Tea Wars and a Place to Sleep
How my son’s name on a map led me to Shizuoka’s battle for the American teacup, and back to longevity
How can a century-old battle over tea teach us about longevity—and about remaining curious enough to change our minds?
I went to Shizuoka because the longevity data pointed me there. The prefecture has remarkable examples of people staying healthy and independent well into later life, and wherever I traveled, one thing was hard to miss: tea.
I expected eventually to visit a tea farm and ask questions about green tea and health. Instead, while looking on a map for somewhere to park my tiny camper van for the night, I noticed a familiar name: MacKenzie, spelled exactly like my son’s.
That accidental discovery led me to Duncan McKenzie, an important figure in Shizuoka’s tea-export history, and from there into a remarkable century-old struggle between Japanese green tea and British imperial black tea for the American market.
But the trail didn’t end with commerce. It led to a pioneering Japanese woman scientist, Michiyo Tsujimura, who began asking a different question: What is actually inside green tea?
And that eventually brought me right back to the longevity question that had taken me to Shizuoka in the first place.
At 71, I am still not much of a tea drinker. But there is considerably more green tea in my little camper van than there was a week ago.
Sometimes curiosity changes more than what we know. It changes what we do.
I tell the full story in my latest Defying the Red Zone article:
