April 2026 | Tangents Tangents is engawa’s shorter-form series: one object, one idea, examined closely.
The distance between origin and cup.
Walk into any cafe in a big city right now and you’ll find matcha on the menu. Matcha latte. Matcha croissant. Matcha soft serve. The word is everywhere, and so is the color, that particular shade of green that photographs well and signals, vaguely, something Japanese, something ancient, something good for you.
Most of it is the Western version of matcha. The same way that what most studios teach is the Western version of yoga, which the spiritual framework quietly removed, the spandex quietly added.
Then there is Ooika. In New Jersey, of all places. The founder, Marc Falzon, is American. He lived in Kyoto in 2017, not as a tourist but as someone trying to understand something. He spent years building direct relationships with family farms in Uji, Yame, Hoshinomura. He imported Japanese stone mills. Ooika grinds in-house, daily. They hand you a spec sheet with every cup that reads like a wine label — farm, cultivar, harvest date, tasting notes. A bowl of usucha runs $12. I paid it without hesitation.
The bowl is rough to the touch. The green is almost violent. Nothing about it is accidental. This is what it looks like when someone cares enough to close the distance between origin and cup.
The Color That Ate a Culture
Here is what most people call matcha in America: a green powder, scooped from a tin that has been sitting on a shelf for three months, whisked into steamed oat milk, served in a paper cup with a plastic lid.
Starbucks sells a matcha latte that is mostly sugar. The green is there. The matcha, in any meaningful sense, is not. Every cafe that wants to seem like it takes things seriously has a version of this. The aesthetic is present. The knowledge of where it came from is not.
None of them will tell you the farm, the cultivar, the harvest date. The name of the person who grew it. Whether it was shade-grown for three weeks or four. Whether it was stone-milled or hammer-milled. Most matcha drinks are made from powder ground months ago, stored in bulk, poured by someone who has no idea where it came from. This information was never collected, because it was never considered relevant.
This is not a complaint about authenticity for its own sake. It is a structural observation about what happens when a practice gets absorbed into mainstream consumption. The friction, the specificity, the time, and the relationship between maker and material get removed in the name of scale. We did it with yoga. Stripped the philosophy, kept the poses, added a hundred-dollar polyester pant. We’re doing it with matcha. Kept the color, lost the cup.
Nobody is asking you to perform a tea ceremony. But knowing what was removed might change how you see what replaced it.
What Prada Knew and Didn’t Say
Last year, Prada debuted a sandal at Milan Fashion Week. Around $1,000. The design was nearly identical to the kolhapuri chappal — a handmade leather sandal with roots in 12th-century India, still made today by artisans in Kolhapur and Solapur, sold for around $12.
Prada offered no acknowledgment of the source. Not in the show notes. Not in the press materials. Not anywhere. The backlash was immediate. A public interest litigation was filed in the Bombay High Court. The artisans who make the authentic chappal, whose families have been making it for generations, who received a Geographical Indication tag from the Indian government in 2019, watched a luxury house present their work as a new design.
Prada eventually issued a statement. The sandal had been “inspired by Indian craft tradition.” The Kolhapuri origin was acknowledged directly.
The silence at launch was not ignorance. The design is not obscure. The kolhapuri chappal is one of the most recognized traditional crafts in India. The silence was a choice. Take the aesthetic, leave the context behind. The acknowledgment came only after the pressure arrived.
Compare this to what Falzon did before opening Ooika. He went to Kyoto. He built relationships with farmers whose names appear on every spec sheet. He learned not from a trend report but from the people who grow the tea. And Hiroki Nakamura, the founder of Visvim, a Japanese brand that spends years researching indigenous craft traditions before incorporating them into clothing, did the same in Finnish Lapland. He didn’t order the reindeer suede and move on. He went to see how the Sami people actually used it. The shoe he eventually made carries that trip inside it.
I think the difference between Prada and these two is not primarily one of intention or morality. It is one of distance. Prada looked at the kolhapuri chappal from far away and decided the distance didn’t matter. Falzon and Nakamura closed the distance before they made anything. Prada’s acknowledgment, issued after the fact, doesn’t close that distance. It just names it.
The Source of the Beautiful
Yanagi Soetsu, the philosopher behind the Mingei movement, argued that beauty is not a quality applied to an object. It emerges from the honest relationship between material, use, and the hands that made it.
A kolhapuri chappal made by an artisan in Kolhapur, whose family has been making them for generations — that object carries its beauty from the inside out. The beauty is not decorative. It is structural. It comes from the same place the object comes from.
A sandal that copies the form without that relationship is also beautiful. I want to be clear about that. But what got extracted in the process was not incidental. The connection to the hands that made the original. The knowledge of why each element exists. The twelve centuries of use that refined the form into what it is. These things were left behind deliberately, because they were inconvenient to the price point and irrelevant to the trend cycle.
The same logic hollowed out matcha. What got pulled out was the relationship with the farm, the name of the person who grew it, and the understanding that freshness is not a mere feature but the whole point. What remained was the color and a word that used to mean something.
This is not a complaint about cultural purity. Cultures have always borrowed from each other. The kolhapuri chappal itself evolved over twelve centuries of exchange. Drinking matcha originated in China and became something entirely new in Japan. Borrowing is not the problem.
The problem is borrowing without closing the distance. Taking the aesthetic and leaving the knowledge behind. Acknowledging the source only when the pressure arrives.
Ichigo ichie (一期一会). One time, one meeting. The understanding that this moment — this bowl, this cup, this object — will not happen again. It is not a philosophy that survives extraction. It has to be present in the making, or it isn’t there at all.
The matcha I drank at Ooika cost $12. The green was almost violent. I thought about the farm in Fukuoka, the stone mill, the spec sheet sitting next to the cup. I thought about the fact that the person who served it knew all of that, and that the knowing was not incidental to the drink.
It was the drink.
The distance between origin and cup is always there. What changes is whether anyone decided it was worth closing.
Further Reading & Resources
Ooika — Marc Falzon’s matcha cafe in New Jersey. Stone-milled, directly sourced, spec sheet with every cup. The standard for what this can look like.
Visvim — Hiroki Nakamura’s ongoing research into indigenous craft traditions, expressed through clothing. The empty suitcases are not a metaphor.
Mingei International Museum — The San Diego institution dedicated to the folk art traditions that Yanagi Soetsu spent his life documenting. Worth knowing before the next conversation about cultural borrowing.
engawa: What Visvim Understands That Silicon Valley Doesn’t — On closing the distance in a different context. Craft, fashion, and the responsibility of ownership.
engawa: Sashiko — The Ancient Stitch That Fashion Can’t Stop Borrowing — Where this conversation started. The $12 object and the $1,200 object, side by side.
FAQ
What is ichigo ichie? Ichigo ichie (一期一会) is a Japanese concept meaning “one time, one meeting.” It expresses the understanding that this particular encounter — this bowl, this moment, this person — will never happen again in exactly this way. It originates from the tea ceremony but applies far beyond it. It is a way of seeing what is actually in front of you, rather than what you expect or assume.
What is the kolhapuri chappal? The kolhapuri chappal is a handmade leather sandal with roots in 12th-century India, traditionally made by artisans in Kolhapur and Solapur. It received a Geographical Indication tag from the Indian government in 2019, recognizing its cultural and regional specificity. Authentic chappals are sold for around $12. Prada debuted a nearly identical design at Milan Fashion Week at around $1,000, without initial acknowledgment of the source.
What is mingei? Mingei (民藝) is a Japanese philosophy of folk craft developed by Yanagi Soetsu in the early 20th century. Its central argument is that beauty is not a quality imposed on an object but one that emerges from the honest relationship between material, use, and the hands that made it. Objects made by anonymous craftspeople for everyday use carry this beauty most reliably.
What does Ooika mean? Ooika (覆い香) means “the aroma of shade.” When tea plants are deeply shaded before harvest, the process suppresses the conversion of amino acids (theanine) into catechins, reducing bitterness and concentrating umami. The leaves develop a distinctive fragrance found only in exceptional quality matcha — the aroma of that shading, compressed into the plant. It is a word most matcha drinkers have never encountered, which is precisely the point.
Taishi Okano writes about the intersection of technology, craft, and culture from New York and Tokyo. engawa is where he works things out. This piece is part of Tangents — shorter takes on specific objects, brands, and cultural moments.