Ethnographic returns — Spring harvest in Wazuka, Uji
May 12th, 2025. It is 6:45am in Minamiyamashiro Village, a hamlet on the Kizu river, which flows southeasterly through Kyoto prefecture’s ‘Uji tea’ producing territories. Sabrina and I are joined by Takeshi and Fumiya, the Street Dreams Magazine, Tokyo photographers who accompanied us for the fieldwork we’d conducted at Obubu Tea Farms during the dormant winter season several months prior. Now it is the height of the spring’s first harvest for the tea farmers across this region, and we have returned.
Curating encounters with craft through tea
Although I had been visiting Japan since my early 20’s, often for work there and regionally, it was only recently that I began to make Japan traditions of and practices around tea a central part of how I relate to the country, its history, and its future…