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Aidan Tan

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Article text courtesy of nytimes.com: Shortages, Smoothies and Fraud: The Matcha Market Cracks Under Pressure

 

Over four centuries, Japan built a tradition of drinking matcha that was based on four principles: wa, kei, sei and jaku, or harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity.

It took just a few years for a worldwide matcha craze to upend those values and replace them with disharmony, disrespect, impurity and fraud.

Highly respected Japanese firms are at war with scores of vendors who resell their matcha far above the normal retail price on Amazon, Facebook Marketplace and other sites. Others are hawking the tea trade’s equivalent of $45 Chanel bags, counterfeit packages filled with third-rate product, or with ordinary tea ground to a dull yellow dust.