Good Taste? Bad Taste? Children’s Orientation Towards the Taste of Tea

In this paper, we will focus on the ways in which children manage to evaluate the taste of green-tea. Traditionally, there is an established way of judging the quality of tea leaves: appearance, color, smell, and the taste and such a ritual was practiced everyday even at home in Japan. As the tea bags and pet-bottles have been more common, these days, children have little experience with teapots and tea leaves. Does this change in lifestyle mean that they no longer have a way to evaluate the taste tea?

By using conversation analysis as a methodology, we will explore how the children orient themselves to the taste of tea and how they perceive what is tasty and what is not tasty. We analyze the discussions among sixth-grade elementary school children who are exchanging ideas in small groups about the tea after tasting four kinds of tea. Although they do not drink tea brewed with tea leaves daily, they reveal that they are capable of making judgement on teas in their own ways and define each taste. As they reach the consensus of which tea is the best, they showed their orientation to the good taste by something non-bitter, familiar, and associated with their own experiences and memories.

People involved in the tea business are facing the issue of decline of tea industry and they often visit schools to pass on the tea culture to the younger generations. In such a setting, they tend to teach the “correct” way of judging the tea according to the traditions. We argue that paying attention to the children’s own ways of tasting and appreciating the tea, which are not necessarily the same with the adults, might give us a new perspective to understand the way to incorporate them into the tea education activities.