SNA (Tainan) — Japan gave Taiwan manga, anime, and KTV. Taiwan is now returning the favor with bubble milk tea.

Across Tokyo and other Japanese cities, small shops have sprung up selling Taiwan’s most famous drink: milk tea with chewy balls that are good for expanding waistlines.

Bubble tea, also known as tapioca tea, pearl tea, and boba, is one of the few examples of a Taiwanese craze hitting Japan. Sucked through a giant straw, it is usually a black tea drunk hot or cold with a sugary syrup and tapioca – a starch extracted from the cassava plant. The tapioca balls are the “pearls” and their texture is nicknamed “QQ,” which sounds like the Taiwanese word for “chewy.” QQ has evolved to take on the meaning of both soft and slightly resistant to the bite – with deliciousness implied. Add powdered milk or fresh milk and you get bubble milk tea, which has become a booming product in Japan.

Young Japanese are turning away from coffee, and bubble tea’s popularity has grown thanks to its Instagram-friendly colorful mixtures, fresh fruit, and big boba balls. In the past two years, a host of tea brands have opened, with reported wait times of up to six hours.

Waits are nothing like that in the home of the bubble milk tea. Drinking the concoction has become a habit for many younger Taiwanese, who can get their fix from specialty bubble tea to-go shops on practically every street.

“Taiwanese really love to drink tea, but each generation’s way of drinking tea is different,” said Huang Cheng-hsian, manager of Hanlin Tea Room, one of the two teahouses that claim to have invented bubble tea in the 1980s.

Traditionally, Taiwanese have followed a lengthy process of brewing tea with hot water at home, a tea ceremony which came from mainland China, he said. “But nowadays young people don’t have so much time to slowly brew tea at home.”

Hanlin Tea Room started in Tainan, a city known for its food. Founder Tu Tsung-ho claims to have used top quality Taiwanese tea leaves to invent the first cold tea drink. The company says he experimented with selling cold drinks over the counter and later added the tapioca balls, used in Taiwanese desserts, to create bubble milk tea in 1986. He nicknamed the original white tapioca balls “pearls” because of their semi-translucent color.

“We added it not just to milk tea, but also to black tea, green tea, but we discovered that milk tea was the most popular,” said Huang.

Today, they sell bubble milk tea with the original white balls, as well as the bigger, more common black variety, which are made with brown sugar. Their Panda Bubble Black Milk Tea has both black and white pearls, and sells for NT$65 NTD (¥238) for a big cup and NT$80 (¥293) for an especially big cup. It is NT$10 (¥37) extra for fresh milk.

Huang said Hanlin uses top-quality tea leaves, and sweet potato powder in their pearls. “Our producer makes it according to our recipe, and they can’t give it to anyone else,” he says. “We tell our customers it’s best to drink it within thirty minutes, because if you let the pure pearls sit in fresh milk for a long time, they will expand and become soft, they will lose some of its flexibility, they won’t be so QQ.”

Hanlin Tea Room has more than seventy stores in Taiwan, and has expanded overseas to Los Angeles, mainland China’s Sichuan and Chongqing provinces, and Hong Kong.

“We always wanted to go into Japan, but haven’t found a very good opportunity yet,” said Huang.

The other claimant to the title of Bubble Tea Inventor, Chun Shui Tang started 150 kilometers away in the city of Taichung. Its story goes that in the early 1980s, founder Liu Han-chieh was inspired to serve tea cold after visiting Japan and discovering iced coffee. Then one day in 1987, one of Liu’s managers, Lin Hsiu-hui, brought to work her favorite dessert, a sweetened tapioca syrup pudding. For fun while sitting in a staff meeting, she mixed it with iced milk tea and black lemon tea, shared it with colleagues and a new product was born.

Chun Shui Tang and Hanlin Tea Room have sparred in court over the years regarding their claims. A ruling last year said that as bubble tea is not patented and anyone can make it, it wasn’t necessary to debate who created it.

Today, the two chains are joined by many other brands, and new variations of bubble tea. It can be made with green, oolong, earl gray or fruit tea, as well as taro, mango, lychee, passionfruit and other fresh fruits. Optional additions include brown sugar, cheese and a crème brulee-style pudding. Customers choose how much sugar or sweetener and ice to add. Originally shaken by hand, now machines do the shaking.

More recently, the pearls have found their way on to pizza toppings (boba pizza), and into sandwiches, ice cream, cocktails, and face masks.

In Japan, tapioca milk tea has been around since 2008. Chun Shui Tang opened its first store there in 2013, and now has fifteen stores across the country and big ambitions to change the drinking habits of Japanese.

Together with other Taiwanese bubble tea brands, like Kaohsiung-based Gong Cha, Chun Shui Tang has appealed to Japanese consumers with customized drinks. This month, Sakura Berry Bubble Milk Tea appeared in its stores, and its takeout-only chain TP Tea promoted a Sakura Latte Ice Cream with optional pearls.

Chun Shui Tang said that while the bubble tea craze was mostly among young Japanese, they were now looking to attract an older market as well.

“This craze for bubble milk tea in Japan is only the start,” Chun Shui Tang said in an email, adding that their main goal is to challenge coffee’s market dominance. “We want to give Japanese people more opportunities to get to know tea, and then accept tea, become fond of tea, and finally change their ideas about drinking tea, so they no longer see it simply as a readily available convenience store drink, and more like a delicate drink that is worth savoring like coffee,” the chain said.

The recent boom in bubble milk tea from 2018 onwards is down to a few factors, according to Tatsunori Kuniyoshi, a research analyst at Euromonitor International, a market research provider.

Japanese consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with sweet drinks, like Starbucks’ Frappuccino, and there is a growing awareness of Taiwanese tea culture, as Taiwan has become a key tourist destination for Japanese, he said.

Tea stands have low running costs and can be opened without a big investment, he added. “Long term, we would expect a decline as consumers are consistently seeking new experiences, and the heated race of new players entering the market seems to be a bit of a “Bubble Economy,” said Kuniyoshi. “But there is a large chance those brands providing high quality tea and growing loyal consumers will survive in Japan, making bubble tea a standard dessert drink in Japan.”

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews