Beyond the Tea Room: Taku Okamoto on Reimagining Japanese Tea Ceremony
What remains of tea ceremony when you remove the tatami room, the kimono—or even the matcha itself? Through OBORO, Taku Okamoto is exploring how the principles of Japanese tea culture can travel beyond tradition, across Europe and into contemporary life.
Taku Okamoto grew up surrounded by tea. His mother teaches tea ceremony, and tea, ceramics and craft were simply part of the environment of his childhood. Yet, perhaps precisely because it was so familiar, he initially had little interest in it.
It took moving thousands of kilometres away from Japan for him to look at his own culture differently. Around a decade ago, while studying in Basel, Switzerland, a bowl of tea he prepared in a classroom became his turning point.
For Taku, the encounter raised a question that would eventually become central to his work: how can something deeply embedded in one culture communicate with people who have almost no cultural reference for it?
After studying in Switzerland, Taku moved to Hong Kong and built a career in design strategy, service design and UX.
Tea, however, gradually became more than a parallel interest. Today, through OBORO, he uses his design background to reconsider what a contemporary tea ceremony can be.
Not necessarily by recreating Japan.
Sometimes, by doing precisely the opposite.
1. You grew up with tea, but it was actually in Switzerland that you became interested in it. What changed?
My mother teaches tea ceremony, so I grew up in a house where tea was always present—not only matcha, but everything around it: hanging scrolls, flowers, craft objects, antiques. And Kanazawa, where I grew up, is a city with many contemporary craft artists, so I was naturally exposed to their work as well.
But I wasn't interested in tea.
When I was studying in Switzerland, it was difficult sometimes. I was a foreigner; I didn't speak Swiss German, and I was usually a coffee drinker. One day I went to make coffee and found I had run out of beans. But I had matcha. My mother sold Kanazawa crafts in a department store, including matcha sets, and she had given me one when I left for Switzerland.
So I started making tea in class.
Suddenly, people became curious. This was around ten years ago, when matcha was beginning to become known internationally, but many people had never actually seen tea being prepared this way.
What interested me wasn't only that they were curious about the procedure. A pause opened up in the room, and everyone watched until I had finished making the tea.
There wasn't much that connected me culturally with the Swiss people around me, but somehow they could watch this and respect it.
That made me interested in my own culture and in how something from one culture can be communicated to people from a completely different one.
2. What was the direct trigger for starting OBORO?
Something personal happened.
On 1 January 2024, when the Noto Peninsula earthquake struck, I was near Keta Shrine in Ishikawa Prefecture. After the magnitude 7.6 tremor, I evacuated to a nearby factory and waited for a possible tsunami.
When I found myself thinking about death, and about what I wished I had done more of, tea came to mind.
Lorela: Was that question also behind the creation of OBORO?
Yes. When I started OBORO, three things were happening in society.
One was the matcha boom.
Matcha is interesting because its image outside Japan is very different from its traditional image in Japan. In Japan, matcha is something of a grandmother's drink. In Europe or cities like Bangkok, young people drink it as a latte.
Just as I was starting OBORO, the price of tencha at the Uji market had almost doubled from the previous year, and everyone was talking about it. There was demand for matcha. But what people talked about was the colour and the health benefits—matcha as a beverage. Almost no one talked about its spirit.
Meanwhile, the number of tea ceremony practitioners in Japan is decreasing.
So we have this strange situation where matcha is becoming incredibly popular while tea ceremony itself is declining.
The second was the demand for tea ceremony experiences.
Before OBORO, I worked at a tea ceremony experience business.
Guests watched a demonstration, then whisked and drank their own matcha. Most tea experiences in Kyoto follow this format. What stayed with me was watching a senior colleague teach guests the etiquette in Japanese, word for word: "Please say 'osakini'." Guests were asked to repeat words they didn't understand. There was a sense that preserving the form had become the purpose in itself.
I felt there should be another way to communicate it.
The last was AI. GPT-4 had just been released. I thought my work as a consultant would begin to shrink. At the same time, work in which people face each other would remain. Tea, I thought, was one of those.
4. How do you see the conventional tea experiences?
I think the tea experiences in Kyoto are complete in their own way. It isn't that something is missing.
But I do feel they have become a consumer-centred culture.
People want to see matcha being prepared. They want to whisk it themselves. They want to wear a kimono. There is demand for these symbolic actions, and people pay for them. It is a rational system, and that is why every experience ends up looking similar.
Whatever is missing is filled in with information. Rikyū, wa-kei-sei-jaku, and so on. The distance between the world the tea ceremony came from and the world we live in now is large, so explanation becomes necessary.
Tea ceremony is intimidating even for Japanese people. Who is the first guest, and when are you allowed to speak? If you don't know the rules, you become nervous.
At the same time, when I asked myself what makes tea tea for me, I realised it wasn't necessarily whisking matcha. So what is it?
When you first learn tea, you keep thinking: why do we do this? Why do we hold back from talking? Why this particular procedure? Why the silk cloth?
Before any shared understanding forms, you are placed inside these question marks.
Surrounded, for a long time, by things you don't understand.
It is inconvenient, too. The tea takes time to arrive, and not everything is explained.
But it is deliberately left unexplained. And when you sit inside that not-knowing, something begins to surface.
That, I think, is the difference from today's tea experiences. What interests me is not the form, but that spiritual part.
5. So how do you make the tea ceremony more accessible without losing what makes it a tea ceremony?
Tea ceremony has kept changing its form for more than four hundred years. In every era, I think, it has tried to stay close to the people receiving it.
In the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, it was a lavish affair centred on Chinese utensils.
In the turbulent Sengoku era, rulers used tea as a tool of diplomacy, while Jukō, Jōō and Rikyū refined the tea of wabi.
In the Edo period, it was formalised as education and etiquette for the samurai class.
From Meiji onwards, it passed from the pastime of industrialists to the accomplishment of women, and then to the general public.
And today it is being received by visitors from abroad as an entry point into Japanese culture.
When I think about tea for those people, what matters to me is finding another way to communicate the principles.
If someone doesn't know words like Rikyū or wa-kei-sei-jaku, how can they still experience the idea?
How do you translate it into the language of the people encountering tea now—visitors from overseas, for instance?
If the closest thing they have to tea is prayer, meditation or mindfulness, then you use words close to those. If their itinerary is packed with activities, you deliberately set aside time when nothing happens. If tea can change its form and enter their awareness, I think they can be brought to the threshold.
6. Japanese tea in Europe is frequently associated with Zen, mindfulness, minimalism and wabi-sabi. Are we romanticising Japanese tea culture?
I think it is very easy to name these concepts.
People say, "this is wabi-sabi," or they talk about Japandi style. But wabi itself is extremely difficult to understand. I've practised tea ceremony for around nine years, and I still find it difficult.
Actually, the moment you try to completely define or understand these ideas, their outline almost disappears. They are ambiguous.
For me, understanding them is a kind of training.
What gets left out of Japandi-style interiors is the chill, the loneliness, the sense of something lacking. Only the comfortable part is cut out and circulated.
The cold of a tea room in winter. Practice that never goes the way you want. A feeling you still can't grasp after years. Romanticising, perhaps, is the work of erasing that discomfort.
That is why I want to keep the discomfort rather than remove it. At OBORO, we deliberately leave the darkness of the long, narrow townhouse—what is called an "eel's bed"—as it is. The cold, the not-knowing: I want to hand these over as part of tea.
Lorela: At the same time, Europe seems to be influencing the way Japan now consumes matcha.
Yes, and I find that very interesting.
The contemporary matcha-latte culture—the fashionable shop, the plastic cup with a green drink, the cute branding—is partly something that Japan is importing back from Europe and the global market.
There are more of these concepts appearing in Tokyo and Kyoto now because matcha has become a global trend. Japan has had a complicated relationship with European influence historically. From the Meiji period onwards, Japan deliberately adopted many European systems and ideas. Even today, there can be this feeling that new ideas are arriving from Europe.
And now something similar is happening with matcha.
Matcha has existed in Japan for hundreds of years. The principles we now describe internationally as "mindfulness" have also been embedded in tea for centuries. Yet sometimes these concepts travel abroad, are reinterpreted, and then return to Japan in another form.
I find that circulation fascinating.
8. Europe is also approaching matcha more like speciality coffee. Could that change Japanese tea culture?
I think it is already beginning to. In Japan, matcha is something precious, given its name by the Grand Master of a tea school. In Europe, it is something transparent, whose grower and cultivar people want to know. Matcha is moving closer to the latter. Behind that is the influence of coffee culture.
With coffee, consumers started asking where it came from, how it was processed and what makes one coffee different from another. There are baristas, certifications and increasingly specialised knowledge.
A tea may have a name given by the Grand Master, for example. You know that name when you drink it, but you may not know whether the tea came from Kagoshima or Shizuoka, which cultivar was used, or even exactly who produced it.
That information isn't the purpose of the gathering. A tea gathering is a time for facing the bowl in front of you and the people sharing the room, so complicated information is deliberately removed.
But today's consumers increasingly want transparency: Where was it grown? Which cultivar? Is it organic? Who produced it?
That perspective is also influencing Japan. Even when I go to Uji, I want to understand the cultivar and production.
So the relationship is moving in both directions.
9. Your background is in service design. How does that influence the way you approach tea?
A lot. Service design looks at a service from the side of the person using it, not the side of the provider.
A tea gathering is the same. I came to design it not as "a place where I perform temae" but as "how a guest spends two hours." From the entrance, to taking a seat, to the first bowl: I observe that flow every time and change it a little for the next gathering. When I held a second gathering in the same place, I realised this repetition was the most interesting part.
But tea is not an extension of service design. If anything, it sits on the opposite side.
When I worked as a consultant, everything was about doing more, faster. When generative AI arrived, I watched many of the things we had considered professional skills become automated.
Tea asks for the opposite. The busier you are, the more it asks you not to be busy.
To keep a designer's eye while facing what cannot be designed. Both of those, together, are how I approach tea now.
Lorela: That makes OBORO sound less like an attempt to modernise Japanese tea and more like an experiment with its underlying principles.
Exactly.
I'm not trying to represent Japanese culture, and I'm not particularly interested in reproducing stereotypes of Japanese culture.
I am interested in how fluid the spirit of tea ceremony can be and how those principles might influence everyday life.
That means questioning, one by one, the things a tea gathering takes for granted.
Can we create a tea ceremony without a traditional tea room?
Could we even create a tea ceremony without matcha?
OBORO itself is an example. It isn't built like a traditional tea room. The long, narrow townhouse is divided into three, and guests meditate in one of those rooms. I describe it as a metaphor for the roji.
Traditionally, the roji is the path that takes you from the everyday world towards the tea room. As you move through it, you gradually detach yourself from where you were before entering a different space.
I am interested in using that concept without necessarily reproducing what a traditional roji looks like.
Lorela: you have already applied that thinking outside Japanese tea.
Yes. I had an opportunity in Bolzano, Italy, where hotels are very competitive and often develop experience programmes for their guests—yoga, wellness and so on.
Herbal tea is important in that region, and one hotel was thinking about how it could be served differently. So I used the principles of tea ceremony to design an experience for serving herbal tea to the hotel's guests.
At its most basic, the tea ceremony has a simple progression: you take your place, purify the utensils, make tea, purify again and leave. Using that structure, I designed a flow that tells the story of the local herbs and draws guests' attention to the aroma and the taste.
For me, that makes sense.
It isn't about using my nationality or putting Japanese stereotypes around the experience.
The question is: can the principles of tea ceremony create value somewhere completely different? That's what I want to explore.
10. Can creating tea experiences like this become a sustainable profession?
If we're talking specifically about running tea ceremony experiences as a scalable business, I don't think it is easy.
Kyoto is one of the few places where the tourism volume makes this possible, but even there competition is increasing enormously. Price competition has already started.
There is also a human-resources problem. Learning tea ceremony properly requires a lot of time. Finding practitioners who can deliver these experiences isn't easy.
And most visitors to Kyoto are one-time customers. That creates another problem: you cannot necessarily take someone from beginner to intermediate and build a long-term relationship with them. Most customers want a fundamental introduction to the tea ceremony, often at an accessible price.
OBORO is intentionally more niche. A niche can create more value, but it also makes the market smaller.
So I don't know whether this exact model is scalable.
But if you look past the tea experience to the spirit of tea—the why—things look different.
Tea doesn't necessarily have to take the form of a tea gathering or a tea experience. If you go back to the principles that make tea what it is, it might become a form of learning or help another industry. That is why, outside the frame of tourism, I think a business could still grow.
The Bolzano project is one example. We started from the client's problem and asked what tea could offer there.
Perhaps the opportunity isn't to scale the tea ceremony itself, but to scale the thinking behind it.
11. Matcha itself is becoming a huge business. What do you think will happen to quality as the market expands?
I think the market could increasingly split into two sides. At one end, top-grade matcha from Uji and prestigious producers. At the other, inexpensive matcha as production expands outside Japan, particularly in China.
The middle could become more difficult.
We are also seeing more matcha brands built around branding. Beautiful packaging and a strong logo come first, and in some cases it becomes hard to see what the matcha inside actually is.
But defining "good matcha" is also complicated.
Matcha doesn't necessarily have the enormous range of flavour profiles you might find across Chinese teas, for example. With high-end matcha, eventually there is a ceiling to how much more umami you can create.
So differentiation increasingly comes from somewhere else: Who made it? Which cultivar is it? Why is it special? What is the story behind it?
Quality isn't only a question of whether something tastes "better."
It also depends on what you want to do with it. The highest-grade matcha designed for koicha, with enormous umami, isn't necessarily what I would choose for a matcha latte.
The purpose matters.
Lorela: Ceramics and space also seem fundamental to the experiences you create.
Very much. The tea ceremony looks minimalist, but in reality it is very materialistic. Behind a simple, ordered tea room there are many bowls and objects stored away, and for one particular moment you choose the ones that belong to that occasion.
There is no fixed rule. I choose according to how the season, the guests and the space come together.
Raku and Hagi, which have been used in tea for centuries, carry the feel of the craft when you hold them, and they are beautiful in a dim tea room. At other times I bring in contemporary artists' work, or something unexpected.
Within that combination, space is probably the most important element. It doesn't need to be a Japanese room. What matters is the atmosphere the space creates and how it makes people feel.
And the same combination never happens twice. The season, the people, the objects, the space—all of them change. So there is no perfect tea gathering.
That imperfection is also something I like.
12. So where would you ultimately like OBORO to go?
My ambition is not necessarily to build a traditional tea house.
I want to continue asking how the fundamental concepts of tea ceremony can create new opportunities.
How can we transmit the spirit of tea without leaning on an obvious "Japaneseness"?
How can the idea of tea be put to use in places beyond the tea room?
How can ritual influence everyday life?
My background is still design. I think about these questions as design questions. Tea offers a different kind of design thinking, because it can deliberately move in the opposite direction from contemporary life.
That's what I want OBORO to explore.
Not simply what a tea ceremony looks like, but what it can do.
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