Issue 09

Yellow tea is the rarest category most people have never encountered.

Issue 09 begins there — with the history and growing regions of a tea so uncommon it barely registers in the wider conversation — and uses it as a way in to the deeper question of what we overlook and why.

Craig Mod, writer and photographer, walked the length of Japan from Tokyo to wilderness. He tells us what that kind of slow travel does to attention, and what tea had to do with it.

We untangle fermentation from oxidation — two terms used interchangeably by people who should know better, and which are not the same thing.

In the Czech Republic, potters who have spent decades at their craft speak about technique, influence, and what it means for a ceramic tradition to carry cultural weight. In Onomichi, a small Japanese town, young people are returning to build something new from what remained.

Artist Morel Doucet on Haitian identity, ancestral tea, and how he thinks art should be seen. A senchadō ceremony. The Asian diaspora in New York, post-pandemic.