The Woman Who Grows Matcha and Finds Most Tea Ceremonies Embarrassing
Nakamura Fumiko has been running her family's small matcha retail shop on Nishiki-koji Street for thirty-one years. She's sixty-three, has the posture of someone who has been bowing correctly her whole life, and speaks about most commercial matcha products with the polite but unmistakable contempt of a Burgundy vigneron discussing supermarket wine.
"The tea ceremony places near Gion," she told me one October afternoon, her hands moving over a row of sealed tins as she talked, "they buy third-grade tencha and charge five thousand yen for the experience. It's theater. I don't hate theater, but you should know that's what you're watching."
I'd come in to buy a small tin of her single-estate Uji matcha — ¥2,400 for 30 grams, which sounds steep until you understand that the cultivar, Samidori, is farmed about forty minutes south of Kyoto in Uji and hand-picked in early May by a family that has been doing so for four generations. Fumiko's shop, Nakamura Chaho, sits a five-minute walk from Karasuma Station on the Karasuma subway line, in a neighborhood that mostly serves Kyoto locals running lunch errands. She gets zero tourist foot traffic. That is not an accident.
The shop smells like ground stone and cold grass. On the counter is a small ceramic bowl with a pile of sifted matcha, there for customers to smell before buying. It is not the thin, slightly yellowed powder you get in a mall matcha latte — it is the color of a pine forest in the rain, and it has a faint marine quality, almost like dried seaweed, that I've never been able to explain properly to non-matcha people.
Why the Tea Ceremony Circuit Exists, and What It Gets Right
I want to be fair here. I've done three formal tea ceremonies in Kyoto, and one of them — at Urasenke, the cultural foundation on Ogawa-dori that operates one of Japan's most important schools of the Way of Tea — was genuinely worth the time. The ceremony there costs ¥5,000 for a 45-minute session, runs on weekday mornings from 10am, and involves tatami rooms and scroll paintings that have been in use for centuries. You learn something about spatial attention you won't learn anywhere else.
The problem isn't the tea ceremony itself. The problem is that the ceremony has been so thoroughly detached from the actual quality of tea that you can sit through a beautiful ritual and drink something mediocre without realizing it. The ceremony teaches posture, presence, and the philosophical architecture of wabi-sabi. It does not always teach you what good matcha tastes like.
What good matcha tastes like is important. First-grade Uji matcha made from shaded tencha — the leaves are covered with cloth for about three weeks before harvest, forcing the plant to overproduce chlorophyll — has a front-of-mouth sweetness that cuts through the bitterness before you've finished swallowing. It's what makes it feel substantive rather than just sharp. Cheaper matcha is mostly just bitter, the kind of bitter that makes you want to eat a wagashi sweet quickly to get rid of it.
Did You Know?
The shading process used before harvest doesn't just deepen the color — it significantly increases L-theanine content, the amino acid responsible for matcha's calm alertness, which is why high-grade matcha feels different to drink than the powder in most cafés.
Where Fumiko Sends Her Own Friends
Fumiko doesn't recommend her shop to visitors as a first stop — she thinks you need a reference point first. She recommends two places.
The first is Kanbayashi Shunsho Honten, one of the oldest matcha wholesale houses in Uji, which now operates a small café adjacent to the shop. It's about a forty-five-minute train ride from Kyoto Station on the Kintetsu Kyoto Line, getting off at Kintetsu-Miyakoji-Hashimoto Station, then a ten-minute walk toward the Uji River. Go on a Tuesday or Wednesday, she says, because weekends bring bus tour groups who pre-booked a package matcha experience. On a quiet afternoon you can sit at the counter and try two grades of koicha — thick tea — side by side. The entry-level bowl costs ¥900; the reserve grade runs ¥2,200. The difference is not subtle. Drinking both in sequence is one of the more useful palate-calibrating experiences I've had in Japan.
The ceremony teaches posture and presence. It does not always teach you what good matcha tastes like.
The second place she sent me was Ippodo Tea, near the Kyoto Imperial Palace on Teramachi-dori, a three-minute walk from Marutamachi Station on the Karasuma subway line. Unlike the Kyoto branch of most tea companies, Ippodo operates with a directness I associate more with sake breweries than tea shops. You walk in, tell the staff your preferences — bitter or sweet, whisked or scooped, drinking it daily or exploring — and they narrow the options. There are no decorative matcha lattes. The shop has been selling wholesale tea to restaurants and institutions since 1717, and the retail counter operates like an extension of that same pragmatic approach.
What I buy at Ippodo: a 40-gram tin of their Ummon no昔 grade matcha for ¥1,296, which I use at home when I want something well-balanced for weekday mornings around 7am. It's not their most prestigious product, but it's honest.
The Gap Between the Instagram Café and the Real Thing
Kyoto's matcha café economy has exploded in the last eight years in ways that are genuinely interesting to observe. Along Ninenzaka, the stone path below Kiyomizudera, you can now buy matcha soft serve, matcha crepes, matcha tiramisu, matcha beer, and what one stall advertises as "matcha ramen" — which I tried once, in 2019, out of journalistic duty, and which I will not discuss further.
Most of this is confectionery, and good confectionery at that. The matcha soft serve at Gion Tsujiri near the Keihan Gion-Shijo Station — a four-minute walk from Exit 6 — is genuinely worth eating: the powder they use is concentrated enough that it leaves a vegetal coating on the roof of your mouth after you finish, which is the sign of actual matcha presence rather than green food coloring. The cost is ¥680 for a single cone, and the line on weekday afternoons around 2pm is manageable if you time it right.
But there is a version of the Kyoto matcha experience that stops at the soft serve and the tourist-facing ceremony and concludes that it has understood matcha. That version is missing the conversation.
Fumiko explained this to me while I watched her weigh out a small sample of tencha — the raw, unground leaf from which matcha is made — into a tasting envelope. Tencha looks like flat, dried pieces of dark-green paper. "In Kyoto, the tourists come, they take the photograph, they leave," she said, in Japanese. "They don't ask why the tea is the way it is. They don't want to know about the stone mill or the specific cultivar. They want to feel they have done Japan." She said this without particular bitterness. More like a biologist noting an observed behavior.
She's right, and I've been guilty of exactly this kind of photogenic shallow engagement with other food cultures. It's worth fighting the instinct.
What to Actually Do, in Rough Order
Start with the Ippodo retail counter. Go on a weekday morning — they open at 9am — before the area around the Imperial Palace gets busy. Tell the staff you're new to high-grade matcha and want to understand the difference between their grades. In my experience, the staff there speak enough English to have a productive conversation, and they're accustomed to explaining without condescension.
From Ippodo, walk the fifteen minutes south to Nishiki Market. Not to buy matcha — Nishiki's matcha vendors are mostly souvenir-adjacent — but to eat lunch and reset before the afternoon. Nishiki is worth the walk for the food culture alone: pickled vegetables, grilled dengaku tofu, fresh yudofu. It puts you in a slower, more sensory mode.
Then, if your schedule allows, take the train to Uji on a weekday afternoon. The ride from Kintetsu Kyoto Station to Kintetsu-Miyakoji-Hashimoto is around forty minutes and costs about ¥310 one-way. The whole Uji area is covered with tea fields. You can walk along the river and see the cultivation plots on the hillsides — still netted from the May shading, depending on the season — and the weight of the landscape starts to make sense in a way that no café can replicate.
For the ceremony, if you want it, Urasenke is worth the time specifically because it takes its educational obligation seriously. Plan that as part of a longer cultural day alongside the Nishiki-adjacent temples, not as a standalone tick-box.
And if you end up near Nishiki-koji Street on any morning, look for Nakamura Chaho. There's no sign in English. The door is usually half-open. The woman behind the counter will not push anything on you. She will, if you're patient and ask good questions, tell you more about matcha in thirty minutes than most tourists learn in an entire week.
She'll also sell you something worth drinking.
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*Nakamura Chaho is a 5-minute walk from Karasuma Station (Karasuma subway line). Ippodo Tea is a 3-minute walk from Marutamachi Station. If you're planning around rail passes or regional transit options, the Uji trip is easy to build into a day that also includes Fushimi Inari — both sit on or near the Kintetsu and Keihan lines running south from central Kyoto.*
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Local Insider Tip
At Ippodo Tea, go on a weekday before 11am and tell the staff you want to compare two grades of matcha side by side — they'll set you up with small whisked samples at the counter, which isn't advertised but is quietly available if you ask.
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