Tsuen Tea

Tsuen Tea dates to 1160, when its founder — a retainer who had left service to build a hermitage at the eastern end of Uji Bridge — began offering tea to travelers crossing it. That makes Tsuen, by its own and outside accounts, Japan's oldest continuously operating teashop: the 13th-oldest company in Japan and the 30th-oldest in the world, still run by the same family now in its 24th generation.

The shop's location was never incidental. For more than 860 years Tsuen has sat at the foot of Uji Bridge, one of the oldest bridges in Japan, serving simultaneously as a teahouse and as an informal guardian watching over travelers who crossed it — a role woven into local memory alongside its tea. The current building dates to 1672, over 350 years old in its own right, a fraction of the shop's full history but still a genuinely old structure by any standard.

Today Tsuen sells matcha, gyokuro, sencha, hojicha, and genmaicha, including organic-certified leaves, alongside soba and confections that pair with them. Eight and a half centuries of continuous operation on one site is a claim almost no retail business anywhere can make, let alone verify against a bridge that's still standing.