Japanese tea in Russia

1929

The peculiarity of the Japanese climate and the intensity of Japanese plant breeding have led to significant changes in cultivated plants introduced both from southeastern Asia, India and even America. Pumpkins [Curcurbita moschata [Duch.] Poir.], undoubtedly introduced from America, have been made small, fast-ripening and are covered with characteristic warts. Eggplants, apparently obtained from southeastern India, differ by having exceptional, small fruits. It is difficult to enumerate all the kinds of spices and medicinal plants.

We went to Sijuoki, ^[1] the main area for cultivation of tea in Japan. The area has coniferous forests of cryptomerias [Cryptomeria japonica D. Don.], lots of hills and red soils. On large cleared tracts, endless rows of globe-shaped tea bushes, carefully trimmed, are lined up. The harvest of tea [Camellia sinensis [L.] O. Kuntze] is done by means of special scissors. This crop is centuries old. The bushes last for 100-200 years. The typical Japanese tea is small-leaved. As an industry, the tea business is highly regarded as a result of careful grading and sorting of the tea into many classes, sensitive price-setting and the use of machines for this. In essence, there has so far been no breeding; natural populations, selected out over thousand of years, are cultivated. ^[2] The bushes are fertilized with liquid manure, and carefully trimmed.

When in the area of Sijuoki I could not help but think of the expeditions to the tea-growing areas around Batumi [on the coast of the Black Sea], where by now the landscape really resembles that of Sijuoki as far as the Japanese cryptomerias, the Japanese bamboo [Pseudosasa japonica Mak.] and the Japanese and Chinese tea bushes are concerned.

The Chinese foreman of a tea factory in Chavka, near Batumi,
photographed some time between 1905 and 1915.

Earlier our country had acquired a considerable amount of Japanese green tea in addition to Indian tea. For a long time the Japanese did not believe that Soviet tea is a serious reality. However, after I bought a large quantity of seeds for use in our country, representatives sent from the tea associations in Sijuoki acquainted themselves with the tea-growing areas along the Black Sea coast and became convinced that many areas, especially Adzharya, ^[3] really resemble Japan. No doubt the time is not far away when the Soviet Union can manage without Japanese tea. ^[4]

Photograph, from the Library of Congress by the amazingly talented Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

1. A Japanese colleague suggests that this could be Shizuoka, near Mt Fuji. The area is “famous for green tea production”. Thanks Yurie. [↩]
2. This has changed. See Tea Breeding in the National Institute of Vegetable and Tea Science. [↩]
3. Ajaria. [↩]
4. The tea industry in Georgia seems to have crashed in 1990; See Living with Caucasians (low down on the page) for an entertaining account. [↩]

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