The origin of Japanese tea can be traced back to16th century, but the introduction of tea was completed by the envoys of the Tang Dynasty. In ancient Japan, there were no native tea trees and there was no habit of drinking tea. Tea has taken root and sprouted in Japan since the envoys of Nara era brought it back to Japan.

In the early days of heian period, the Japanese monk Zuyi (767-822, the ancestor of Tiantai Sect in Japan) brought China's tea trees back to Japan and began to plant them in Sakamoto, Feng Jingen. It is said that this is the beginning of tea planting in Japan. During the Kamakura period, the Zen monk Rong studied the processing method of tea in China and brought high-quality tea seeds back to Japan for dissemination. 12 1 1 wrote the first Japanese tea-drinking monograph, Eating Tea for Health.

Tea culture in China comes from the daily customs of ordinary people, while in Japan, on the contrary, tea drinking culture takes a top-down road, just like the capitalist reform in Meiji period. When tea was first introduced to Japan, it was completely a luxury, and only the royal family, nobles and a few senior monks could enjoy it. Tea ceremony is regarded as an elegant and advanced culture limited to the royal family, and its content and form were strongly imitated by the Tang Dynasty. Since the Kamakura era, it has become more and more common to regard tea as a panacea under the influence of eating tea for health preservation. The rapid development of tea planting has also created favorable conditions for tea to enter civilian families. During this period, tea drinking activities began to spread to the people centered on temples.

Different from China's method of fermenting tea, Japanese tea is to dry steamed tea naturally, and the tea ground into powder is called "matcha" (final tea). In Muromachi era, tea farmers in Guinea held tea tasting parties to classify tea, which developed into entertainment for many people to taste tea and developed primitive tea ceremony etiquette. For hundreds of years, Kyoto's Uji matcha has become synonymous with Japan's top-grade matcha.