The nation’s actual tea-harvesting season begins a little earlier, starting with the southern tea fields of Kyushu and ending in June in northern regions. In any case, May and June are the time when shincha (new harvest green tea) is available and at its peak. Shincha is also called ichibancha, which means “first tea”; subsequent harvests are called nibancha (second tea), sanbancha (third tea) and so on.

Shincha is eagerly anticipated by tea lovers since it is the mildest, most flavorful tea of the year. (Another reason it may be so highly prized is because Japanese people love the “new harvest” or “first catch” of so many things, from rice to wine to fish.)

Since it’s made only with tender new tea leaves that have not been exposed to sunshine for long periods, shincha is low in catechins and caffeine, which means it has less bitter and tannic qualities. Shincha is also higher in an amino acid called theanine than later-harvest teas, so it has more umami and a subtle sweetness.

There are small differences between shincha from different regions, too. I find that the shincha grown in Kagoshima in Kyushu, for example, tends to bit a little sweeter than the shincha from Shizuoka Prefecture, which has a clean, fresh green flavor. Some people swear that the shincha from Uji in the Kyoto area is the best, but there are great tea producers in many parts of the country. It’s a lot of fun to compare and contrast shincha from various areas from year to year.

To maximize the subtle flavors inherent in shincha, it’s worthwhile taking some extra care when brewing it. The most important element is the water, which must be combined with the tea at the right temperature — it should be around 70 to 80 degrees Celsius. This brings out the umami and sweetness of the tea, not to mention that very hot water causes more catechins to be released from the tea leaves, which produces a bitter flavor.

Boil the water, then cool it down by pouring it into the tea cups first. Put two teaspoons of tea leaves per serving into the kyūsu (teapot), then add the slightly cooled (but still hot) water from the tea cups. Swirl the pot a couple of times to bring out the full flavor of the tea, then pour. A little tea leaf sediment in each cup is fine.

You can of course enjoy some refined store-bought wagashi (traditional sweets) with your tea, but one of my favorite tea accompaniments is karintō, an old-fashioned, down-to-earth sweet, popular since the Edo Period (1603-1868), that my grandmother used to make for us whenever we visited her.

You can buy karintō ready-made almost anywhere, but it’s easy to make at home. The key is to fry the dough slowly at a low temperature until each piece is crispy all the way through. I like to mix dark brown and white sugar for the coating syrup, but you can try it with just dark brown sugar if you want a more assertive flavor.

 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has not shown any intention to drop its mantra that all options, including a military strike, are on the table.

But a statement released by the U.S. administration on Wednesday after an extraordinary classified briefing on North Korea for the entire Senate made no specific reference to military options.

It instead highlighted that Trump’s approach aims “to pressure North Korea into dismantling its nuclear, ballistic missile and proliferation programs by tightening economic sanctions and pursuing diplomatic measures with our allies and regional partners.”

A major focus is how the new U.S. administration will deal with North Korea from now on, and whether there will be even a slight adjustment to its approach after tensions have escalated to a level described by Pyongyang as close to “the brink of war.”

The U.S. statement said the additional pressure to be put on North Korea will be aimed at persuading Kim Jong Un’s regime “to de-escalate and return to the path of dialogue.”

A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity said, “We have timelines in mind for what we would like to see change, but it’s mainly event-driven.”

“It depends on the actions of North Korea. It depends on the actions of others whose help we’re looking for in resolving this problem and moving toward the goal of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the official said.

Not all North Korea watchers had expected there would be another nuclear test around the 105th anniversary of its late state founder’s birth on April 15 or the 85th anniversary of its armed forces on Tuesday.

Bong Young-shik, a research fellow at Yonsei University’s Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul, was one such voice, saying it was “too risky for Pyongyang to clearly cross the red line.”

In the face of direct U.S. military threats, it is perhaps no wonder that North Korea has opted out of a banned nuclear explosion or a new type of ballistic missile launch.

Putting its military might on display, the United States ordered the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and three other warships in April to steam toward the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula.

The action was initiated between a U.S. cruise missile strike against Syria and the dropping of its most powerful nonnuclear bomb on Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan.

“The world witnessed the strength and resolve of our new president in actions taken in Syria and Afghanistan,” U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said in a speech in mid-April in South Korea. “North Korea would do well not to test his resolve.”

For its own part, North Korea too has signaled that it remains open to negotiations.

A flurry of statements issued through the country’s official media following the dispatch of the U.S. Navy battle group and the two military strikes in April have maintained a bellicose tone.

But if read closely, most of them hinge on a warning that North Korea will inevitably resort to military means if attacked or if its sovereignty is threatened.

Some experts on the North Korea issue have noted the country’s move to re-establish the Diplomatic Commission of the Supreme People’s Assembly, which was announced three days before the 105th birth anniversary of national founder Kim Il Sung.

The committee is headed by Ri Su Yong, a vice chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, who is the top official in charge of overseeing foreign affairs. Other members include Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s first vice foreign minister and its point man on nuclear issues, and Ri Son Gwon, head of its state-level agency dealing with inter-Korean affairs.

The revival of the panel, endorsed during this year’s parliamentary session, is seen by the experts as a possible sign of North Korea’s preparedness for a new diplomatic offensive against South Korea and the United States.

North Korea is well aware that South Korea will elect a new president on May 9, which could lead to a dramatic foreign policy shift.

The election is heavily tilted toward candidates from liberal parties in the wake of the corruption and abuse-of-power scandal that ousted conservative President Park Geun-hye, who had been very tough on Pyongyang.

Though the race is tight, Moon Jae-in, the front-runner in polls who is from the left-leaning Democratic Party of Korea, has expressed his willingness to seek early talks with North Korea.

Bong of Yonsei University said he expects “the Trump administration will hold a military option for a while in order to have Beijing move first in taking putative actions.”

Through its official media, China has hinted at the possibility of cutting off its oil supply to North Korea if it conducts another nuclear test in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Gasoline prices have risen sharply in Pyongyang over the past week, according to locals, though it is unclear if the change is connected with pressure from China.

In exchange for refraining from the test, Bong said, “North Korea may want to bargain with Beijing and Washington that all related parties must agree on opening a multilateral dialogue.”

 

“It’s impossible. There is no way we can run away from it,” said Seijiro Kurosawa, a 58-year-old taxi driver in Fussa, near Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. “We don’t have bunkers, shelters or anything like that.”

His company recently instructed drivers to park their cabs and take immediate refuge in the event of an attack, but he isn’t sure where he could go.

“All we can do is run into a department store perhaps,” he said.

A possible missile strike and what to do about it have dominated TV talk shows and other media in Japan in recent weeks as regional tensions have spiked, with the North Korean regime continuing to test-fire rockets and U.S. President Donald Trump sending an aircraft carrier to nearby waters in a show of force.

North Korea has yet to meet its goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach the U.S. mainland, but analysts believe its current arsenal is capable of striking the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed across Japan. The government raised caution levels in March after Pyongyang said four ballistic missiles that landed a few hundred kilometers off Japan’s coast were meant to simulate a nuclear strike on U.S. bases here.

While Japanese tabloids and television programs have reported on nuclear shelters ordered by a handful of rich people or touted gas masks as a more affordable option, it’s largely business as usual in Fussa, a town of 58,000 people.

“Whatever will be, will be,” said 34-year-old Jumpei Takemiya, who runs a shoe repair shop across from Yokota Air Base. “Just think calmly about it. Is Yokota really going to be the first one to be hit? I doubt it, and frankly I’m not so nervous,” he said.

Looking out his shop window, he added: “As you can see, there is no heightened security or any other unusual development around here.”

For 75-year-old Yoshio Takagi, the talk of North Korean missiles brings back memories of World War II, when he had to temporarily relocate to a rural village to avoid American bombs falling in and around Tokyo that killed his two older brothers. He remains opposed to the use of weapons, but is also realistic about current circumstances.

“Tension has escalated and the situation has become more unpredictable under Trump,” he said. “But Japan relies on the U.S. military and there is a base here. I think we just have to accept the consequences.”

Visits to a government crisis management website surged into the millions in April from a previous record of tens of thousands in March, as the government tweeted and put out fresh instructions for what to do in the event of a missile attack.

The instructions are simple: If you are outdoors, take refuge in strong buildings or underground shopping arcades and if no such facilities are nearby, drop to the ground and cover your head. A chemical weapon is possible, so the instructions advise covering your nose and mouth with a cloth and shutting doors and windows.

A first-ever missile attack drill was held in March in Akita Prefecture, and the government recently instructed all 47 prefectures to draw up plans quickly for similar drills. So far, only two others — Yamagata and Nagasaki, home to Sasebo naval base — have started to make concrete plans for drills in the coming months.

“We need to plan carefully in order to raise awareness, not to scare off the public,” said Keiko Nakajima, a Tokyo crisis response official.

Some think the risk is overblown.

North Korea is “mostly bluffing its military capability, and the missile scare is further hyped up largely by TV,” said Hiroki Fujii, a 40-year-old utility employee who lives near Yokota.

Akinori Otani worries more about a U.S. military plane crashing in the area. At bases nationwide, residents have raised concern about the safety of the tilt-rotor MV-22 Osprey aircraft.

“Ospreys are actually flying around,” said Otani, a 42-year-old resident of Hamura, another town near Yokota. “I’m more concerned about them than a missile that I think is unlikely to hit us.”

In Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, home to a U.S. Marine Corps air base, residents began asking about attack response plans after the area was mentioned on TV among possible targets, said Yuji Yamaguchi, an emergency response official there.

He questioned whether it is possible to predict a missile’s course and issue an alert before it reaches Japan and said that without such information, drawing up an evacuation scenario would be difficult.

It is believed that it would take about 10 minutes for a North Korean missile to reach Japan, yet when the four missiles landed off the coast in March, it wasn’t until 20 minutes after that the government notified local fishermen.

For Reiko Naya, who runs a gift shop just outside the Yokota base, she is concerned that the tension may be used by the government as a justification to bolster Japan’s military capabilities.

“Japan has renounced war, but it seems we are gradually getting embroiled into a conflict,” she said. “We thought North Korean missiles would never reach Japan, but after all these tests, they now seem routine. Eventually, one of them might come flying.”

 

In a report by the 38 North website, images of the Punggye-ri nuclear test facility taken April 25 showed that the pumping of water from the site’s north portal — where the North has apparently been preparing to conduct an atomic test — had been restarted “to maintain an optimal environment for instrumentation and stemming.”

Removing the water from the tunnel is presumably done to keep it dry for monitoring or communications equipment.

The analysis by the website, a project of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, also highlighted the large number of personnel present at various locations throughout the site, which it said was “unusual” and likely part of a propaganda push by the North amid widespread media speculation over the country’s nuclear program.

“The presence of a large number of people dispersed throughout the facility in the latest image … is unusual and almost assuredly a component of an overall North Korean deception and propaganda effort,” 38 North said Tuesday.

Personnel at several areas at the test site appeared to be engaging in a game of volleyball, a popular sport in North Korea.

An analysis last month of the site had similarly spotted groups playing volleyball.

That had left analysts wondering whether the North Koreans were engaging in an act of deception, since they are thought to know when commercial satellites that take such images fly overhead.

On Monday, Pyongyang said it would carry out a nuclear test “at any time and at any location” set by its leadership.

However, the website cautioned that predicting if a nuclear test was forthcoming remained a guessing game.

“Based on satellite imagery alone, it is unclear if this activity indicates that a nuclear test has been cancelled, the facility is in stand-by mode or that a test is imminent,” it said.

A sixth nuclear test by the North would come amid a flurry of activity by the nuclear-armed country as it seeks to master the technology needed to mount an atomic weapon on a long-range ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States.

 

“If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it,” Trump said Monday in an Oval Office interview. “If it’s under the, again, under the right circumstances. But I would do that.”

The U.S. has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, and as recently as last week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. would negotiate with Kim’s regime only if it made credible steps toward giving up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

“Most political people would never say that,” Trump said of his willingness to meet with the reclusive Kim, “but I’m telling you under the right circumstances I would meet with him. We have breaking news.”

Asked later about Trump’s comments, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that “clearly conditions are not there right now” for a meeting. He said “we’ve got to see their provocative behavior ratcheted down.”

North Korea has become the most urgent national security threat and foreign policy issue facing Trump as his first 100 days in office passed. Kim’s regime has continued developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in defiance of international condemnation and sanctions. Military analysts have said North Korea is on course to develop a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile that could reach the U.S. mainland as soon as 2020, during Trump’s term in office.

On Tuesday, South Korea said a U.S. missile shield deployed in the country against China’s objections is now technically ready for operations. South Korea’s Defense Ministry had said previously it expected the system to be fully operational by the end of the year.

The news came the same day as the North accused the United States of pushing the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war after a pair of U.S. B-1B Lancer strategic bombers flew training drills with the South Korean and Japanese militaries in another show of strength.

South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun told a briefing in Seoul that Monday’s joint drill was conducted to deter provocations by the North and to test readiness against another potential nuclear test.

The U.S. Air Force said in a statement the bombers had flown from Guam to conduct training exercises with the South Korean and Japanese militaries.

North Korea said the bombers conducted “a nuclear bomb-dropping drill against major objects” in its territory at a time when Trump and “other U.S. warmongers are crying out for making a preemptive nuclear strike” on the North.

“The reckless military provocation is pushing the situation on the Korean Peninsula closer to the brink of nuclear war,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday.

Trump warned in a separate interview Thursday that a “major, major conflict” with North Korea was possible, while China said last week the situation on the Korean Peninsula could escalate or slip out of control.

In a show of force, the United States has already sent an aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Carl Vinson, to the Sea of Japan to conduct drills with South Korea and Japan.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn called for stronger vigilance because of continuing provocations by Seoul’s poor and isolated neighbor, and for countries such as China to increase pressure on the North.

“I am asking foreign and security ministries to further strengthen military readiness in order for North Korea not to miscalculate,” Hwang told a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.

Experts said that a Kim-Trump summit would be difficult to imagine at this point.

Even if the conditions were right, from the U.S. perspective, a meeting would be unlikely. Kim has not met any major world leader since taking charge after his father’s death in late 2011 and hasn’t left his isolated country. His nuclear program gives him prestige at home. And leaving North Korea, even for a short period, could expose him to the risk of a coup by opponents in the military or Pyongyang’s elite, analysts say.

“They won’t meet anytime in the near future,” said historian Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, when asked about a potential meeting ahead of the Trump interview. “Negotiations are not going to work because North Korea is never going to denuclearize.”

Kim’s predecessors weren’t much more accessible or cooperative. Over more than two decades, six-nation talks, bilateral negotiations, food aid and U.N. sanctions have all failed to deter the Kim dynasty’s quest for a nuclear arsenal. That has left the Trump administration relying increasingly on China, North Korea’s neighbor and top trading partner, to exert pressure on the regime.

While Trump didn’t spell out what conditions would have to be met for him to sit down with Kim, Evans Revere, a former U.S. diplomat in South Korea, said “it’s almost impossible to imagine North Korea meeting the conditions that would allow such a meeting to occur.”

“North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty when it was caught cheating, violated every one of the denuclearization commitments it made, and now threatens the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons,” Revere, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, said in an email. “That’s hardly the basis for a presidential meeting with Kim Jong Un.”

Tensions have escalated since Trump vowed in January that he wouldn’t let North Korea develop a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the U.S., and North Korea has labeled American military moves in the region as acts of “intimidation and blackmail.”

North Korea has continued to test missiles this year after carrying out two nuclear tests last year.

While dispatching an aircraft carrier group and a submarine to the region, the Trump administration has emphasized the use of economic sanctions and diplomacy to persuade North Korea to curtail its nuclear program. Trump has said he’s encouraged by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s efforts to defuse the situation. Trump and Xi met last month at the U.S. president’s private club in Florida and have talked several times since.

In an editorial late Monday, China’s Global Times, a state-backed tabloid that does not necessarily reflect national policy, said the United States should not rely on China alone to pressure Pyongyang into giving up its nuclear ambitions.

April could prove a “turning point,” the paper said, but “Washington … must also continue to exert its own efforts on the issue.”

But Trump’s statement that he would be “honored” to meet Kim — as well as his description of the young North Korean leader over the weekend as “a pretty smart cookie” — have sparked fresh concern over his approach to dealing with Pyongyang.

“I don’t see much coherence in the Trump administration’s statements,” said Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If there is to be any hope of getting Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table to discuss denuclearization, the U.S. has to articulate a clear position.”

John Sifton, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said Trump had established a troubling pattern of paying compliments to foreign leaders with shaky human rights or autocratic reputations. “

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see that he admires leaders who ignore the rule of law,” he said.

 

On Monday, those conciliatory words from the mouth of U.S. President Donald Trump included some extraordinary ones about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, long an object of American scorn and suspicion.

There were these words from Trump: “Obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.”

And, even more so, there were these: “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him,” Trump told Bloomberg News, “I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it.”

Wow, says an astonished world: What if?

In the annals of diplomatic history, such a tete-a-tete, unlikely as it is, would tumble into a category that offers few possible comparisons.

There are the ones that never happened — Roosevelt sitting down with Hitler during World War II, George Bush (whichever one) facing Saddam Hussein while in office. And there are those that did: Kennedy meeting Khrushchev in Vienna, Nixon arriving in Beijing at the dawn of the U.S.-China thaw and immediately heading to a meeting with Mao.

Even those, however, were before many things we take for granted today — perhaps most notably the internet, live television and the instantaneous social-media pipelines that Trump knows and uses so fluidly.

The notion of a substantive sit-down between two of the most gazed-upon figures of this moment in the planet’s history is a staggering prospect — and a potential logistical nightmare if the two countries ever tried to make it happen.

Presuming that such a trial balloon is to be taken seriously, what, in fact, would it take to pull off? The loose contours of it could play out as follows:

The venue

Possible locations could include the DMZ, which would be about as cinematic a piece of drama as human geopolitics could offer up, with a room featuring negotiation tables that sit halfway in the North and halfway in the South.

The benefit of this location would be the presence of existing security. It’s already the nucleus of one of the most tense patches of the planet, and it’s effectively already wired for such an event. Somewhere in China would be a possible, though highly unlikely, location as well.

But could it be elsewhere? Perhaps famously neutral Switzerland, where the now-infrequent world traveler Kim Jong Un almost certainly spent part of his upbringing attending school? Could it possibly even be the White House, where Trump has already caused uproars by hosting the president of Egypt and by calling the president of Turkey, both perceived in the West as hardly the most robust upholders of American values. That would be highly controversial and even more unlikely — just getting Kim a visa would be an interesting proposition — but stranger things have happened.

Or perhaps, gaming it out, things might take place in an unexpected or even unknown place. In 1989, George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met on a ship off Malta to discuss the changes taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and it propelled the tiny Mediterranean island into notoriety for several years. Malta was itself a follow-up in some ways to the fabled Yalta conference, in which Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Crimea in early 1945 to plot out Europe’s postwar configurations.

The United States has been the site of such sensitive meetings, too, with Camp David being the most notable locale for its Carter-administration peace talks between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. The history of such things is lengthy; in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt helped broker peace between the warring nations of Japan and Russia in the unlikely locale of a small New England town. More recently, the unlikely venue of Dayton, Ohio, became the site in 1995 of peace accords to end the Bosnian war. But those were other nations in conflict, not the United States itself.

And what about Pyongyang? There would be precedent for that — from U.S. envoys like Madeleine Albright to a previous Japanese prime minister to faded basketball star Dennis Rodman — and the Kims are not known for their love of foreign travel, which carries them away from turf and situations they can completely control.

Whatever the case, barring it taking place at the DMZ, such a high-stakes, high-security Trump-Kim meeting would change a place for a long time, if not forever.

The topics

Nuclear disarmament — North Korea’s — would be first on the table. You’d think. But with two such unpredictable rulers, no one could be absolutely certain.

Given Trump’s style so far, time might be given to developing some sort of rapport between the two men before any negotiations began. But major topics would surely emerge before too long.

Among them: Aid to the North, which has played the brinkmanship game many times before with an eye toward getting assistance for its poor, sometimes hungry populace. Relations with the South. And weapons tests — missile and in particular nuclear, which make the United States and China, not to mention the South, very uncomfortable.

The reaction

The wild cards here would be South Korea, Russia, and, of course, China — the North’s patron for many decades and, of late, its increasingly wary and irritated neighbor.

In South Korea’s case, such a meeting would be an existential event. Most agree that Kim’s arsenal has enough accuracy and firepower to devastate the South, and so a meeting between the United States, South Korea’s military protector, and the North would have serious security implications for Seoul even if virtually nothing of substance was discussed.

China is wary of any U.S. involvement in its sphere of influence, and is already at odds with Washington about territorial claims in the South China Sea, while the perennial issue of Taiwan’s autonomy always lurks in the background. Beijing has courted South Korea in recent years more than before, with Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting Seoul in 2014 in what was seen as a hint to the North. (Recent Chinese trepidations over THAAD, the U.S.-made missile system being set up in South Korea, have restored some of the tension with Beijing.)

Against this backdrop, any Trump-Kim sit-down would, using conventional wisdom, have to involve China and the pressure it can exert on the North — something the Trump White House has always said was necessary. But protocol does not always seem to be the order of the day, as Trump’s unexpected, pre-inauguration call to Taiwan’s new president underscored.

Finally, Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, would watch from afar with great wariness and probable dismay. Such a meeting could alter Moscow’s relationships with both Beijing and Washington, and probably Pyongyang as well.

Oh, and let’s not forget the media reaction. Obviously any such meeting would be the visual of the year for news organizations. Setting it up as a media event would draw hundreds if not thousands of news outlets. That would mean a major infrastructure setup that’s on par with a summit meeting of leaders or an Olympics.

The allure

Whatever the political implications, this much is certain: Any meeting with Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, anywhere in the world, would be — if it ever actually happened — one of the most dramatic events of the 21st century thus far.

It would encompass three major global narratives at once: The United States under Donald Trump, and what his administration means; the Kim family and the unique, mercurial way they have ruled North Korea and projected themselves to the world; and the regional security and defense of East Asia, one of the most strategically pivotal regions in the world.

It would be big. It would be loud. It would be momentous, somewhat surreal and entirely unexpected. All things quite familiar to the worlds of two singular, bound-to-change-the-world men named Kim Jong Un and Donald J. Trump.

Then again, you might not want to hold your breath. This came in Tuesday afternoon from the official news agency for North Korea, which goes by the formal name Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: “The Trump administration that newly took office in the U.S. is provoking the DPRK with no reason, not knowing what rival it stands against.”