On a café menu abroad, one board says hojicha and the next says houjicha. On a Japanese bag, the same tea may read ほうじ茶 or 焙じ茶. It is one drink under several spellings. Each spelling records something about the word.

A finger traces the letters on the menu.

A name for the fire

Open the bag and the leaves are brown, not green. The name hojicha describes how the tea is made: by roasting.

Japan's labelling rules define hojicha as sencha, bancha and similar teas roasted over strong heat. The name says nothing about which leaf or which part of the plant is used. Kukicha names the stem, and genmaicha names the added rice, but hojicha names the fire.

The sources say this much: the name points to a process. How the tea names divide up is set out in What is hojicha? How it differs from kukicha and genmaicha. Then the characters on the bag.

Kana or kanji on the bag

Two bags on a shop shelf show the same tea in different scripts. Hojicha is written either ほうじ茶 or 焙じ茶.

The labelling rules list the name in kana, ほうじ茶, while their definition uses the verb 焙る, to roast. A school-lunch menu book on a tea industry body's site and a national brewing sheet write 焙じ茶. The character 焙 does not appear in the Jōyō Kanji Table, Japan's list of kanji for everyday use, while 茶 does.

Side by side, the two bags show only that both spellings are in public use. After the writing comes the sound.

Four beats, one long vowel

Say it slowly and the word falls into even beats. In Japanese it runs ho-o-ji-cha, with the first vowel held long.

In kana, ほう is two characters, ho and u, and together they make a long “o”. じ is spelled ji and ちゃ is spelled cha, the Hepburn-style letters that Japan's revised rules adopted. The same rules give matcha as an example of a familiar spelling.

Next, the long vowel in Latin letters.

Hojicha, hōjicha, houjicha

On menus outside Japan, the word is spelled more than one way. Under Japan's romanization rules, hōjicha and houjicha both mark the long vowel, while hojicha drops it.

Japan revised its long-standing official romanization rules. A long vowel is usually shown with a mark, as in Tōhoku. Without the mark, the vowels may be written out as in kana, as in Touhoku.

The rules' Q&A notes that leaving long vowels unmarked has spread under the influence of English spelling. Applied to this tea, that gives hōjicha, houjicha and the familiar hojicha. The figures and sources follow below.

The numbers in detail

Definition
Table 1 of the Japan Tea Central Association's Labelling Standards for Green Tea gives the name ほうじ茶 and defines it as “sencha, bancha and the like roasted over strong heat”. The same table defines genmaicha as sencha or bancha with roasted rice added, and kukicha or bōcha as tea high in stems and leaf stalks.
焙じ茶 in print
The brewing table in “Twelve months of tea school-lunch menus” on the Japan Tea Central Association website uses 焙じ茶. So does the MAFF PDF “How to brew tea well”.
Jōyō kanji
The Jōyō Kanji Table (Cabinet Notice No. 2 of 2010) contains 茶 and 煎 but not 焙 (checked by full-text search of the official PDF on 27 October 2026).
Romanization rules
The new rules are Cabinet Notice No. 4 of 2025, replacing Cabinet Notice No. 1 of 1954. They adopt Hepburn-based spellings such as shi, tsu, chi, fu and ji. The Agency for Cultural Affairs Q&A (February 2026) says long vowels are generally marked, as in Ōno and Yūki. Without marks, the vowels may be written as in modern kana spelling, as in Oono and Yuuki, and Tōhoku becomes Touhoku.
Unmarked spellings
The same Q&A says writing without long-vowel marks has spread in recent years, likely under the influence of English. It notes that Ōno and Ono, or Yūki and Yuki, can then no longer be told apart.
Applying the rules
The rules do not list ほうじ茶 as an example. Hōjicha and houjicha are this piece's application of the general rule to the kana ほうじちゃ.