Picking Up Where We Left Off
In the last couple articles, we traced the chasen back to its origins: a tool born from a single stalk of bamboo, shaped by hands that took a decade to master the craft, used with quiet intention in the tea ceremony, and honored with a memorial ritual when its working life comes to an end.
We also noted that this same tool has now traveled far beyond the tea rooms of Japan. It appears on café counters around the world, and for many in the tea community, that is something they genuinely hoped to see.
But hoping for something and being ready for it are two different things.
This article draws on the observations of our members around the world. What they have witnessed firsthand raises questions that go beyond culture and aesthetics. Some of them are simply about safety.
A Safety Problem First
Before we talk about cultural respect, there is something more immediate to address. What is happening in some cafés around the world is not just a question of tradition or etiquette. It is, in some cases, a question of hygiene and basic food safety. This insight is based on our member, Jules Reyes, a longtime matcha enthusiast and our member who has spent years visiting matcha cafés abroad.
Left soaking in water
One of the most commonly observed practices is leaving the chasen submerged in water between orders. The water is often visibly clouded with matcha residue and left sitting for extended periods. Bamboo is a natural, porous material. Prolonged exposure to moisture creates conditions where mold and bacteria can develop. This is not a gray area. It is a hygiene concern.
Cross-contamination
When a chasen is used to whisk drinks containing milk, syrups, or other additives, and then used again for the next order without adequate cleaning, the risk of cross-contamination is real. Bamboo cannot be sanitized with chemical agents, and it is not suitable for commercial dishwashers. For customers with dairy allergies or other dietary sensitivities, this is an invisible risk that most would have no way of knowing about.
Washed in a dishwasher
Some have observed cafés cleaning their chasen in commercial dishwashers. The intention may be good. The result is not. High heat and strong water pressure degrade bamboo quickly, warping and breaking the delicate tines. A chasen that has been through a dishwasher is not just damaged. It may be unsafe to use.
Broken tines in the drink
Perhaps the most alarming observation: when a chasen is pressed too hard against the bottom of the bowl, the tines can snap. One of our members has personally been served a drink with a broken tine in it. No serious harm was done, but that outcome was not guaranteed. For a first-time matcha drinker, an experience like that could be genuinely off-putting, or worse.
These are not abstract concerns. Good intentions do not prevent harm when the knowledge is not there.
How the Chasen Is Being Used
Alongside the safety issues, there is a separate layer of concern around how the chasen itself is being treated as a tool.
A fundamental misunderstanding
As we touched on in the first article, the chasen is not, strictly speaking, a whisk in the Western sense. Its purpose is to disperse matcha evenly through water, not to whip air into a liquid. When it is treated as a standard frother, the technique changes entirely. More force, more speed, more pressure against the bowl. The result is a tool being used in a way it was never designed for, by someone who may not realize there is any other way.
The electric whisk attachment
A chasen attached to the end of an electric hand mixer has become something of a practical solution in busy café settings. It reduces wrist strain, speeds up the process, and for high-volume environments, the appeal is easy to understand. And yet, for many Japanese people and tea practitioners, watching it spin at mechanical speed inside a tea bowl produces a reaction that is difficult to explain but hard to ignore. It is not necessarily wrong. It is just jarring. A tool that was designed to move with the quiet intention of a human hand, now rotating at speed. Something about it does not sit quite right – even when the matcha in the cup turns out perfectly fine.
The Matcha-related business incident
In 2025, a video posted by an American matcha startup went viral, and not in the way the company intended. In the video, the founder made the case for his product by calling traditional matcha tools unnecessary clutter and sweeping a chasen and tea bowl off a table with his arm.
The backlash was immediate and global. A tool that tea practitioners handle with quiet reverence had been called garbage, on camera, in a marketing video. The founder later posted an apology, but his announcement that the product would continue drew further criticism.
What this incident revealed was not simply one company’s misstep. It exposed how much tension had already been building around the chasen and its place in the global matcha boom. That video was the moment the pressure became visible.
Voices from Japanese people
How do tea practitioners and Japanese people feel about all of this? Looking at what has been shared on social media, the dominant tone is not outrage. It is something quieter and harder to name. A kind of discomfort. A low-level sadness.
Some of the voices that have resonated:
“I wish people would not do things halfway. This is a culture I hold sacred. Having it imitated loosely, with mistakes being spread in the process, and used as a way to make money – that does not sit right with me.” (A Japanese tea practitioner)
“I was once served a matcha latte that had been made by attaching a chasen to an electric whisk. I was not bothered by the taste. I was bothered by the method. Maybe the thinking is that as long as it mixes, it is fine. But I could not get past it. It is not about the price of the chasen. It is the feeling of seeing something traditional treated carelessly.” (A Japanese woman who visited Hawaii.)
“A café that handles its tools with care, that shows respect through the way it works, feels good to be in. A café that imitates the form without the substance feels uncomfortable, even if you cannot quite explain why.” (A non-tea practitioner)
“I understand that people want to convey a sense of Japan. But the utensils are not just about appearance. The way you handle them, the spirit behind that handling – that is also part of the culture. I think people are probably just unaware. But if you are going to share a culture, please take the time to understand it and treat it with care.” (A Japanese tea practitioner)
A note on perspective
It is worth acknowledging something honestly: how a chasen is used in cafés around the world is, ultimately, nobody’s legal concern. Most Japanese people living in Japan are not the target customer of an overseas matcha café, and in that sense, what happens there does not directly affect them.
In fact, some younger Japanese people studying or living abroad have come across a chasen in a café and felt something closer to wonder than discomfort. Having grown up without ever whisking matcha themselves, seeing it handled – however imperfectly – in a foreign city can feel surprisingly moving.
And yet. The way a tool is used can still cause unease in those who know its history, even from a distance. That is not a reason to feel guilty about ordering a matcha latte. But it is worth knowing that the chasen carries meaning for some people – and that meaning does not disappear just because it has crossed a border.
Is This Cultural Appropriation? Or Something Else?
It would be easy to label all of this as cultural appropriation and move on. But the reality is more layered, and at least two distinct problems are sitting on top of each other here.
The first is a safety and hygiene problem. This exists independently of cultural respect. A café can have the deepest admiration for Japanese tea culture and still cause harm through a lack of practical knowledge about how bamboo behaves in a commercial kitchen environment. Good intentions do not sterilize a chasen.
The second is a question of cultural honesty: what does it mean to use a tool whose history and context you do not fully know? This is where things get genuinely complicated, because there is no clean answer.
We often hear the phrase: “as long as there is respect, it is fine.” But what does respect actually look like? How much is enough? Who decides? These are not questions anyone can answer with a number or a checklist. A person who has studied tea ceremony for ten years and a person who learned about matcha last week may both feel they are approaching the chasen with sincerity. They are not wrong to feel that way. But their relationship to the tool is not the same.
There is also a quiet irony worth naming. In Japan, many people who have never studied the tea ceremony feel hesitant to whisk matcha at home. The sense that it is a formal, technical practice that one should not attempt it without proper training has contributed to a gradual decline in tea ceremony participation within Japan itself. Meanwhile, people abroad have picked up the chasen with little of that hesitation, and in doing so, helped drive a global matcha boom that has paradoxically revived demand for the very craft Japan was struggling to sustain.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It is both, and neither, and it depends on who you ask. What it is, above all, is complicated.
So What Should Cafés Actually Do?
This is not an article that ends with a verdict. There is no universal standard for how a chasen should be used outside of Japan, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably oversimplifying.
But there are some ways of thinking about it that might help.
One useful frame is to match the tool to the context. A café built around the tea ceremony, serving a small number of carefully prepared bowls, has a very different relationship to the chasen than a high-volume coffee shop that added a matcha latte to its menu last spring. These are not the same situation, and they probably should not involve the same tools or the same level of preparation.
For tea-focused spaces serving matcha in small quantities, using a chasen makes sense – but it comes with responsibilities. Learning how to handle it correctly, understanding its material limitations, managing hygiene in a way that suits the tool rather than forcing the tool to suit a system it was not designed for. And ideally, being able to explain to a curious customer why the chasen is there and what it means.
For high-volume matcha cafés, silicone whisks, electric chasen, or automated matcha machines are not a compromise. They are an honest response to real conditions. Using them is not a betrayal of matcha culture. It is an acknowledgment that different contexts call for different tools, and that the culture is bigger than any single utensil.
For coffee shops with matcha on the menu, it may be worth asking whether the chasen needs to be there at all. Serving a well-made matcha latte with the right equipment, without the chasen, is more honest than using the chasen as a visual gesture toward a tradition the café has not engaged with in any meaningful way.
None of this is a rule. It is a starting point for thinking.
If there is one question worth sitting with, it is this: not whether you use a chasen, but whether you could explain why you use it, and how, and what it is. The ability to answer that question – or at least to take it seriously – might be the closest thing to a useful standard we have.
The Line That Protects Both
Matcha lattes and the Japanese tea ceremony are not the same thing. That distinction is not a judgment. It is just true.
Drawing that line clearly is not about protecting one and dismissing the other. A beautifully made matcha latte is its own thing, worth enjoying on its own terms. The tea ceremony is a lifelong practice, worth pursuing on its own terms. They share an ingredient and a tool. That does not make them the same experience, and it does not mean they need to be treated identically.
There is one more thing worth acknowledging. The chasen you see on most café counters around the world is probably not a handcrafted Takayama whisk. It is more likely a mass-produced version, made in China or Korea, bought in bulk, and treated accordingly. At a few dollars each, it is easy to see them as fully disposable – and in purely practical terms, they are.
But here is the question that lingers: if the tool is stripped of its origin, its craft, and its cost, what remains of its cultural meaning? Is it still a chasen in any meaningful sense, or has it become something else entirely – a shape that gestures toward a tradition without carrying any of it?
There is no clean answer. But it is worth knowing the difference.
What happens next depends on the people who use them.
The next time you see a chasen on a café counter, you do not need to feel troubled by its presence. But perhaps take a moment to notice how it is being kept. Whether it looks cared for. Whether the person using it seems to know what they are holding.
You do not need an answer. Just the question is enough.
