[Illustration: CARRYING HOME TEA LEAVES, NEAR UJI]
In the twelfth century Kyoto was the centre of life in Japan, and the district of Uji, between that city and Nara, has always kept its reputation for producing the finest tea. The most valuable leaves are those on the young spring shoots, and when I passed through on the 19th of May these were just being gathered and dried. Most of the shrubs grow in the open air without any protection, evergreen bushes from two to three feet high, and among them the women and children were at work. As they squatted by the plants, filling their baskets, very little of them was visible, but their big grass hats shone in the sun, looking like a crop of gigantic mushrooms. The Japanese “kasa” is made of various light materials--straw, split bamboo, rushes, or shavings of deal; it is used, like an umbrella tied to the head, as a protection against sun and rain; in the evening or on cloudy days it is laid aside, and the laborers wear only their cotton kerchief, spread out like a hood, or tied in a band round their brows. Though it cannot be called the “vast hat the Graces made,” it is, nevertheless, very effective in the landscape, and the variations of its outline in different positions indicate happily the action of its wearer.
[Illustration: A PLANTATION COVERED WITH MATTING NEAR UJI]
The plants which produce the most expensive teas, costing from six to eight dollars a pound, are carefully protected by mats stretched on a framework of bamboo, so that the tender leaves may neither be scorched by the sun nor torn by the heavy rains, and there are acres of them so enclosed. It was a curious thing to look down from a little hill-top on a sea of matting which filled the whole valley from one pine-clad hill to another, its surface only broken by the ends of the supporting poles and by the thatched roofs of the drying-houses which stuck up here and there like little islands. Underneath the mats women were picking, and in every wayside cottage those who were not in the fields were busily sorting and cleaning the leaves. There are no large factories or firing-houses; each family makes its own brand of tea, labelling it with some fanciful or poetic name, such as “jewelled dew.”