- Current
Nikkei View
- About
- Roots
- Nikkei
Links
- IMDiversity Job Bank
- More
about Gil:
Gil's Home Page
Resume
Fave Web Sites
1957 TimeLine
"Toy Book" Excerpt
Writing Samples
SUPPORT THE NIKKEI VIEW!
Amazon.com now offers a way for you to sponsor the Nikkei View column! Just click below for more information!
Search Amazon.com using keywords such as "Japan," "Japanese
American," "Tokyo," and others for books or videos.
I'm now an Amazon.com
Affiliate. I urge everyone to support their local independent businesses
first, but if you search Amazon.com from here, I earn a percentage of
your purchases. It's one way you can help underwrite the Nikkei View.
Thanks!
JOIN THE DISCUSSION!
"Ties Talk" is an e-mail discussion group through which people of all ages and backgrounds from all over the U.S. and the world can comment on the Japanese American and Asian Pacific American experience. You can get a sample of the types of discussion that go on in the Ties-Talk Archives.
To
subscribe to "Ties Talk" and join our community, send an e-mail
to majordomo@lists.apanet.org
with the following line in your message:
subscribe ties-talk
Once
you send in your subscription request, an automated e-mail message should
be returned from "majordomo" to your e-mail address asking you
to confirm your membership to the list. Once you send in the confirmation,
you'll be added to the list. The "Ties Talk" e-mail discussion
list is operated by the Japanese American
Network, or JA*Net.
Hope to see you in e-mails!
Connect to the Denver area's Asian community with AsiaXpress!
Radio the way it should be: DavidsWebcast
ARCHIVES
LATEST
COLUMN
2001 COLUMNS *
2000 COLUMNS
1999 COLUMNS * 1998 COLUMNS
20
March, 2001
THE
NEWEST MIRACLE DRINK:
THE ANCIENT GREEN TEA
Long before there was a Starbucks on every corner throughout the globe, long before it became hip to buy gourmet coffee beans then grind and brew it in gourmet coffee pots, long before coffee was flavored with various sweet oils to imitate the international flavor of everything from Irish Cream to French Vanilla by people who actually don't like the taste of coffee but want to appear hip anyway, there was tea.
| I grew up drinking or "o-cha" - the Japanese word for tea, which is the same in Chinese and related to the Indian word "chai" - not because it was a status symbol, but because it was part of my cultural heritage |
These days I still enjoy a good cup of coffee, but I rarely drink it. Instead, I've returned to my original hot drink.
Apparently I'm not the only one who has tired of coffee. The java fad may be fading. I recently read a news story that said that the popularity of coffee has peaked, and it made mention of the fact that tea bars are sprouting up all over the US to serve young hipsters who are looking for something new to call their own. The report even noted that Starbucks may be making a mistake by not aggressively adding a selection of teas to its menu.
Of course, tea is nothing new.
As someone of Asian heritage, I grew up drinking or "o-cha" - the Japanese word for tea, which is the same in Chinese and related to the Indian word "chai" - not because it was a status symbol, but because it was part of my cultural heritage. And the tea I most often drank was green tea.
I didn't drink tea all the time when I was young like my mother did, but the teapot and the aluminum cylinder of loose tea were always ready in the kitchen for whenever we had guests, and I always had it when we dined out.
I also grew up drinking western-style tea such as Lipton's in tea bags, and when I went off to college in the 1970s I began drinking other types of teas besides green tea: fragrant British types such as Constant Comment, Earl Grey and English breakfast, and a line of earthy, herbal blends by the Boulder, Colorado-based Celestial Seasonings tea company, with silly and exotic names such as Red Zinger, Morning Thunder and Sleepytime. I didn't drink much green tea, but I made all my tea in a beautiful plain white porcelain teapot with the requisite bent bamboo handle that I bought in a shop in Greenwich Village when I first arrived in New York City to go to school. That was how I stayed in touch with my roots.
For the past several years, I've returned mainly to green tea and variations of Japanese o-cha, including plain green tea, but also roasted green tea (hoji-cha) and green tea with tiny rice crackers (genmai cha). I also still drink some herbal blends from the supermarket, but tend to like the ones made with green tea, such as "green tea with kombucha super-oxidant" tea bags.
Recently, I learned that green tea is not only a part of my heritage, but it's important for health, even without blended ingredients such as kombucha, ginseng or other exotic additions.
Various medical and scientific studies credit green tea specifically with health benefits ranging from preventing hair loss and cancer, lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, slowing the effects of age and even fighting cavities. Oh yeah, green tea just plain makes you feel better, too, and it's good for you in more general ways because it's essentially steeping a vegetable. It may not take the place of eating vegetables, but it doesn't hurt if you don't ea a healthy diet.
Green tea is the type with these benefits because it's steamed dry after being harvested. All teas come from basically the same plant, but black teas (the type that's used in European blends and Lipton's) are fermented. Green tea is full of antioxidant polyphenols that help the body.
There are four primary polyphenols in green tea, collectively referred to as catechins. Clinical tests show that catechins destroy free radicals and have far reaching curative effects on the entire body. Catechins are powerful antioxidants that have been shown in numerous studies to fight viruses, slow aging, and have a beneficial effect on health. Although tea, like coffee, naturally has caffeine, it has much less than coffee does. Even various black teas have less caffeine than coffee, so it's also healthier in that regard than java.
That's all in modern parlance, but the benefits of tea were well-known to the ancient Chinese, who first cultivated tea. Those benefits spread to other Asian countries including Korea and Japan, thanks to Buddhist monks who traveled to China for study and returned to Japan bringing tea with them as a medicinal beverage. During the Kamakura era, a monk, Eisai, stressed the beneficial effects of tea in his book "Maintaining Health by Drinking Tea" (1211): "Tea is a miraculous medicine for the maintenance of health. Tea has an extraordinary power to prolong life. Anywhere a person cultivates tea, long life will follow. In ancient and modern times, tea is the elixir that creates the mountain-dwelling immortal."
So it's no surprise that tea is making such a strong comeback: It's simply healthier than coffee. At a time when the baby boomers, who make up the bulk of the world's population, are beginning to enter middle and become more concerned about their health (it's true, I'm trying to eat better and work out), the benefits of tea are very appealing. Of course, our parents have known all along about tea, and my mother drinks her tea with meals as she has all her life, and all my life growing up. Maybe that's why she's so healthy….
As for me, there's one thing that drinking lots of green tea hasn't helped. I'm still losing my hair.