Money has always been forthcoming, officially, semi-officially and privately, for sending to America and Europe numbers of intelligent young men and women.  So disciplined and studious are most of these young people that their country has had back with interest every yen of the funds so wisely provided.  We have much to learn from Japanese methods in this matter of well-considered post-graduate foreign travel.[200]

FOOTNOTES: 

[198] See Appendix LXIII.

[199] See Appendix LV.

[200] See Appendix LVI.

CHAPTER XXXIII

GREEN TEA AND BLACK

(SHIDZUOKA)

Things I would know but am forbid
By time and briefness.

LAURENCE BINYON

More than half of the tea grown in Japan comes from the hilly coast-wise prefecture of Shidzuoka through which every traveller passes on his journey from Kobe or Kyoto to Tokyo.  He sees a terraced cultivation of tea and fruit carried up to the skyline.  But there is more tea on the hills than the passenger in the train imagines.  When viewed from below much of the tea looks like scrub.  In various parts of southern Japan patches of tea may be noticed growing on little islands in the paddies, but tea is a hill plant and it is on the sides of hills and on the plateaus at the top of them that the plantations are to be found.

Tea looks not unlike privet and grows or is made to grow like box to a height which can be conveniently picked over.  The rows of neat-looking plants are half a dozen feet apart.  The first picking may take place when the bush is three or four years old.  Bushes may last forty, fifty or even a hundred years, but the ordinary life of tea is between twenty and thirty.  A bush is usually cut back every ten years or so.  A good deal depends on the pruning.  After each picking the bushes are cut over with the shears just as we trim box.  These trimmings may be used to make an inferior tea for farmhouse consumption, or they may be utilised in the manufacture of caffeine or theine—­the two products are indistinguishable.  Usually the bushes are cut round-topped, but occasionally they are roof-shaped and sometimes they are like giant green toadstools.

The characteristic feature of a tea district beyond the rows of tea bushes is the chimney piping of the farmhouses which manufacture their own tea. (The word manufacture is used in the original sense, for farmhouse tea is hand-made.) In a country where the houses are chimneyless these galvanised iron chimneys are conspicuous.

The picking of the tea seems to be done almost entirely by women and children.  The pickers are supposed to take only the three leaves at the tips.  But the pickers mostly take bigger pieces, for the somewhat higher price given for good picking is not enough to secure three-leaf stuff only.  It is not absolutely necessary, however, that the leaves gathered should be all of such a choice sort.