A Bowl for a Coin

Front matter

X A Bowl for a Coin A Commodity History of Japanese Tea

WILLIAM WAYNE FARRIS

A BOWL FOR A COIN

CHAPTER FOUR Modern Tea: From Triumph to Uncertainty 125 viii Contents

Conclusion 167 Notes 177 List of Characters 203 Bibliography 209 Index 219

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Japan-US Educational/Fulbright Commission for funding a nine-month research stay in Tokyo and Kyoto during 2010- 2011. I am especially grateful to Hongo Kazuto for serving as my adviser at the Historiographical Institute of Tokyo University. Sato Yüki, a PhD candidate from Tokyo University, served as my tutor as we read the difficult tea documents of the medieval and early modern periods. Special thanks go to Hashimoto Motoko for guiding me on a tour of Yoshida tea farm/factory/shop in Uji. I would also like to express my gratitude to Iwama Machiko, Nagai Susumu, Kodomari Shigehiro, Oka Atsushi, Nonaka Yasushi, Abe Kiyoko, Kimura Shigemitsu, Nakane Fukuji, Sakamoto Hiroshi, Murai Shosuke, Takahashi Tadahiko, Tsutsui Koichi, Sawamura Shin'ichi, Nakamura Shüya, Tajima Isao, and Fujii Joji for help in various aspects of my work.

In 2014, the History Department and the College of Humanities at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and the Northeast Asia Committee of the Association for Asian Studies funded me for a two-month research period at the Research Center for the Study of Japanese Culture (Nichibunken) outside of Kyoto. Thanks also go to Kiki Leinch for arranging a visit to the Uji tea company Marukyü Koyamaen during that summer of 2014. Harald Fuess, then of Heidelberg University, gave me some helpful pointers on commodity history.

I would like to admit the great debts I owe to Eric Rath of the University of Kansas and Rebecca Corbett, then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, for the advice and references that they gave me for this study of tea during the Edo and modern periods of Japanese history. I would ix x Acknowledgments also like to thank Peter Hoffenberg of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for discussing endlessly various aspects of modern economic history and major league baseball.

I am also grateful to two anonymous readers for their trenchant comments on the manuscript and to my editor, Stephanie Chun at the University of Hawai'i Press, for her guidance.

My deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Carol Brewer, who has supported my research and writing in ways too numerous to list. She has been a constant companion and good conversationalist, while coming up with questions that never cease to bedevil me.

This book is dedicated to my brother Al and his family for everything that they have done to see the Farris family through some difficult times.

Any mistakes, of course, are the responsibility of the author.

Map 1. Provinces and circuits of traditional Japan. From William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645—900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), pp. xvii-xix.

Key:

Kinai

1. Yamashiro 2. Yamato

3. Kawachi 4. Izumi

5. Settsu

Tokaido

6. Iga

7. Ise

8. Shima

9. Owari 10. Mikawa 11. Totomi 12. Suruga 13. Izu

14. Kai

15. Sagami 16. Musashi 17. Awa

18. Kazusa 19. Shimosa 20. Hitachi

Tosando

21. Omi

22. Mino

23. Hida

24. Shinano

25. Kozuke

26. Shimotsuke 27. Mutsu

28. Dewa

Hokurikudo 29. Wakasa 30. Echizen 31. Kaga

32. Noto

33. Etchü

34. Echigo 35. Sado

San'yodo

44. Harima 45. Mimasaka 46. Bizen

47. Bitchü

48. Bingo

49. Aki

50. Sud

51. Nagato

Nankaido 52. Kii

53. Awaji 54. Awa 55. Sanuki 56. Iyo

57. Tosa

Saikaido

58. Chikuzen 59. Chikugo 60. Buzen

61. Bungo

62. Hizen

63. Higo

64. Hyūga 65. Osumi 66. Satsuma

Islands 67. Iki 68. Tsushima

A. Iwashiro B. Iwaki

C. Suwa

} vx VLVOIIN 4 Em &

ZI akt i

NVdV[ JO dV]A

A BOWL FOR A COIN

Introduction

ARR

In September 2010, I was preparing to order a meal at a restaurant called The Gold of Africa in downtown Cape Town, South Africa. The waitress was dressed in appropriately African garb, and the menu listed specialties from Morocco, Kenya, and Egypt as well as South Africa. As I glanced at the drinks list, however, a most unexpected item caught my eye—Japanese green tea. About six months later, I was in St. Louis, Missouri, to care for my ageing parents. My brother, who had just rescued me from Lambert Airfield, took me for brunch to a greasy spoon called Goody Goody, known for serving the best omelets and hash browns in the area. Once again, while reviewing the beverage menu, I was surprised to find Japanese green tea listed.

It seemed astounding to me that these two restaurants, separated by thousands of miles and a greater cultural divide, had arrived at the decision to serve a drink from a country at least as far away as The Gold of Africa and Goody Goody were from each other. The worldwide appeal and availability of Japanese green tea were clearly evident, but I began to wonder what had made that possible. How had the Japanese come to produce, distribute, and consume tea, and why?

To be sure, historians have authored many excellent and insightful books on the Japanese tea ceremony (called chanoyu or sado) and related arts.! Typically, these studies begin with a general discussion of the early history of tea during the Heian (794-1185) and Kamakura (1185-1333) periods and then shift into a conventional chronology that follows the development of chanoyu during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Often these books either conclude the narrative at that point or touch only briefly on the tea ceremony in later centuries? These works have blazed a wide trail for those interested in the ritualized practice of tea in Japan, but they left me as a social and economic historian with more questions than answers.

If tea had been around in Japan for more than a thousand years, then somebody must have pursued the farming of it. By what methods was tea first grown in Japan? What important changes occurred in the methods of cultivation as farmers learned more about the plant? What were the lives of tea cultivators like? Considerations of farming techniques and development are vital for a full comprehension of the origins and eventual popularity of Japanese green tea.

As I quickly discovered, there is much more to producing a bowl of tea than merely growing the plant. Concerning the processes by which the plucked leaves were converted into a palatable drink, I first asked: What were the forms of tea consumed during ancient times? When and why did powdered tea (matcha) become a type of tea imbibed in Japan? I soon found out that, historically, innumerable varieties of tea had been prepared in the archipelago, and they easily eclipsed matcha in both quantity and popularity.

Cultivating the plant and processing its leaves may yield a bowl of tea, but it does not guarantee that consumers' thirsts will be quenched. So I investigated the ways in which tea was exchanged and marketed as a commodity throughout Japanese history. For the Buddhist monks and aristocrats who were the first eager consumers of Japanese tea, usually as a medicine, the commodity first had to change hands from producers to drinkers. In what form did this exchange take place: as gifts, taxation, trade, or some combination of all three? When and how were the first brand names for tea created? What were the lives of tea merchants like? Japanese tea was shipped abroad to Europe from a surprisingly early date, and the modern export trade transformed production and consumption in the archipelago.

Finally and more broadly, I wanted to know how tea made its imprint on Japanese civilization. Although one would never know it today, tea is not native to the Japanese islands. What important ritual, political, and medicinal functions did it serve? How have these functions changed over the centuries? The custom of tea drinking has affected and been represented in Japanese literature and the arts beginning with the first poetry and scroll paintings. From art forms as diverse as prints, plays, advertisements, and Edo-period verse to the radio, newspaper, and television commercials of the modern era—all have featured tea. Examining the cultural meanings of tea in Japan rounds out the picture of this beverage.

Historians interested in the full story of modern Japanese green tea should therefore recognize the need to address these four interrelated aspects— the farming, processing, distribution, and various social and cultural functions of tea—because they supply the broader context within which chanoyu was created. Teasing out and describing these threads over nearly thirteen hundred years reveals a far more significant role played by the beverage in Japan’s economy, society, politics, and culture than heretofore recognized. Despite its origins as a cultural item from Tang China enjoyed by only a handful of people, Japanese tea spread gradually but surely to become an important part of the historical record. Several centuries later, by the early 1400s, many commoners were enjoying tea, cultivation was more intensive, the market came to the fore as a means of exchanging the beverage, and most notably, the tea plant originally imported from China lost its exotic appeal and became nativized to Japan. City folk would have been familiar with the cries of street tea peddlers. “A bowl for a coin (ippuku issen)!” they would shout, hoping to entice potential customers to try their particular concoctions. Tea went on to become a daily fact of life for all the inhabitants of the archipelago. For this reason, it serves as a lens through which to view the development of Japanese society over the ages.

A history of Japanese tea may encompass many local points of production and chronology, but it also highlights at least three historical themes with more universal application. First, I have already mentioned that tea was served early on as a medicine. By the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), the beverage was being drunk by much of the population. Did the widespread consumption of tea, the preparation of which included boiling water, have effects on the health and longevity of the archipelago’s population? Did it also stimulate people to work harder in an ongoing “industrious revolution”? Tea may have played a central but little noted role in Japan's economic and social transformation from a land of peasants to one of office and factory workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.?

The second and third themes are interrelated and concern the economic development of modern society since the Industrial Revolution, circa 1750. During the 1950s and 1960s economists wondered why certain regions of the globe industrialized while most did not. It seemed like a simple problem of money and technology, so economically advanced countries spent large sums of money trying to force-feed industrialization upon so-called backward countries. Unsurprisingly, these attempts failed. In recent decades, economic historians have realized that the process of industrialization is much more complex than simply parachuting in advanced technologies. At the very least, there are two crucial prerequisites: (1) the development of a productive agriculture that yields a surplus; and

(2) the creation of classes of people with extra cash to spend on commodities in an evolving consumer society. Of course today, as humans face a looming environmental crisis, citizens may not necessarily view these twin accoutrements of modern society as unalloyed “goods,” but they are undeniable factors in the evolution of the contemporary world nonetheless.

The history of tea in Japan speaks to issues of agricultural development and the rise of consumer society for what is often called a “late developer” but looks increasingly like an early one. First, the history of tea cultivation serves as an example of how Japanese farming intensified and matured over the centuries. It is no accident that by 1850 tea production was so sophisticated that it could help to bankroll Japan’s industrialization. Second, as many have noted, tea is a commodity with a mildly addictive property. An examination of the growth of demand for the beverage over thirteen hundred years reveals important points about how peasants became consumers and their numbers multiplied until they embraced all of Japanese society.”

The overwhelming preponderance of tea currently produced in Japan is “steeped” tea (sencha) for home consumption.” Japanese continue to drink green tea for its good taste and as part of their highly varied contemporary diet. As modern consumers outside Japan have learned to enjoy Japanese foods and become obsessed with health concerns, Japanese green tea has come to enjoy a niche market and a worldwide reputation for good taste and purported effectiveness in fighting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.^ It is a tribute to the modern Japanese green-tea industry that its product saturates the domestic market and reaches places as diverse as Cape Town and St. Louis.

Today in Japan, green tea is so common that restaurant patrons are almost never charged for repeated servings. It is served at birth, marriage, and death ceremonies. People of all social classes enjoy the beverage, although not always in the same way. It carries medicinal, ritualistic, religious, economic, social, and political meanings. The history of green tea takes the reader to the heart of Japanese society and culture and underscores themes that appear again and again in the Japanese and global past.

Tea, or Camellia sinensis, is a dark-green shrub with leaves of an elliptical shape. Shoots are soft, while older leaves are leathery and may be serrated. The tea plant has white flowers about an inch in diameter with five to seven white petals and containing stamens and a pistil that allow the plant to reproduce freely in the proper climate and soil conditions. The shrub may grow as high as forty-five feet but is usually much shorter. The tea plant is native to southwest China and/or northeast India, where the climate is subtropical with lush vegetation. There mists fill the air and rainfall is plentiful.

Successful cultivation of the tea plant requires three environmental conditions: relative warmth, plentiful rainfall, and the right kind of soil.” The ideal temperature for growing tea ranges from thirteen to seventeen degrees centigrade and should never fall below minus ten. The tea plant needs lots of rain—more than 15,000 millimeters per year. Soil should be relatively fertile and porous; good drainage is necessary and heavy clay soils will not do. For much of its history the plant was grown on mountain soils in Japan.

Traditionally, the propagation of the tea plant begins with the appearance of the blossom in November. It is important to note that the cultivar is not self-pollinating, that is, the stamen and pistil of the same plant cannot reproduce. With the help of bees, butterflies, and birds, the flowers will yield hard, full seed packets within a year. Normally, human intervention is necessary for the maximum number of tea plants to reproduce, but under the right conditions some tea shrubs may make seed packets on their own. Whether sprouted from seeds or cuttings, as is the case today, tea bushes never yield a harvest right away. Typically, it takes about seven years for a new bush to make an average crop.

There are about as many ways to prepare and drink tea as one can imagine. It has been made into blocks, ground, steeped, and combined with rice, butter, yogurt, jam, and many other foods. Black teas commonly consumed in Europe and the United States differ from Japanese green tea only in their mode of preparation, being oxygenated to reduce the bitter taste. This processing permits manufacturers to produce their black teas on large plantations and in factories on a scale unimaginable for Japanese green tea.

Tea is different from most other beverages in that it naturally contains caffeine and catechins. Caffeine stimulates the nervous system, inhibiting sleep and rejuvenating a tired body. It strengthens the heart, encourages blood circulation through frequent urination, and makes the body’s metabolism more efficient. According to the Mayo Clinic, coffee contains anywhere from 95 to 200 mg of caffeine per eight-ounce serving. By comparison, tea has less: black tea has 14 to 61 mg in the same serving, while green tea holds 24 to 40 mg, again in an eight-ounce serving. It takes about 100 mg of caffeine a day to lead to addiction, so while coffee drinkers frequently become psychologically addicted to their beverage, such a state is rarer with tea. That is not to say that repeated servings of strong tea may not lead to addictive behavior, and perhaps even hallucinations.

The antioxidant tannin in tea has been proven to strengthen the body’s immune system and fight off bacteria and viruses. Habituation to tea’s caffeine, however, was likely the initial reason for the popularity of the beverage. How the residents of the islands became such avid consumers of green tea is a story that begins near the dawn of Japanese civilization.

Chapter One

When tea was introduced for the first time to Japan around 750, a tiny aristocracy ruled over about 6.5 million inhabitants. Buddhism was becoming increasingly predominant as a belief system within this tiny elite, and to explain and implement Buddhist rituals the court ordained monks and nuns. Compared to these political and religious elites, however, the great mass of the population lived a hard life and existed from hand to mouth. Japanese society resembled a rigid pyramid with a small, pointed tip where the elites enjoyed lives of great opulence while most barely survived.

The nature of Japanese society profoundly affected the way in which tea was received and propagated in the islands. Since most commoners had to struggle to survive, they did not take cultivation of the less than nourishing product too seriously nor was it very widespread. Cultivators might farm tea for a while and then abandon cultivation for another more stable and promising life. When it came to processing the leaves, the kinds of tea available were few in number and the beverage itself looked and tasted nothing at all like Japanese green tea does today. Again, because the number of consumers was severely limited, they usually knew each other and exchanged tea leaves almost exclusively as a gift. There was no need for a market. Finally, in a time when life expectancy even for the elite did not exceed thirty, the primary function of tea was as a medicine to cure ailments of various types. Aristocrats and the clergy seized upon this function and devised rituals stressing the beverage's supposed health effects. They wrote tracts and poetry about drinking tea. By 1300, the size of the tea-drinking elite had expanded somewhat, but these essential characteristics remained the same. Indeed, tea retained its role in gift giving and as a medicine into the present.

THE ORIGINS OF TEA IN JAPAN

As noted in the introduction, southwestern China was likely one region where tea flourished. It remained a product primarily of south China during the Latter Han and Northern and Southern Dynasties (25-589 CE), where it was popular with Daoists and reclusive poets, among others.! By the 700s, however, it had grown in popularity to encompass north China, too. The scholar Lu Yu (733-803) composed The Classic of Tea (Chajing) around 760 and described a society that had gone mad for the beverage. Even prior to Lu Yu, “tea had become an integral part in the lives of Buddhist monks,” who cultivated, drank, and offered tea to visitors and the imperial court.” By the 760s, migrants headed for south China to work in a flourishing tea industry. As Victor Mair and Ehrling Hoh have written, “the drink spread to every nook of the land and stratum of society.?

Both Korea, where the Kingdom of Silla held sway, and the Japanese court, where Sinophilic leaders such as Fujiwara no Nakamaro (706—764) dominated politics, looked to China for the latest in elite culture. More important, Buddhist monks traveled regularly to China and were familiar with customs there. Each court sent embassies to China to pay tribute items and receive courtly accoutrements frequently during the 700s. The elites of both Silla and Japan could easily have known of the Chinese addiction to tea and fallen prey to the same habit at this time. And yet Japanese wooden tablets and paper documents listing the Chinese character (t'u) that may mean tea measure the herb in units that cannot possibly have been utilized for the plant or beverage.

Recently, though, biology and archaeology have provided the most convincing evidence to date that visitors carried tea to Japan earlier than previously thought. Japanese and Chinese molecular biologists have examined tea specimens throughout East Asia and have found that all tea in Japan originated in south China and came in waves as the archipelago's most famous invasive species. The first and most venerable comprised a tea strain with a long pistil that entered both Korea and Japan from south China at about the same time, probably several decades prior to 800. For those with knowledge of the close relationship between the peoples and cultures of the ancient Korean peninsula and Japanese islands, this revelation should come as no surprise.? Korean elite tea culture possibly dates back as early as the late seventh century.

Archaeologists in Japan have uncovered additional valuable evidence.” Shards of light-green porcelain vessels, many of them tea bowls, have come to light from the foundation of Süfukuji, the temple where an early ninth-century sovereign is known to have imbibed his tea, as well as the Yamashiro provincial headquarters. More important, archaeologists have found them at Kofukuji, the famous temple at the Chinese-style capital Nara, dating to the late Nara period (710—794). A site thought to be a detached palace or temple has revealed these treasures for the 730s or 740s. The Ordinances of Engi also refer to tea bowls manufactured in Owari Province, one of the production centers where shards have been recovered.? The Chinese Yue ware that served as the model for these tea bowls has come to light at numerous sites throughout Japan for the eighth century. To be sure, tea bowls may be used for many purposes, but the most reasonable hypothesis is that Buddhist monks and court aristocrats in Japan were familiar with tea drinking during its heyday in China in the mid-eighth century.

Scholars will probably never know just who was responsible for the introduction of tea to Japan. One expert has surmised that two little-known monks who spent the years from 750 through 778 in Tang China may have been the first to carry tea seeds from China to Nara? They lived at Daianji in Nara; a list of the possessions from that temple shows items that could have been used for tea drinking. Moreover, Daianji was a center of East Asian culture, with many Tang monks residing there including disciples of the famed Chinese cleric Jianzhen (Ganjin, 688—763). Doji (?-740), another Daianji priest, wrote odes referring to "fragrant water" Monks at this temple may well have been the first to grow the tea plant in Japan, given that cultivation of Camellia sinensis in Nara prefecture is probably the oldest in the entire archipelago.? Yet court annalists tell a tale of more heroic origins.

TEA DURING THE NINTH CENTURY: CULTIVATION AND MODES OF EXCHANGE

In the first verifiable written records, tea seemingly makes a dramatic appearance in Japan.!! Texts link the introduction of tea to two of the most famous men in Japanese history: the Buddhist monks Saicho (767-822) and Kükai (774—835). To elaborate, it is generally known that each cleric was the founder of a famous school of esoteric Buddhism, Tendai and Shingon, respectively. These sects offered great solace to wealthy Japanese aristocrats in search of the ritual trappings of salvation. To learn about these sects, each cleric went to Tang China in 804; Saicho returned in 805/6, then

Kukai in 806/10. At the party for Saicho's departure, there was a reference to "drinking tea"; eight years after sailing back to Japan, Kükai wrote in 814 that he was "learning Indian writing while sitting and drinking tea." Both men had frequent experiences drinking the habit-forming herb while in China and are presumed to have carried tea seeds back to Japan with them.

As if to prove this point, in 815, Saicho sent ten "pounds" (kin, about 600 grams) of tea to the monk Taihan, a Kükai disciple. That year was an important one for tea in Japan. The beverage was apparently quite popular at the court of the current "Heavenly Sovereign" (or emperor) Saga, as there are repeated allusions to tea in Japanese poetry of the time. In that same year, Saga went to Süfukuji over the mountains from Heian, and the monk Yochü, who had himself spent thirty years in Tang China, demonstrated his prowess by boiling up some tea leaves for the enjoyment of the weary travelers. Within two months, Saga had ordered eight provinces in or near the Kinai (the Kyoto-Osaka-Nara region), including Yamato and Yamashiro where the capitals Nara and Heian stood, to plant tea and present it as a tribute-tax item. The narrative thus gains the stamp of imperial approval.

There are, however, problems with attributing the origins of tea to these two men. First, all of those traditions date from long after the early 800s, as late as the sixteenth century. Second, neither Saicho nor Kükai returned to Japan in a season appropriate for the planting of tea. Third, unless the men brought back with them plentiful amounts of seed, they could never have produced enough tea by 815 to quench the thirsts of Saga and his court. Knowledge of the plant's reproductive processes cast substantial doubt on the conventional tale of tea's origins.

Rather than attributing the beginnings of tea in Japan to either of these two clerics, it makes more sense to posit that the cultivar was already being grown and consumed in the islands by the early 800s. In other words, the insight that tea cultivation in Japan probably dates to the second half of the Nara period is essential. By the time the two monks had returned from China, modern scientific and archaeological testimony shows that tea had likely been farmed and consumed in Japan for over half a century.

Consider Saicho's generous gift to Taihan in 815. Most narratives simply assume that Saicho had the tea available from his trip to China, but it had been eleven years since the Tendai prelate had returned from the Asian continent. The tea could not have been left over from his time in China because it would have gone bad in the meantime. It might have been a gift sent from Chinese monks in 815, but there is no record of such a gift, and besides, the amount would have been too large to pass rigorous inspection tests of continental goods conducted at court.

The Prehistory of Japan's Tea Industry, 750-1300 Ti

In my view, all the tea-drinking activities of Saga's court make sense only if tea was already a daily fact of life for the elite in the early ninth century. The nature of tea cultivation supports such an inference. As noted in my introduction, after planting tea seeds, it typically requires eight years before tea shrubs are capable of producing palatable tea. Is it reasonable to believe that Saicho and/or Kükai and/or Yochü could have brought enough seeds with them in 805/806 to supply Saga and his court fully by 815, just eight or nine years later? Although it is not completely beyond the realm of possibility, the long maturation of tea bushes suggests that none of these monks who traveled to China could have brought back the seeds for Saga's tea with them. The truth is more likely that Japan's elites were used to consuming tea because the plant was already being grown in several places around the capital by that time.

All the tea consumed at the Saga court was therefore farmed in Japan, even possibly at Daianji, where Saicho had a disciple. Sad to say, there is no credible evidence that either prelate ever carried seeds to Japan. There are many traditions that attribute the origin of tea in Japan to Saicho and even Kükai, but they have no basis in ninth-century sources. The attempt to tie the importation of tea to these famous figures is analogous to similar urges in Japanese tea history to link origins to well-known historical persons.

The tale of Saicho and Kükai raises the question of the earliest cultivation methods in Japan. How does one interpret the order to establish tea fields in all those provinces in 815? Was the order ever carried out? The answer can never be known for sure, because there are no further references to the command or to tea-farming methods for this era. Yet some historical evidence suggests a more optimistic view of the implementation of Saga's order. First, at least one of the provincial governors charged with planting tea, Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu, was a frequent drinker of the beverage.? Then, too, there was a tea plot located within the imperial residential grounds.” Inspired by the example of Yochü and his apparent tea-making skills acquired after thirty years in China, Saga may well have issued and implemented his command.

Let us assume that tea seeds were planted in 815 and eventually germinated into seedlings. What happened to the resulting bushes? Such a question carries the argument into the realm of speculation about ancient Japanese cultivation methods, but if informed by knowledge of the reproduction of the tea plant, then such speculation can be insightful. First, if the court's tea plants germinated and the seedlings were cared for by conscientious farmers, then naturally the resulting shrubs were likely productive, but there are no further references indicating that this was so.

What if the tea seeds were planted, the surviving plants tended for a while and then abandoned, a fate that frequently befell rice and other fields? As noted earlier, left on their own, tea flowers are not self-pollinating, that is, the stamen and pistil of the same plant cannot produce seeds. Butterflies, bees, and birds must fly from plant to plant to pollinate the flowers, yielding hard pouches of tea seeds. Without human intervention, the rate of successful pollination is not very high, but if Saga ordered enough seeds planted and they yielded bushes, then undoubtedly some would have produced seed pouches, while others might have died. Whatever seed pouches there were would have fallen to the ground, where they may or may not have germinated. Interestingly, animals such as boars, deer, and monkeys are known to assist in the growth process by eating the seed pouches. These animals then carry potential tea plants inside them until they defecate the undigested seeds, fertilized and ready to germinate.