Last week, The Conversation published an article by USC librarian Rebecca Corbett examining how Westerners first reacted to matcha in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Corbett, who serves as Japanese studies librarian, is a noted expert on the history and practice of Japanese tea culture.
In an article titled “Green gruel? Pea soup? What Westerners thought of matcha when they tried it for the first time”, Corbett traces early Western encounters with the powdered green tea, drawing from accounts in newspapers and travel memoirs during Japan’s Meiji period. These sources she cites offer strikingly candid (and often unflattering) descriptions of matcha: bitter, thick, unpalatable—likened to “green gruel” or “pea soup.”
Corbett places these reactions within the broader history of chanoyu, the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, and the ways Japan presented its cultural identity abroad during an era of modernization and Western fascination. She also reflects on why matcha has become a global craze today, noting that few contemporary drinkers engage with the ceremony’s deeper traditions.
This marks the latest instance of Corbett offering historical insight into the global matcha phenomenon. In July, she was quoted by NBC News in a story about booming international demand for matcha and its traditional roots in Japanese tea culture.
Corbett recently completed a Japan Foundation fellowship at Waseda University and is the author of the 2018 book Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan, which explores the evolution of tea practice for women in Japan from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.