Journal
How to clean a matcha bowl (chawan)
Soap is fine on a bowl, unlike a whisk. The part that actually needs care is the unglazed foot ring nobody mentions — and most staining is prevented, not scrubbed.
How to clean a matcha bowl (chawan)
Soap is fine on a bowl, unlike a whisk. The part that actually needs care is the unglazed foot ring nobody mentions — and most staining is prevented, not scrubbed.
How Long Does Incense Burn?
The short answer: a Japanese incense stick usually burns for twenty to thirty minutes. Almost every other answer you will find online says forty-five to seventy, and those answers are...
How Long Does Incense Burn?
The short answer: a Japanese incense stick usually burns for twenty to thirty minutes. Almost every other answer you will find online says forty-five to seventy, and those answers are...
Why Is Matcha So Expensive?
The short answer: a bowl of good matcha costs what it does because the leaf is grown in the dark for three or four weeks, picked once a year, stripped...
Why Is Matcha So Expensive?
The short answer: a bowl of good matcha costs what it does because the leaf is grown in the dark for three or four weeks, picked once a year, stripped...
Matcha bowl with spout: what a katakuchi is for
The spout is genuinely Japanese and genuinely old — it just does not come from the tea bowl. What a katakuchi is for, and the one number these listings leave...
Matcha bowl with spout: what a katakuchi is for
The spout is genuinely Japanese and genuinely old — it just does not come from the tea bowl. What a katakuchi is for, and the one number these listings leave...
Culinary vs ceremonial matcha
Nobody regulates either word, so the label is a description rather than a guarantee. What to check instead, and when the cheaper tin is the right buy.
Culinary vs ceremonial matcha
Nobody regulates either word, so the label is a description rather than a guarantee. What to check instead, and when the cheaper tin is the right buy.
Why is my matcha bitter?
Every guide lists the same four causes and leaves out the one that decides most bowls: how it was whisked. Three questions separate them in a single bowl, so you...
Why is my matcha bitter?
Every guide lists the same four causes and leaves out the one that decides most bowls: how it was whisked. Three questions separate them in a single bowl, so you...
Tomari (とまり) is an old word for a mooring — the place a boat ties up for the night. A bowl of tea is meant to be the same: a few minutes to put the day down. You do not need to know the rules to begin.
Who chose this
I choose everything here by hand, in Japan. I practice tea rather than simply selling the tools for it — I am not a tea master and I do not claim to be. I am a practitioner, which mostly means I have ruined enough bad whisks to know what a good one feels like in the first second of holding it.
Nothing is drop-shipped and nothing passes through a third warehouse. I pack each order in Tokyo and post it from Japan, ceramics double-boxed by hand. If something arrives broken, write within 7 days with photographs of the piece and the box, and I send a replacement or a refund; there is nothing to post back unless I ask. Who writes and chooses all this, and the longer version of why this shop exists.