What Harajuku Fixed

For years I was a committed coffee addict. It started at the design agency where I trained as a media designer and never really stopped—latte macchiato at first, then the elaborate Starbucks concoctions, then eventually straight black Americano, no sugar, no milk, nothing to dilute the hit. At some point it was just about the effect. Two pots a day, stomach cramps, tremors, bad sleep. The usual story.

Then I was in Japan for the first time, and my friend Sari poured me a cup of matcha at a ramen restaurant in Harajuku—it came with the meal, the way water comes with a meal in other places. That color. That smell. The taste, which is fresh in a way that nothing I’d been drinking was fresh. And enough caffeine to get through the worst nights and deadlines without the shaking, the jittery pulse, the low-grade anxiety that two pots of coffee deposits in your chest. Green tea became something close to a religion after that. Wherever I am, I look for the best available—ideally matcha.

There’s a documentary on Arte that follows the question of where matcha actually comes from—how it’s grown, processed, sold, and what the families who have done nothing else for generations have to say about it. Anyone who hears "a documentary about tea" and thinks that sounds dull is missing the point. It’s not exciting. That’s exactly what’s right about it. It’s the opposite of two pots of coffee. It’s the Harajuku ramen restaurant on a cold afternoon, Sari explaining the grades of green, steam rising from a ceramic cup.