Savor the Season, Enjoy the New Tea
The seasonal peak of a food can be divided into three stages: the beginning, the height, and the tail end. In modern terms, it might be easiest to think of this as roughly ten days each — early, mid, and late in a given month. The very first catches or harvests of the season — the first bonito, the first ayu sweetfish, the first matsutake mushrooms — were traditionally prized as auspicious "first foods."
That said, in Kyoto, this "beginning" stage was traditionally reserved as a hospitality ingredient for guests and honored patrons at renowned restaurants, while it only reached ordinary household tables once the season moved past its beginning and into a stable, plentiful middle stage. The tail end, in turn, carried its own role — marking a bittersweet farewell to the passing season. Being able to enjoy that very first "beginning" harvest in an everyday meal was something genuinely special. There was even an old saying that "eating the season's first food adds 75 days to your life," and in the past, relatives would rush to deliver the season's first bamboo shoots or ayu to the head of the family before anyone else, as a gift ahead of the season's arrival. Sharing that early seasonal harvest with neighbors, too, was something like a tradition among old established families — a custom that lives on today, not just within individual households but as a form of social courtesy in various settings.
Shincha, rather than functioning primarily as a formal gift, has long been woven into daily life in Kyoto as a seasonal pleasure enjoyed within each household. Unlike tea enjoyed year-round, which isn't tied to any particular season, shincha seems to carry within it a sense of joy and gratitude toward nature — a quiet celebration that another year's tea-picking season has safely arrived.
The timing of the tea harvest shifts slightly from year to year, but it comes around reliably each season. As the cherry blossoms fade and the fresh greenery of the new season arrives, families and friends gather to share shincha together, marking the start of a new season.
The sight of fine tea hairs (down) floating on the surface of a cup of green tea carries, even in childhood memory, the changing of the season from spring into summer — remembered alongside its subtle bitterness and sweetness. For the people of the old capital, enjoying Uji's shincha was a rich, fleeting pleasure — perhaps something of a special "treasure," precious precisely because it disappears as the rainy season draws to a close.
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