Story
KEKKAI — 結界 — is a Japanese word for a sacred boundary.
In old Shinto and Buddhist temples, a kekkai is a line drawn around what is worth protecting. Sometimes it is a rope. Sometimes a stone. Sometimes only a piece of paper hanging in a doorway.
What matters is not what the boundary is made of. It is that someone chose to draw it.
We named our brand KEKKAI because the world's matcha is not always honest. Culinary grade is being relabeled as ceremonial. Heavy metal test results are not shared. Regions are not disclosed.
We wanted to draw a boundary — around what a bowl of matcha should be.
What follows is what is inside that boundary. The tea. The people who make it. The tin that holds it.
Who Makes It
Our tea comes from Matsudacha in Yachiyo, Ibaraki, a tea maker working continuously since 1898. Matsuda Koichi, the fifth-generation head, runs it now.
They keep their own fields in Ibaraki. Our three teas do not come from them. Ours are tencha — the shaded, steamed leaf that becomes matcha — bought from growers in Kagoshima, Shizuoka and Miyazaki, then finished, milled and blended at Matsudacha.
We say this plainly because the alternative is to let you assume otherwise. Matsuda Koichi designs each blend and approves the final taste and colour before anything ships.
Blending is where the skill sits. A single field gives you one note. What you drink is a decision someone made about how those notes should sit together.
We tell you which regions ours come from. Most brands will not.
What "Grade" Actually Means
There is no grading system for matcha in Japan. No governing body, no standard, no definition. "Ceremonial grade" is a term that grew up outside Japan, and anyone may print it on anything.
We use it because it is the term people search for. It tells you nothing on its own. So here is what actually separates our three teas.
Shading. Tencha is grown under cover before harvest. Blocking the light raises the amino acids that read as umami and holds back the astringency. The longer the cover stays on, the more expensive the leaf.
Harvest. The first flush of spring carries the most concentrated flavour. Later pickings are brisker and cost a fraction as much.
| CEREMONIAL GRADE | First flush · shaded approx. 21 days |
| STANDARD | Second flush, June · shaded approx. 7 days |
| STARTER | Autumn · unshaded |
Twenty-one days of shade on a first flush is a genuine ceremonial specification. Seven days is not, and we do not claim it is. All three are machine-harvested, which is standard practice for tencha in Japan.
None of this makes one tea better than another. It makes them different, and suited to different things. A brisk unshaded tea holds its shape through milk where a delicate one disappears. What you paid for in a shaded tea is the first thing a latte covers.
Our organic teas are certified JAS No. 1617 through OMIC. What that means is not what most people think. It is not a health claim. It is a boundary — drawn around what did not go into the leaf. No synthetic pesticides, no synthetic fertilisers, verified annually by OMIC, an independent certifier.
Everything we offer — STARTER, STANDARD, and CEREMONIAL GRADE — is finished, milled and blended in Japan by Matsudacha.
The Tin
Our ceremonial grade comes in a tin made by hand.
The tin is made by Kato Seisakusho, a workshop in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, established in 1895. Three years older than Matsudacha. Asakusabashi is a district of small workshops and wholesalers — not the tourist quarter of Asakusa a few stops to the north. The workshop has made tea caddies there for over a hundred and thirty years. Things where the container matters as much as what's inside.
The elderly craftsman who used to make these tins has retired. Kato Shunji, the current president, now works on them alongside the others in the workshop. His wife — the vice president — told us this when we visited. She also told us that only two workshops in Japan still make the inner lid in tinplate. Kato Seisakusho is one of them.
A single sheet of tinplate, rolled into a cylinder, soldered, the lid formed on a press. Then sprayed and screen-printed by hand, one colour at a time. Held next to a machine-formed tin, the difference is small. It is only the difference between something someone tried at, and something someone did not.
The tin was made to endure. It was not made to be thrown away. When our ceremonial grade is empty, we sell the same tea in two 30 g pouches, so the tin can be kept.
If you would rather not have the tin at all, the refill is sold on its own. It is the same tea at the price of the tea. We would rather you drank it than paid for an object you did not want.
Independent Testing
Every lot of our tea is independently tested for heavy metals — lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and aluminum.
Samples are submitted through Eurofins Food Testing Japan in Yokohama, and the analysis is carried out at Eurofins WEJ Contaminants GmbH in Hamburg, Germany. We could have tested closer to home. Sending the samples to an accredited laboratory in a country with no commercial interest in Japanese tea seemed the more useful thing to do.
Aluminum is not required by regulation. Neither is arsenic, for tea. We test and publish both because complete disclosure is another boundary we chose to draw.
The most recent testing results are available on our independent testing page.
The Teas We Offer
STARTER — an unshaded autumn harvest from a single region, Chiran in Kagoshima. Brisk and grassy. Good as a latte, forgiving with milk, a fair place to begin.
STANDARD — our certified organic everyday blend from Kagoshima and Shizuoka. Second flush, lightly shaded. The one we reach for most often.
CEREMONIAL GRADE — first flush, shaded three weeks, from Kagoshima and Miyazaki, in the handcrafted tin. For usucha or koicha.
CEREMONIAL GRADE Refill — the same tea as the tin, in two 30 g pouches. For refilling a tin you already have, or for anyone who wants the tea without it. Available as a single purchase or on a subscription of your choosing.
Draw your Kekkai.