About the FETC Editorial Team

It started with a cup of milk tea — one we wanted to make a little better at home.

That small ambition turned into around two hundred combinations: different leaves sourced from around the world, different blends, different brew parameters. Somewhere in that process, we found benifuuki — a Japanese cultivar originally bred for black tea, grown in Kagoshima. The astringency fades. What returns is a faint floral sweetness, something close to white flowers, that lingers. It stayed with us.

In 2018, we opened a small milk tea stand in Tokyo. One tea. One approach. The stand eventually closed, and today we focus on our own online store. But the farms we visited while running that shop are the landscape that FETC grew out of.

What Far East Tea Company does

Far East Tea Company (FETC) is a small company working with Japanese tea and the culture around it. Based in Tokyo, we focus on single-origin teas — single farm, single cultivar — and sell through our online store and to a handful of restaurants and ryokan.

Our editorial team writes two blogs. fareastteaclub covers cultivars, processing methods, brewing, and ingredients — articles for readers who want to understand what is in the cup. Behind the Sip documents visits to tea farms: the words of the people who grow it, the sound of the machines, the first pour of the season, brewed with water from that particular place. Both are available in English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

Founder — Tai Hatakeyama

Tai Hatakeyama founded FETC in 2018. Born in 1993, he grew up in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Before starting the company, he worked on a team where most members were from outside Japan — a daily environment of English and other languages, with only a handful of Japanese colleagues. What that experience kept surfacing was a simple, uncomfortable fact: he did not know his own country very well. Looking at Japan from the outside, the accumulated time and craft in its food and craft became more visible, not less.

It was during that period that the milk tea experiments began, benifuuki entered the picture, and the stand opened. The shop brought him further into the world of tea. The online store carries that work forward.

More than one hundred fifty farms visited

Starting with that first cup of milk tea, Tai has visited more than one hundred fifty tea farms across Japan — from Niigata in the north to Kagoshima and Yakushima in the south. Tai has walked the fields, listened to the machines in the processing sheds, and been served the first infusion brewed with water drawn on site. The conversation tends to split about evenly between tea and the families and places around it.

When deciding which farms to work with, we apply one criterion. Does the person growing the tea genuinely like what they make? The grower who, after the day's work is done, brews their own tea in the house that looks out over the fields — that is the person whose tea we want to carry. That is the center of what we do.

How we write

Tea needs explanation. Just as wine has sommeliers, Japanese green tea asks for distinctions of its own — Sencha, Gyokuro, Kabusecha, Matcha — and each calls for a different approach to brewing. The same farm in a different year, with a different producer, can yield a completely different cup. We want to describe that difference through who grew it, where, and how — not through abstract praise.

For articles touching health, caffeine, pregnancy, and other areas that affect how readers live, we draw on primary sources: MHLW, MEXT, FDA, Cochrane, and others. We keep FETC's perspective clearly separate from established fact. For sensory writing, we rely on memory from fields we have actually walked through — forty farms, fifty farms — and try to be as concrete as the experience allows.

Languages

Articles are published in English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean. We review each language for naturalness, rather than leaving it to machine translation. Japanese tea should not be limited to Japanese readers. That belief is why we maintain all four languages.

Featured in

External coverage of FETC founder Tai Hatakeyama and the company.

Contact

For questions about the editorial team, please reply to our newsletter or use the contact form at the bottom of the site. Correction requests, inquiries about farm visit coverage, and questions about translation or citation all come through the same channels.

Far East Tea Company
Tokyo, Japan