The World of Caffeine (26 page)

The green tea that today is served everywhere and endlessly in Japanese restaurants is, by Western standards, brewed for a very short time and extremely weak, almost hard to distinguish from water, and must be very low in caffeine. In contrast, the whipped brew served at formal tea ceremonies is strong and bitter, a completely different drink.
Ma-cha
literally means “powdered tea,” and it is this tea which is whipped into a bright green froth in the tea ceremony. There are two types of
ma-cha:
usu-cha,
or thin tea, and
koi-cha,
or thick tea. The tea most often referred to in speaking of the tea ceremony is
usu-cha.
The use of
koi-cha
is reserved for very special ceremonies among intimate friends. In these ceremonies only one cup is used and tea is drunk by turns without washing the cup.

Ma-cha
is the cured tips of the just-budding tea plant. Japanese laboratory analysis reveals that these tips contain about 4.6 percent caffeine by weight (compared with only 2 percent for other green teas), more caffeine than any other part of the tea plant, and indeed, more caffeine by weight than any other vegetable source. This caffeinerich tea is sometimes used by Japanese students to help them stay up late for study, the way coffee is by used by their American counterparts.

Small, hard candies made entirely of sugar accompany the tea and are freely consumed during the ceremony. Thus, in addition to a large caffeine wallop, the participants’ blood-sugar levels increase quickly. Some participants claim that the
combination of caffeine, sugar, and the enforced discipline of remaining almost perfectly still and composed during the ceremony account for what one called “the huge ‘rush’ often attributed to ‘mystical’ aspects of the tea ceremony.” Because the minds of the participants are free from distraction and imbued with tranquillity and harmony, we can only assume that they would have a more acute awareness of the effects of any drug circulating in their systems. If this evaluation is even partially accurate, caffeine has certainly played more than an incidental part in the flowering of the tea ceremony and the traditions of teaism.

As to the spiritual elevation of the Urasenke school and the Urasenke tea masters, some observers are skeptical. Rikyu, the shrewd intriguer and grand master of tea, worked to increase the wealth and political influence of the Kyoto-based Urasenke tea masters. Urasenke is still the leading school of the tea ceremony and commands a major worldly presence that in Japan today, like that of the Catholic Church in many lands, is immense. Despite such comparisons of Urasenke worldly power and pomp with that of the Catholic Church,
chanoyu
is usually regarded as entirely secular. Some people see the contemporary tea ceremony as a pastime or hobby of the idle rich. Studying and practicing the tea ceremony is very expensive, in part because of the exorbitant cost of tea ceremony lessons. Also costly are the tools required, including the bowls, implements, and other equiment, not to mention the necessity of buying or renting a traditional teahouse, typically something only the very wealthy can afford to do. Add to these costs the leisure necessary to devote to the study of teaism, and it is easy to understand why average Japanese cannot afford to indulge. Many, perhaps most, Japanese have never attended a tea ceremony. Certainly only a small percentage of Japanese actively pursue serious study of the ceremony, mostly women with inherited wealth or the wives of wealthy businessmen. Many other women study some tea ceremony lore in high school or in special schools for prospective brides, but few continue through advanced studies.

As a conventional accomplishment of young ladies,
chanoyu
has unquestionably become associated with sentimental absurdities of brocaded girls lined up like dolls, straining to attain what they fancy are the most elevated feelings about porcelain and flower blossoms. In fairness, however, one must acknowledge that such costume displays are by no means the only examples of
chanoyu
today. The Soshu Sen school of
chanoyu,
for example, is an austere Zen tradition that requires no fancy or expensive surroundings or equipment, only a bowl, tea, and hot water.
¹⁸

Westerners may have difficulty understanding how Urasenke, a tea school, has attracted millions of tuition-paying students each year, and maintains economic and cultural control of a dozen of the nation’s traditional crafts, including architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquerwork, and the arrangement of flowers. It wields such authority in modern Japan that it has been called “the Vatican of Japanese culture.” When tea is to be offered to the imported Buddhist or autochthonous Shinto gods, visiting royalty, or heads of state, the hereditary Urasenke grand tea master is tapped to officiate.

In the early 1990s, with what justice we cannot say, Urasenke became the center of a scandal after being accused of sanctioning the pollution of village water sources in order to protect its leaders’ interest in a luxury golf course development. This, together with a number of other factors, has eroded the reputation of the school and the standing of the values it represents, at least in some quarters. Some modern Japanese reject the tea ceremony utterly, judging it to be nothing more profound or spiritual than an elitist, self-indulgent intellectual exercise in aesthetic appreciation through affected but harmless chatter, accompanied by the ingestion a psychoactive drug.

Dutch merchants, who record drinking coffee in Japan in 1724, were the first people known to have consumed it there. The Japanese themselves were remarkably cool to the new drink. Their affection for coffee only began to develop more than a century later. In 1888 two establishments called
“Kahisakan”
or “coffee-tea houses,” were opened in Tokyo, advertising that they combined the atmosphere of an exotic European café with the familiar Chinese tearoom.
¹⁹
Other coffeehouses followed, each offering its own special Eastern interpretation of the Middle Eastern and European tradition. More coffeehouses appeared in the 1920s, founded by Japanese who had lived abroad, often in France, and who had returned with the idea of recreating the atmosphere of the Parisian cafés. By the 1930s, the brew had percolated through Japanese culture to the extent that certain shops known as “pure tearooms” began selling only coffee. In the tense and dangerous days before the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese government closed these coffeehouses, perhaps because of their potential role as “seminaries of sedition.”
²⁰

Following the war, the coffeeshop, or small short-order restaurant, similar in nature to those that are so common in Western nations and invariably serving coffee, tea, and caffeinated soft drinks, began to proliferate. In the 1950s and 1960s, these establishments often served as meeting spots for businessmen as well as social gathering places for young people. In the 1970s and 1980s, the prewar coffeehouse or café reemerged in more than a dozen different styles. Some are classified according to the style of recorded music they feature—jazz, chamber music, folk songs, and so on. Others are known as
“bijin,”
or “beautiful girl,” coffee shops because they treat their patrons to waitresses chosen for their good looks. Still others, especially to be found in larger cities such as Tokyo, set up to attract foreign tourists, function as meeting spots for Japanese
who are interested in forming a liaison with a person of different nationality. Some simply prepare and serve coffee as their main attraction, sometimes accompanied by small sandwiches or curried rice and sometimes only by a small cup of green tea.

Contemporary Japan has a growing coffee, or
koh-hi,
culture unique to itself, featuring such un-Western preparations as hot or cold canned coffee, available from countless vending machines for a dollar a can, and even jellied coffee. Coffeeshops and cafés charge as much as $5 a cup for a non-refillable serving. An American traveler recently counted more than twenty-five coffeehouses in a six-block stretch of downtown Tokyo. The hundreds of cafés that line the streets have assumed a place in Japanese society similar to that occupied by coffeehouses in early Arabia. With cramped conditions in offices and homes, the coffeeshops have become a kind of second home for many Japanese, a place to meet for business, a romantic rendezvous, a casual chat with friends, or just to take a break from a busy day. Some natives and visitors chalk up the high price for a cup to getting a little peace and a place to rest. In a crowded, bustling city where space is the most valuable commodity, one can rent a little space for a few minutes while drinking a cup of coffee.

The giant among Japanese coffeehouse chains is Doutor, which, starting around 1980, took command of the market by offering good coffee much cheaper than their competitors. Today they charge only about ¥180, or about $1.80, for a non-refillable cup, less than half of what you would pay at many other places. Doutor operates nearly five hundred shops nationwide and for a time opened about five new ones every month. In 1995 the company began to encounter competition with America’s Seattle-based coffeehouse chain Starbucks, which had decided to make Japan its first overseas target, beginning with Tokyo. Yuji Tsunoda, president of Starbucks Coffee Japan, speaks of Starbucks as a “new lifestyle concept” for Japan and about the “Starbucks experience.” Although such puffing sounds like a public relation man’s dream, we must acknowledge that references to a new style of living and an atmosphere filled with new experiences was and is genuinely to be associated with coffeehouse culture everywhere.

The brick-and-mortar coffeehouses are apparently carrying on the Middle Eastern and European traditions of creating centers of recreational socializing with strangers or friends. Coffeehouse environments range from student hangouts in Tokyo playing new wave jazz, and cafés that provide comic books, magazines, and books for their customers, to those reminiscent of teahouses, featuring traditional lute music and scroll paintings. Rolnick, in
The Complete Book of Coffee
(1982), comments on their large numbers and exotic variety:

As she is in many technological areas, Japan is in the forefront in the rush into cyberspace. A cursory search of the Internet turns up dozens of so-called cybercafés, with such names as Electronic Café International, KISS, Café Des Pres, and Cybernet Café. Following the Japanese lead, other Asian countries, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan, now boast cybercafés in great numbers.

Japan has been the launching pad for the Asian coffeehouse. Taiwan, under Japanese influence, now boasts many coffeehouses with geishalike companionship for the patrons. Korea also has a number of coffeehouses, often featuring classical music, after the Japanese model, in the Myongdong district. And in Hong Kong, coffee drinkers sit at outdoor cafés on benches in the springtime, in a manner reminiscent of Rome, Paris, and even harkening back to the first Islamic coffee drinkers in Mecca, Cairo, and Constantinople.

David Landau, editor of
Coffee Talk Magazine,
who describes himself as a “Japanophile,” says that, even though we associate the Japanese with green tea, they have regularly used coffee for years, and many consider it a fixture of life just as Americans do. In fact, ten years ago, Landau judges, the Japanese were making better coffee than Americans. Today, however, with our now maturing and widespread love of specialty coffees, Americans could teach them a great deal. According to Landau, these higher-grade coffees are available in upscale restaurants but are not yet in general use:

It’s expensive, though. A non-refillable cup will cost $2 or more. In any case, outside of fancy restaurants, which are out of reach for average Japanese, fine coffee is still hard to find.

The All-Japan Coffee Association, the primary coffee trade group, estimates the total value of the Japanese coffee market at about ¥1 trillion ($10 billion) per year. The association contends that the traditional markets for instant and regular brewed
coffee are saturated, but it is optimistic about the growth of specialty coffees. Although Japanese coffee customs are evolving, the average Japanese apartment, perhaps in part because space is tight, doesn’t have a coffeemaker of any sort. Japanese typically make instant coffee at home for themselves and serve the same to their guests. A person looking for coffee brewed from exotic beans or fancy drinks such as a “double-tall café latte” in Japan must go to a
kissaten,
or coffeeshop.

The first written mention of coffee in English occurs in the context of the first written mention of tea, in a 1598 translation of
Linschoten’s Travels,
in a chapter entitled “Of the Island Japan.” Bernard Ten Broeke Paludanus (1550–1633), a professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden and world traveler, translated and annotated the Latin text (Holland, 1595) of the Dutch adventurer Hans Hugo Van Linschoten (1563–1611). Highlighting his interpolation with a distinctive typeface, Paludanus inserts the following remarks, comparing Turkish coffee drinking with Oriental tea drinking, into Linschoten’s discussion of Japanese tea:

Paludanus links the two beverages in this passage with respect to the similarity of their physiological effects, and, in the chapter in which the passage is found, introduces both drinks to English readers, suggesting that the English, from the very start, though unaware of caffeine, were informed that coffee and tea, which they regarded as drugs, were united by a common agency.

Only ten years later, the English read a vivid description of the Middle Eastern coffeehouse. William Biddulph, in his
Travels of Certayne Englishmen in Africa, Asia, etc…. Begunne in 1600 and by some of them finished—this yeere 1608
(London, 1609), describes the use of coffee and Turkish coffeehouses at a time when England knew only the tavern:

No catalogue of early references can permit us to determine precisely when coffee, tea, and chocolate first significantly entered the English awareness. However, some indirect evidence can shed light on the question. Shakespeare (1564–1616), who uses more tropes of language and a greater range of vocabulary than any other writer and whose work features treatments of virtually every aspect of daily life, including, of course, food, drink, and the habits and delicacies of the table, both in England and the exotic city-states of Italy and ancient Greece and Rome, makes no mention of coffee, tea, or chocolate. Because of the comprehensive nature of the Shakespearean universe of discourse, the absence of these references helps fix the time after his death as the earliest boundary for their general presence in England even by reputation.

The first mention of tea and coffee in print in English. This page is from a 1598 edition of
Linschoten’s Travels,
in a chapter entitled “Of the Island Japan,” translated from Latin by Bernard Ten Broeke Paludanus. Coffee appears as
“Chaona”
in the second line of the text notation by Paludanus. Note that this interpolated text on coffee appears in a Roman typeface inserted into the Gothic typeface of the original text. Tea appears as
Chaa
in the first column, two lines from the bottom. (W.H.Ukers,
All about Tea)

Less than ten years after Shakespeare died, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), lord chancellor of England and one of the fathers of empiricism, whom some suppose to have been the true author of the Bard’s works, makes two references to coffee, which he almost certainly never saw, much less tasted, unless it was from the hands of his physician, Dr. William Harvey. The first Baconian reference occurs in the
Historia Vitae et Mortis
(1623): “The Turkes use a kind of herb which they call
caphe
.” By
1624, when Bacon wrote
Sylva Sylvarum
(1627), he must have read a few more of the early travelers’ accounts of Middle Eastern coffee use, phrases from which recur in his discussion of a variety of Oriental drugs:

Notice that Bacon classifies “coffa” with opium, tobacco, and betel, as a fortifying and analeptic drug, not a beverage, and distinguishes these drugs as drugs only according to how they are taken, whether eaten, smoked, or chewed.

Other early references by Englishmen include remarks made in the 1626 correspondence of the twenty-year-old aristocrat Sir Thomas Herbert, who traveled in the company of Sir Dodmore Cotton, ambassador to the Persian shah. Herbert alludes to caffeine’s effects when he reports to his friends that Persian coffee “is said to be healthy, dispelling melancholy, drying tears, allaying anger, and producing cheerfulness.”
⁴
Robert Burton, quoted in an epigraph to our introduction, added a reference to coffee in the 1632 edition of
Anatomy of Melancholy,
in the chapter called “Medicines.” Burton apparently heard about coffee sometime after the publication of the first edition in 1621, in which he does not mention the drink.

The English physicians of the day enjoyed at least a limited respect from their countrymen,
⁵
and their approval of the caffeinated drinks helped caffeine to make quick progress in their homeland. The influence of these medical men is apparent in the first printed advertisement in England for a caffeinated beverage, appearing on May 19, 1657, in the
Public Adviser,
which lists the maladies it was believed to cure:

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as now, university students were frequently travelers, aficionados of the exotic, and members of the avant-garde. It was such a student from abroad, Nathaniel Conopios, a Cretan, who was first documented to have prepared and served coffee in England. Before coming to England, Conopios was educated in the Greek Orthodox Church and served as
primore
to the patriarch of Constantinople. When his employer was murdered by strangulation, Conopios, to avoid meeting the same end, escaped to England. He presented his credentials to Archbishop Laud, who sponsored his entry to Balliol College, Oxford.

The eclectic scholar and Oxonian diarist John Evelyn, F.R.S., provides an eyewitness account of Conopios drinking coffee, the earliest dated record of this practice in England, in a retrospective entry for May 1637. He states:

Anthony a Wood (1632–95), an historian of Oxford life, confirms Evelyn’s account, commenting that although Conopios was soon expelled from the university by “Parliamentry Visitors,” his brief tenure initiated the use of coffee there:

The story of the first coffeehouse in the Western world is known through the chronicles of the same Anthony Wood, published as
Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the most
ancient and famous University of Oxford from the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh Dom. 1500 to the end of the Year
1690
(London, 1692), which was written with considerable research assistance from the biographer John Aubrey. Wood was a “suspicious, lonely, intolerant” man, more at home with old books than with his fellows, and, as he admitted of himself, he was “a Person who delights to converse more with the Dead, than with the Living.”
⁹
Because there were no existing records, he depended on personal interviews to provide the information he needed for his history. To collect much of this oral
intelligence, the reclusive, cantankerous Wood relied on the affable Aubrey. Though Wood was much disliked by his contemporaries, today we owe him thanks for recording some of the most authoritative early accounts of coffeehouse life in England. Wood relates that in 1650 a Lebanese Jew arrived in Oxford in the service of a Turk, bringing with him both a supply of coffee beans and the knowledge of their use:

A few years later, Jacob took his business to London, opening a coffeehouse in Holborn. Confusingly enough, he may have turned over the Angel to a man named “Jacobson,” a recent Jewish convert to Monophysite Christianity. Speaking of this latter “outlander,” Wood reports in an entry dated 1654:

In another reference, Wood speaks of Jacobson as selling both coffee and chocolate, a bill of fare that was to become common in London over the next decade. Establishing what must be the world’s record for café longevity, the original coffee room of Jacob’s Angel remained in use as a restaurant for more than three hundred years.

Within a decade, coffeehouses multiplied and became the rage at Oxford. Their success elicited opposition from some, who, like Wood, thought them inimical to rather than productive of serious intellectual activity. In 1661, Wood declared, the conversations of the University men of his day, instead of talk about academic matters, consisted of “nothing but news, and the affairs of Christendome is discoursed off and that also generally at coffeehouses.” A few years later, he blamed this cultural deterioration on the rise of the coffeehouse: