History of hojicha: when and where did it begin?

A mail-order page, at the end of a footnote

Tap the small footnote number and the screen flicks over. The sentence leads to the own-brand page of a company that sells hojicha.

It is the page of a hojicha mail-order brand started overseas. It says only that tea merchants roasted leftover leaves and stems. It lists no references at all.

No primary source supporting the account came out of this search. That is where the trail ends. The bōcha section of the same encyclopedia reads a little differently.

The bōcha section, same article

Scroll down and the name of a stem tea appears. In the same article, the section on Kaga bōcha is supported differently.

Like the rings of a tree, the age of a story is recorded in the documents attached to it. The account of a third-generation merchant devising a roasted stem tea carries footnotes to an advertisement in an old directory and a who's who. Even inside one article, accounts of origin differ in strength.

What can be said is only that the footnotes are of different kinds. This bōcha story turns up on the public side as well.

A stem tea in a public encyclopedia

From a cup of bōcha rises the smell of dry stems. The Kaga story stands on the public side too.

A government encyclopedia of traditional foods records that a merchant found a use for the stems left from drying and put Kaga bōcha on sale. That is some twenty years earlier than the common account, in another place and from another material.

A confectionery company is later recorded launching one, which the column at the end of the chapter covers. A prefectural tea institute issued a research report on the design of roasting machines. Only its title has been checked.

The official history of a long-established tea region mentions neither hojicha nor a roasting step. That is as far as the documents go. Next comes a bundle of old receipts.

Superior, medium, standard

On a tea shop's shelf, price tags mark the superior grade and the standard one. In a pre-war port city, roasted tea was already sold by grade.

Among an institute's expenditure vouchers are purchases of standard and medium roasted tea, and of plain and superior. All three grades, superior, medium and standard, appear in its books.

Grades appear when enough people are choosing between them. The receipts support that much and no more. Last comes how to read a year of beginning.

Opening the footnote

As the steam thins, the sentence on the screen starts to look different. A beginning cannot be pinned to one year and one place.

It is like the source of a river, split among many mountain streams. Not writing the undecided as though it were decided is where this book stands.

What is left instead is a habit any reader can use. When an account of origins turns up, open what the footnote points to. A public body's document, or the page of someone selling the thing: that alone changes the weight of the same sentence.

The footnote tells the kind of source and nothing more. The years and names are gathered just below.