Stephane Danton came to Japan from France in 1993 hoping to work in the wine business.
But although he was a qualified wine sommelier back home, he found it impossible to break into Japan’s closed wine world. So looking for another line of work, he settled on green tea. “I thought that tea was very similar to wine,” says Danton. A visit to Danton’s tea shop and café, Ocharaka, in western Tokyo, shows the refreshingly new approach he took to a traditional part of Japanese culture.
The 24 kinds of tea on sale include green tea blended with natsu-mikan (a citrus fruit), and also with peach. He has teas mixed with baked roast potato, as well as chocolate-mint. “At first no one wanted to believe in me. ‘What is this foreigner doing?’ they asked.”
While such avant-garde blends might raise eyebrows among green tea traditionalists in Japan, they have been a hit overseas. “We have to adapt the taste to the country we go to,” stresses Danton. “Most foreigners want to import something to Japan, but I thought it was better to export – because I understand what French people need.”
Ocharaka was even invited by the Japanese government to serve green tea at the 2008 International Expo in Zaragoza, Spain. Danton and his staff prepared 970,000 Valencia-orange flavoured cups over 93 days using 735 kilos of loose tea.
Danton lives in Yokosuka with his wife and two children, and has been making the four-hour, round trip journey to Kichijoji for a decade – something he much prefers to living in the city. “That’s my time. Without such a thing I would not be in Japan.”
Almost all of Ocharaka’s tea comes from the famous Kawane tea-growing area of Shizuoka prefecture, where Danton has become deeply involved in the local community. Several times a year he takes groups of customers from his shop to visit tea farms, and he hopes to set up an agri-tourism NGO.
But most tea growers are already in their fifties and Danton is concerned for the future of the industry. “If we don’t do something for green tea in Japan, it will be destroyed in 15 years.”