Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 35
CHAPTER XXXV
THE TEA TRADE
Since Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world his countrymen have been consuming more and more of its teas each year, the United States and Canada being almost her only customers, England and Russia, the great tea-drinking countries of Europe, buying hardly enough to serve as samples. Each year the United States pays over $7,000,000 for the nerve-racking green tea of Japan. Besides the price of the tea, a trifle of $11,000,000 goes to Japan for raw silk and cocoons. In return, Japan imports from America less than $2,000,000 in kerosene oil, and another $1,000,000 in clocks, watches, and leather. It is this balance of trade that disturbs United States officials in Japan, who see England selling that thrifty nation over $18,000,000 in cotton, woollen, and iron goods, and taking from it a little over $3,000,000 of manufactured silks, curios, and art goods. Meanwhile Russian petroleum arrives by ship-loads, and, handled by the largest English firm in the East, is being pushed and sold by the smallest retailers at less than the Standard Oil Company’s fluid.
The tea-plant, as every one knows, is a hardy evergreen of the camellia family. It grows a thick and solidly-massed bush, and at a first glance at a field regularly dotted and bordered with the round bushes setting closely to the ground, one might easily mistake it for box. In the spring the young leaves crop out at the ends of the shoots and branches, and when the whole top of the bush is covered with pale golden-green tips, generally in May, the first picking takes place. The second picking belongs to the fire-fly season in June, and after that great festival tea comes in from the plantations in decreasing quantities until the end of August. The choicer qualities of tea are never exported, but consumed at home. Choice basket-fired tea, such as is used in the homes of the rich and well-to-do Japanese, sells for one and two dollars a pound. There are choicer, more carefully grown and prepared teas, which cost as high as from seven to ten dollars a pound; but such teas are shaded from the hot suns by matted awnings, and the picker, going down lines of these carefully tended bushes, nips off only the youngest leaves or buds at the tip of each shoot. The average tea, bought by the exporters for shipment to the United States and Canada, is of the commonest quality, and according to Japanese trade statistics, the average value is eleven cents a pound as it stands, subject to the export duty and ready for shipment abroad. There are often sales of whole cargoes of Japan tea at auction in New York for fifteen cents a pound. Families who buy this same brand from their grocers at forty or sixty cents a pound may judge to whom the greater profits accrue.
Japan tea came into market as a cheaper substitute for the green teas of China, those carefully rolled young hysons and gunpowders of our grandmothers’ fancy. Europe has never received the Japan teas with favor, but the bulk of American importations is Japanese, and the taste for black tea is being cultivated very slowly in the great republic. For green tea, the leaves are dried over hot fires almost immediately after picking, leaving the theine, or active principle of the leaf, in full strength. For black tea, the leaves are allowed to wilt and ferment in heaps for from five to fourteen days, or until the leaf turns red, and the harmful properties of theine have been partly destroyed. The Oolong tea of South China is nearest to green tea, its fermentation being limited to three or five days only, while the richly-flavored black teas of North China, from the Hangkow, Ningchow, and Keemung districts, are allowed to ferment for twice that period to prepare them for the Russian and English markets. The choicest of these black teas go to Russia, a part of the crop still being carried by camel trains from the end of the Grand Canal near Pekin to the terminus of the trans-Siberian railway. It is also shipped by steamers to Odessa; and as the tea is thoroughly fired and sealed in air-tight packages, it makes no difference in the quality of the infusion afterwards whether the tea-chests were jolted by camel caravans from Tungchow to Irkutsk, or pitched about in a ship’s hold—much as caravan tea is celebrated in advertisements for the American public.
The Japanese Government made experiments in the manufacture of black tea in the province of Ise, but the results were not satisfactory, and no further efforts have been made to compete in that line with China. Japan will continue to furnish the world’s supply of green tea, but as the demand for such stimulants declines, a great problem will confront its tea-farmers.
Kobé and Yokohama are the great tea ports, each one draining wide districts, and their streets being fragrant with the peculiarly sweet odor of toasting tea-leaves all summer long.
At Kobé thirteen firms, of which only two are American, are engaged in the tea-trade. In Yokohama there are twenty-eight firms, thirteen being English, eleven American, two German, and two Japanese. One American firm has invented machinery for firing and coloring the tea, the leaves being tossed and turned by inanimate iron instead of by perspiring coolies. As there are no patent laws in Japan, and as the Japanese are very quick at copying, this machinery has to be very carefully watched, taken apart, and locked up every night. Several thousand men, women, and even children are busily employed during the four months of the busy season—May, June, July, and August. A steam saw-mill, set up by a speculative American, makes a business of supplying tea-chests to these firms, although some still depend on their own carpenters. The matting and the sheets of lead for covering and lining the boxes come from China. Each firm, too, has a little art and printing establishment attached, where the gaudy labels for chests and cans are block-printed. One firm often has a hundred different pictorial labels for its packages of tea, that number of names being applied to the one kind of tea shipped.
Of each consignment made, a sample can of tea is forwarded by mail, while a duplicate sample can is retained by the exporter.
The young tea-leaves picked in May and early June comprise more than half of the whole season’s crop, succeeding growths of leaves being coarser and having less flavor. This tea, picked by women and children in the fields, is roughly dried in shallow baskets lined with paper over charcoal fires, and is then sold to commission dealers in the interior towns and villages. They sort it into grades, toast it once more, and ship it to the treaty ports in rough paper sacks, boxes, and baskets. Some of it comes by junks to Yokohama. Over and over the tea is tested by sample infusions and the leaves carefully inspected. All summer, at the exporting houses, the tea-tasters are busy with their rows of white cups. A certain weight of leaves is put in each cup, the boiling water is poured on and allowed to stand for five minutes. The expert notes, meanwhile, the color of the liquid and the aroma, carefully watches the unrolling of the leaves, and then tastes the brew by slow sips, meditatively, discriminatingly. The tea-taster takes care to swallow very little, as its effects are disastrous in time. Tea-tasters as a rule follow their business but a few years, severe nerve and stomach trouble being brought on by the constant sipping of so much powerful stimulant. Of course they command high salaries. Astonishing stories are told of the acuteness of their sense of taste and the certainty of their judgments. Their decision sets the price, and the dickering with the Japanese commission merchant is always settled by the tea-taster’s estimates.
In the tea-firing godowns the dried leaves are stacked in heaps as high as a haystack, when it makes a solid, cohesive mass, that can be cut off like hay with a patent hay-knife. In nearly every case the firing is superintended by a Chinese compradore, and his assistants are Japanese.
The tea-firers bring their cooked rice and their own teapots with them, and snatch refreshment whenever there is a lull in the work. They are searched at night when they leave, and with the sweet simplicity of children they keep on trying to secrete the leaves, always being caught at it. Their work consists in standing over round iron pots sunk in a brick framework for the thirteen hours of a day’s work, and stirring and tossing tea-leaves. There are charcoal fires under the iron pans, and all day they must lean over the hot iron and brick. The tea is given this extra firing to dry it thoroughly before its long sea-trip, and at the same time it is “polished,” or coated with indigo, Prussian blue, gypsum, and other things which give it the gray lustre that no dried tea-leaf ever naturally wore, but that American tea-drinkers insist on having. Before the tea-leaves are put in the pans for the second firing men, whose arms are dyed with indigo to the elbows, go down the lines and dust a little of the powder into each pan. Then the tossing and stirring of the leaves follows, and the dye is worked thoroughly into them, the work being regulated by overseers, who determine when each lot has been fired enough. It requires a certain training to keep the tea-leaves in constant motion, and it is steady, energetic work.
This skilled labor is paid for at rates to make the Knights of Labor groan, the wage list showing how impossible tea-culture is for the United States until protectionist tea-drinkers are ready to pay ten dollars a pound for the commonest grades. During the four busy months of the tea season the firers are paid the equivalent of eleven and four-tenths cents, United States gold, for a day's work of thirteen hours. Less expert hands, who give the second firing, or polishing, receive nine and six-tenths cents a day. Those who sort and finally pack the tea, and who work as rapidly and automatically as machines, get the immense sum of fifteen cents a day. Whole families engage in tea-firing during the season, earning enough then to support them for the rest of the year; or, rather, pinching for the rest of the year on what they earn during this brief season. In autumn little tea is fired, but the whole force of workmen can be had at the shortest notice, though the godown may have been closed for weeks. One compradore, notified at eleven o’clock at night that tea must be fired the next day to fill a cable order, had four hundred coolies on hand at day-break, many of them summoned after midnight from their villages, distant over seven miles from the godowns. This mysterious underground telegraphy in the servants’ quarters is one of the astonishing things of the East.
Tea-firing begins at six o’clock in the morning, the coolies clattering into the settlements on their wooden clogs at dawn, and going home at dusk. They wait patiently outside the compounds until the lordly Chinaman comes to summon as many workers as he wants for the day, whether two- hundred, three hundred, or four hundred. All these guilds in the Orient have their established rules of precedence among themselves; each one knows his rights and his place, and desperate as may be their need of the small pittance, there is no pushing or fighting. Foreigners who live near godowns complain of the babble of the coolies before daylight, and a tea-firing godown always declares its nearness by the confused hum of the several hundred cheerful voices all day long. The Japanese lower classes are the most talkative people under the sun, and rows of jinrikisha coolies never sit quietly in waiting, like the red-nosed Parisian cabmen, dozing or reading feuilletons, but are always jabbering, laughing, playing games and tricks on one another. The long, hot day’s work does not check the tea-firers’ loquacity in the least, and at dusk they are as sociable as at dawn. One frenzied resident, whose door-steps, window-sills, and shady curb-stones were favorite resting-places for the tea-firing coolies, determined to know the subjects discussed with such earnestness and sonorous phrases. His interpreter reported on three consecutive mornings that, for three mortal hours, one group of ten coolies, sitting on patient heels, cheerfully discussed the coming rice crop.
Philanthropists see fit to drop a tear over the lives of the workers in the tea-godowns, although these victims seem as cheerful and well satisfied with their lot as human beings can be. The women and young girls are rather picturesque with their blue cotton towels folded over their heads, and as the Japanese have remarkably pretty hands, the play of their fingers in the moving streams of tea-leaves is pleasant to watch. How they endure the slow, killing heat of the charcoal fires in torrid weather, on their diet of tea, rice, and shreds of cold fish, is a marvel to indolent, meat-eating foreigners. The pathetic sights are the women with young babies on their backs trudging home from the godowns at sunset, the babies having been danced around on the backs of older children in the godown-yard all day, or laid down in some safe corner near the mother's charcoal-pan. I asked a most humane woman once why charity did not take the form of a crèche, or day nursery. The answer was that it would be impossible to support such an institution in so small a community of foreigners. Each godown would need a large créche of its own; the poor women could not afford to spare a half-penny of their earnings, and the problem must solve itself.
If man cannot live by bread alone, many foreign residents live by tea alone, and live luxuriously. Great fortunes are made quickly in the tea trade no longer, as in earlier days. Romance departed with the clipper ships, and the cable and freight steamers reduced the tea trade to prosaic lines. Only the best and most experienced men now succeed in this trade, but the tea-merchant toils in his counting-room and godown only from April to October. Then he closes and locks it all behind him, and usually goes over to the United States to look after his interests and orders there. Tea has its fluctuations, like corn or cotton, although it is a crop that never fails, with the added disadvantages of the great distance from the final markets and the expensive cable communications to make it uncertain and full of speculation. As it takes fifty days for the fast tea steamers to reach New York by way of the Suez Canal, the tea-picking season is over when the exporter learns of the arrival and sale of his invoices. On account of the heavier freight charges that way, only a fraction of the crop crosses the Pacific to be shipped by rail across the continent from San Francisco, the New York steamers by way of the Suez Canal requiring but a little longer time, saving half the cost to the shipper, and adding the convenience of a single handling of the cargo.
The first of the season’s crop is fired and hurried off as quickly as possible; tea steamers racing through Suez to New York, and the overland railroads rushing cargoes across the United States in special trains, as if they were perishable. With the exception of the four Pacific Mail steamers running to San Francisco, English ships carry all this tea to American markets. The tea steamers discharging cargo at New York usually load there for Liverpool, and arrive in Japan in time for the next season, or sometimes make two trips to New York in one season. While the tea is moving freights are high, but in the autumn they decline. One or two sailing ships take entire cargoes of tea to Tacoma each season, and send them across the continent by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The greatest market for Japan teas in America is now centering at Chicago instead of New York, and prophetic tea-merchants expect to have San Francisco become the headquarters and great distributing point.