Women and girls come from a distance to pick tea.  Picking is regarded as “polite labour by the daughters of the higher middle class of farmers.”  It has also the attraction that farmers’ sons have a way of visiting tea gardens in order to “pick up wives.”  The girls certainly give would-be husbands every chance of seeing what they can do, for they are at work for a long day, often of from twelve to fourteen hours.  In such a day it is possible, I was told, to pick 50, 80 or even 100 lbs. of leaves.  One man put the rate as from 50 to 120 pieces a minute.  Four pounds of leaves make a pound of tea.

In one district the first picking may take place during the first three weeks of May.  In colder districts it is proceeding until the end of the month.  The second season is from the end of June until the beginning of July.  The third is in August.  The bushes, after producing their three crops of leaves, bear in November their seeds, which are about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and are worth about a sen a pound.  Oil is pressed from them.

Good tea depends on climate and soil, careful cutting over and good manuring.  In some places I saw soya bean being grown between the rows as green manuring.  Like so many other crops, tea is or ought to be sprayed.  The northern limit of tea is Niigata, where the bushes must be protected from the snow, which may fall in that prefecture to a great depth.  The region in which tea cannot be grown is that in which the temperature falls below zero for two months.  Tea is not grown, as in India and Ceylon, by tea planters, but in small areas and as a side-line at that.  I never saw a plantation of more than five acres.  Most areas are much smaller.  The chief reason for this is that tea is largely manufactured on the day on which it is picked and the capacity of a farmer’s tea manufacturing equipment is limited.  In Shidzuoka nearly a quarter of the tea is hand rolled and three-quarters made by machinery.  Elsewhere in Japan half the crop may be hand rolled.

When leaves are sold to factors the transactions take place in booths opened by them in the tea districts.  It is a busy scene in the region of the cottage factories.  One is on a wide plateau covered almost entirely with rows of tea plants.  Here and there are parties of chattering pickers, their heads protected by the national towel.  Against the blue hilltops on the horizon stand out the cottages of the farmers with chimney-pipes smoking, the booths of the dealers, and, in every patch of tea, the thatched roof over the precious sunken pot of liquid manure by which the tea bushes have so often benefited.  On the road one passes women with baskets on their backs, like Scotch fish-wives with their creels, men carrying two baskets suspended from a pole across one shoulder, or a man and his wife hauling a barrow, all heavy-laden with newly picked leaves.  Small horse-drawn wagons carry the manufactured tea in big, well-tied, pink paper bales.  On the whole, although the labour is hard it seemed a better life having to do with the fragrant tea than with the rice of the sludge ponds in the valley below.