Introduction
Unexpected but true: Coffee consumption in Japan far outstrips tea drinking. But while coffee is a recent 20th century newcomer to the nation’s beverages, tea and all its marvellous variants have been a cornerstone of everyday life in Japan for over a thousand years.
Coffee simply hasn’t stood the test of time long enough for it to warrant a Shinto shrine. On the other hand, tea has had centuries for a rich culture to develop around it. Just look at all the tea shrines below! If you’re ever in the vicinity of these shrines, consider stopping in to express a little gratitude to the deities for the beauty of a simple cup of tea.
Chajin Hachiman Shrine, Tokushima
Located in the lush mountains of Tokushima Prefecture, Kamikatsu is best known as Japan’s first zero-waste town. Its impressive recycling system attracts scores of international visitors hoping to learn how its inhabitants deal with their waste on a day-to-day basis. Far less well known is Chajin Hachiman Shrine, a shrine dedicated to a tea deity — not particularly surprising, given that the hokora is tucked into a small cavern in the rocky mountainside, somewhere in the middle of one of Kamikatsu’s tiny hamlets. That it hasn’t fallen foul of any earthquakes or rocky landslides is a minor miracle in itself.
The shrine’s story is supposed to have begun with one Yokoo Gonnosuke, a late Heian period warrior of the Taira clan. He was searching for a remedy to cure his lord, Taira no Kiyomori, of a fever, and so sent his retainers to the Chinese mainland to obtain this cure — bancha tea, which they did not know how to make. (An extreme course of action, to be sure.)
However, by the time the retainers had learned how to make bancha from the Chinese and returned to Japan, Kiyomori had already died of the fever, and the Taira clan had already been defeated by the Minamoto warriors at the Battle of Dan-no-ura. (While not an exact parallel, the retainers coming back to Japan to a completely changed political landscape reminded me of Jared Leto finding out about COVID after a two-week silent retreat.)
Now a fugitive on the run from the Heike clan, Yokoo Gonnosuke fled to Shikoku. While resting in a cave deep in the mountains near Hiwasa in what is now Tokushima Prefecture, he chanced upon a tea plant. Since he’d travelled all the way to China and back just to learn how to make bancha, he passed on the method to the villagers living in the area. This is the supposed origin of Awa bancha, Tokushima’s signature lacto-fermented tea.
As with all unverifiable legends, this story should be taken with a pinch of salt, since Awa bancha doesn’t appear to have any fever-fighting properties. However, it’s certainly plausible that the method for lacto-fermenting tea might have arrived directly in the area from someone who had travelled to China — virtually no other region in Japan produces this style of tea, while fermented teas such as Puer are quite common in China.
But why a Hachiman Shrine? Yokoo Gonnosuke had apparently been carrying a statue of Hachiman the war god as he was fleeing the Heike clan, and so enshrined it in this cavern deep in the mountains. It was apparently customary before battle to eat ‘yuzuke,’ a bowl of rice with hot water poured over, to bolster one’s fighting spirit; yuzuke seems to be an early form of chazuke, which substitutes the hot water with tea (or tea mixed with broth). Ergo, said somebody lost to the mists of time, the god of warfare must also be the deity of tea.
Sukunahikona Shrine, Osaka
Sukunabikona is the deity of health, medicine, and hot springs — entirely fitting for a shrine located in Doshōmachi, a historic neighbourhood for traders dealing in traditional medicine and a present-day hub for pharmaceutical companies. The shrine has two principal deities: the eponymous Sukunabikona, and Entei Shinnō, otherwise known as Shen Nong (lit. Divine Farmer), second of the mythical emperors in Chinese mythology.
Shen Nong is credited with having discovered tea sometime around 2730-80 BC, depending on sources. (A sentence not to be taken as gospel.) Details on the discovery vary in the telling, but consistent across all of the anecdotes is that he had been testing the poisonous effects of some seventy herbs on himself. One version says that a tea leaf accidentally fell into his cauldron of boiling water as tea twigs burned beneath it, and that the resulting brew cleared away the toxins in his gut. Another version says that the wind blew it into his mouth, and chewing on the leaf helped counter the poison he had ingested.
At any rate, tea was first consumed in China as herbal medicine, and indeed, this was likely a key part of how it was first consumed in Japan — as a medicinal beverage and stimulant, arriving in the form of bricks of powdered tea. Given this historical background and the shrine’s location, the founders also enshrined Shen Nong, the Father of Chinese Medicine and the legendary figure who discovered tea, as a deity of medicine at Sukunahikona Shrine. Today, the shrine is sometimes referred to as ‘Shinnō-san.’
The shrine was founded in 1780 by the Ise Religious Association, a merchant guild of traders specialising in Japanese and Chinese herbal medicines. Building a shrine would ensure divine protection and general prosperity for the pharmaceutical trade, or so they believed.
Sukunahikona Shrine is also notable for its ‘paper tiger’ talismans, which have its origins in the medicine sold to ward off the epidemic during Osaka’s outbreak of cholera in 1822. At the time, cholera had a number of different names in Japan; salient here is ‘虎狼痢’ or ‘Tiger-Wolf Diarrhea.’ It was only logical that the medicine sold to combat this disease was the dramatically-named ‘Tigers Head Demon-Slaying Orpiment Pills’ which contained, among other herbs, powdered skull of tiger. (For the curious, the full name of the pills: 虎頭殺鬼雄黄圓; and yes, orpiment is a highly toxic mineral arsenic.)
Since both the disease and medicine shared the character for ‘tiger,’ each dose of medicine came with a free papier-mache tiger that acted as a protective charm. The cholera outbreak eventually went away, but the tigers have remained a staple talisman at the shrine.
Chanoki Shrine, Tokyo
One would expect a place called ‘Tea Tree Shrine’ to have tea trees, and you’d be right. Tea bushes do grow on the precincts of this compact little shrine near Suitengumae Station, with clusters of fragrant white camellias emerging around fall to early winter. However, the present shrine only dates back to 2008, so the tea bushes are quite modest in comparison to what the original shrine supposedly looked like, its main building encircled by many magnificent and meticulously trimmed tea trees.
Little is known about the original shrine. It stood on land belonging to the Hotta clan, who ruled the Sakura Domain in Shimosa Province (present-day Chiba); the land itself was a secondary residence for them. No fires occurred within the compound or the surrounding town for many years, so people came to revere the shrine and its deity as one that warded off fire. (Fires happened very often during the Edo period, so this was unheard of.) While technically located on private property, it seems that the Hotta clan would open the gates to the public once a year during the annual Hatsuuma Festival, typically in early February.
The shrine was dismantled in 1960 due to the construction of the Hibiya Line underground railway; it was three years before the shrine could be rebuilt. In 1985, Hotei, the god of happiness and contentment, was enshrined at Chanoki as part of Nihonbashi’s Seven Lucky Gods Pilgrimage, where one can visit seven shrines or temples in a given neighbourhood to be blessed by the seven deities.
On the 88th night after the spring equinox, Chanoki Shrine hosts the annual kenchashiki, a ceremony where tea is offered to the gods. Among the regular attendees of this ritual are representatives of the Japan Tea Industry Association, the Nihoncha Instructor Association, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries.
Fortunately, the event isn’t an entirely stiff-necked affair: There’s live music in between the rituals, most notably a performance of the ‘tea-picking’ song to celebrate the season of shincha (new tea), and of course, free samples of said shincha. (We love free samples.) But if you can’t make this event for a cup of tea, there’s always the Tokyo Marathon — the road in front of the shrine forms part of the running route, and on race day, shrine volunteers serve warm tea to runners and spectators in the vicinity.
Chanoki Inari Shrine, Tokyo
Tokyo has not one, not two, but three Chanoki Inari Shrines.
The oldest (and most interesting) of them is tucked away to the side of the stone steps leading up to Ichigaya Kameoka Hachiman Shrine in Shinjuku Ward. At a purported 1,200 years old, this tea tree shrine stood in this spot long before the surrounding Hachiman shrine was built around it in 1636. A few sources say that the legendary monk Kōbō Daishi performed the enshrinement ceremony, but this claim should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
Ichigaya’s Chanoki is apparently efficacious for those suffering from eye ailments — beloved by feudal lords and retainers during the Edo period — and has seen a recent increase in devotees, possibly because we stare at screens all the time. We should totally have included it on our list of eye temples and shrines!
Legend says that long ago, a white fox — a messenger of the Inari deity — injured its eye on a tea tree branch, and as a consequence came to detest tea. Shrine worshippers established a custom of abstaining from tea during the first three days of the New Year. A separate belief that visiting this shrine and abstaining from tea for 17 days could cure eye diseases also arose.
After this exciting story, the rest of the Chanoki Inari Shrines are rather mysterious by comparison. Our second one is a tiny slip of a hokora nestled between two buildings in the shopping street near Tamachi Station. It was moved and enshrined in the same hokora as Ganryū Inari, as the original shrine was demolished in 2018 to make way for a brand-new development. It doesn’t seem to belong to a registered religious organisation, and there’s no information board around, so we’ve yet to establish the origins of either of these shrines. It may well have begun as a small branch shrine of Ichigaya’s Chanoki above.
The third Chanoki Inari is a sub-shrine located on the precincts of Suwa Shrine in Minami Shinagawa. There’s no publicly available information about it that we could find, but it does seem to be regularly cared for by the Suwa neighbourhood association.
Shizuoka Sengen Shrine, Shizuoka
What makes Shizuoka Sengen a tea-related shrine, if there isn’t a tea deity involved? For starters, there’s their annual Misono Kenchasai, where sencha is offered to the deities while praying for peace in the Imperial Household and the nation, as well as the flourishing of Japanese culture. (Their words, not ours.) That being said, shrines with strong ties to tea schools do tend to hold similar ceremonies in spring to herald the new tea season; see, for example, Kamigamo Shrine and Gokōunomiya Shrine in Kyoto.
Another point in their favour is that Shizuoka is a major tea-producing region — second only to Kagoshima, in fact — and as one of the city’s most important shrines, it does draw its fair share of worshippers from the tea industry. But few other shrines, if any, can say that they inspired a local tea purveyor to create a set of seven varieties of teas themed around Shizuoka Sengen’s seven sub-shrines.
Since 2009 (or thereabouts), Shizuoka City has hosted the Shizuoka Omiyage Project, which encourages companies in the area to design and create truly local souvenirs. The theme in 2018 focused on Shizuoka Sengen Shrine. Kanō Masahiko, the third-generation owner of tea farm Seicha Kanoh, had grown up in the neighbourhood near the shrine, and was inspired to develop the ‘Shizuoka Sengen Seven Shrine Pilgrimage.’ The product went on to win a gold prize at the World Green Tea Contest in 2019.
It’s a neat idea, and a good way to do a tea tasting at home. Each tea was paired with a shrine based on their characteristics. For instance, Kanbe Shrine was paired with green tea, since it venerates the deity of longevity. Sukunahikona Shrine — no relation to the one in Osaka above — gets Japanese-style black tea, since theaflavins (a type of antioxidant) have antibacterial and antiviral properties. (Sukunabikona is the deity of medicine, among other things.)
One more honourable mention. Tamame tea — which can be translated as ‘bud’ tea — is made from the buds and leaf tips gathered during the production of gyokuro and sencha. This relatively under-marketed tea was paired with Tamahoko Shrine, based on the belief that sprouting buds bring good fortune; the product description specifically mentions that it offers reassurance to those sitting examinations. Anything to help with the stress of studying!
Bonus: The ‘Have Some Tea’ Jizō Statue, Tokyo
What would you do if you died from a dreadful illness while travelling somewhere to marry your beloved? If you were a woman from the post-town of Itabashi, the answer would be to turn into a ghost and haunt the place where you breathed your last.
The Ocha-agare Jizō is a statue in Kami-Ikebukuro, Toshima Ward, located inside the Kōshin Tower that was built in 1704. There are supposedly a number of stories about this statue, but the most common ones begin with the woman above, and all say that it was built to pacify her spirit. Its date of construction is unknown, though a few sources suggest that it dates back to the Edo period.
The details vary: One version says that her marriage had been opposed or prevented (whom by is unclear) and that the haunting was an act of vengeance on the townspeople. Another version says she was haunting her beloved, appearing nightly in front of his house. In all versions, a disembodied voice can be heard crying, have some tea, have some tea.
Why the call to have tea? Who is she demanding drink tea? What does tea have to do with her failed wedding? Who knows. But if you’re ever in the area, stop by and say a prayer for the woman who couldn’t marry her beloved.
Written by Florentyna Leow