So my mom is packing for a few weeks in Japan and is making plans for where she’ll go once she touches down at Narita. Although no stranger to Japan, she hasn’t been there in about 15 years.
If you could ask for anything from Japan (within a reasonable size range, of course), what would it be?
For me, the answer is easy. I’d like tea.
A couple years ago, a friend from Japan gave me a packet of genmaicha, green tea laced with puffed pieces of roasted rice. Yum.
Genmaicha has been my tea of choice ever since. Last year I bought a half pound of this tea from the Imperial Tea Court in Berkeley. The variety I bought there actually came from China and included roasted rice that looked like mini pieces of popped corn. A month later I won a package of genmaicha at a Chinese University of Hong Kong alumni association event held around the Lunar New Year.
And now that I’m out of genmaicha and resorting to tieguanyin, a solid green tea from Fujian province (which I do like), my mom’s trip is still very timely.
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