While the visit was the best holiday in my entire life and I had the opposite of Paris syndrome the one thing I was particularly looking forward to was visiting Japanese tea rooms. But except for tourist traps and museums all the tea rooms I found were Western style tea rooms and English afternoon tea was all the range apparently.

Same thing happened when I moved to the UK and discovered that 99.9% of people drink tea bags most of which are terrible, they brew it with no care and then add half a cup of milk and heap of sugar into it.

And yet in both cases the mystique around tea, tea accessories and tea aesthetics remained. The actual tea part of it atrophied or maybe was never there to begin with, I don't know. Tea sets serve as decoration while they drink a mug of builders tea.