Japan Boycotted Apartheid and Bought the Rooibos Anyway

Rooibos arrived in Japan in the early 1980s, and Japan is now the largest importer of rooibos in the world. Between those two facts sits a contradiction the tea walked directly into.

By the early 1980s, Japan had spent a decade formally refusing entry to South African visitors over apartheid, while a much older, separate arrangement still let Japanese visitors move through South Africa itself with nearly the same standing as whites. The red bush did not find a way around that arrangement. It came in through the middle of it.

The rule written for the businessmen

The term "honorary white" first reached print in the Johannesburg newspaper The Star on 8 February 1962. Days before that, on 3 February, the Afrikaans paper Die Burger ran a cartoon mocking Pretoria's own city council for debating whether Japanese visitors could share the same swimming pools as whites, the joke being that the councillors were simply practicing the country's real national sport of arguing about colour. Historians of the episode trace the underlying policy to the same period: Japanese visitors, regarded as "temporary visitors from the far east" who posed no threat to the apartheid system while being commercially valuable, were routinely allowed into white-designated spaces even while officially classified as non-white.

The reasoning behind that arrangement was commercial. Japan's government and companies were already buying heavily from South Africa (cars, electronic goods, and minerals such as platinum among them), and by the mid-1980s Japan had become the apartheid state's largest trading partner of all. Access mattered to a relationship that size. The visiting businessmen who kept that trade moving were the ones the swimming-pool rule, and the classification behind it, existed for.

The other side of the same relationship read differently, a decade later. On 5 June 1974, Japan's government announced that South Africans would no longer be granted visas to enter Japan, closing off the sporting, cultural, and educational exchange between the two countries. The government's own stated reasoning was blunt: Japan depended heavily on trade with the rest of the world and could not risk the negative international attention its ties to the apartheid state were starting to draw. So two things were true of the relationship for years afterward. Japanese visitors to South Africa still moved through the country as "honorary whites," a rule built for trade in the first place and never withdrawn. South African visitors to Japan, after 1974, could not get in the door at all. The distance was managed carefully, and it ran in only one direction.

Rooibos enters

Rooibos reached Japan into exactly this. The Japanese learned about the tea in the early 1980s, and the interest was sparked by two things: visits from two South Africans, James van Putten and Annekie Theron, and the plant's reputation as a source of antioxidants. Theron is already met on this site as the Pretoria mother whose 1968 experience with a colicky infant helped build rooibos's health reputation, so there is no need to retell that story here.

Theron described what the visits produced. "The Japanese were impressed with the evidence from my experiments with infants, as set out in my book," she said. "They immediately arranged for funds to become available for research into the benefits of rooibos herbal tea. In good time, they verified the presence of the high-content of antioxidants in rooibos herbal tea."

The promise of a Japanese market did something the South African industry had not done for itself: it triggered the first dedicated scientific research into rooibos's health benefits, with Japanese and South African scientists investigating the plant's anti-ageing potential. Elizabeth Joubert, a Stellenbosch researcher, worked with the Rooibos Board to ensure that as many polyphenols as possible survived in the tea exported to Japan. The industry's worry was a different one. As van Putten put it, "We need to demonstrate to the Oriental tea drinker that rooibos is a 'tea'," and not, he feared, something dismissed as "just a herbal drink."

Taste Tea, and the trade the boycott did not stop

The early importer was Sammy Kakefu, based in Kobe, among the first overseas buyers to travel to South Africa and meet the industry in person, at a time his own government would not have let a South African travel the other way. For a time he was the only importer in Japan. He branded his rooibos "Taste Tea" and told his compatriots to "beauty up with Taste Tea," and he aimed to be buying up to a thousand tonnes a year (about 1,100 US tons) by the mid-1990s.

By Boris Gorelik's account, in his history of rooibos, Japan's sanctions blocked the direct importation of South African commodities. It did not stop this particular trade. Japanese buyers kept shipping in larger quantities of rooibos regardless, and distributors were bringing in about 400 tonnes of rooibos a year (about 440 US tons) before Japan's government lifted its broader sanctions package. That was short of Kakefu's target, but it was real, and it was growing.

The trade also turned rough. Gorelik's account holds that some distributors fell out with one another and allegedly harassed buyers who would not deal with them, and that there was talk of a yakuza connection. Rooibos became something of a pariah in Japanese business circles by that account, and major companies kept their distance from it for a time. This is reported in the source as allegation, not as settled fact, and it belongs on the record as that.

The paperwork catches up

On 22 October 1991, Japan's government announced that it would immediately scrap its bans on direct investment, on air links, on the import of South African steel and iron, and its voluntary restraint on selling South African gold coins, the Krugerrands. One restriction stayed in place: the ban on exporting Japanese computers and technology for use by South Africa's security agencies. The government's stated reasoning was that it welcomed continued progress toward a nonracial democracy in South Africa and judged that restoring growth to the country's economy would help its welfare. The African National Congress publicly regretted the decision, rejecting Japan's judgment that the reform process was irreversible and warning that the policy would prove "disastrous in the long term."

The tea trade had not waited for any of it. The 400 tonnes a year had been arriving while those very bans were still formally in force.

What the consumer never saw

In the late 1990s, Clinton Gass set up Rooibos Ltd's Japanese subsidiary. By then the earlier unruly distributor era had left a mark. Major Japanese beverage companies, among them Suntory and Coca-Cola, believed in rooibos but would not touch it commercially, because its reputation in the business community had been tainted. The damage, importantly, had stayed at that level. As Gass put it, "it didn't reach the consumer level. The Japanese had a favourable impression of rooibos, because the idea that it was good for you had been hammered home by the distributors." In time, the major beverage manufacturers did take part in the rooibos business after all.

The consumer's favourable impression is the part that lasted. More than 2,000 tonnes of rooibos (about 2,200 US tons) were shipped to Japan in 2018, the largest single consignment since the tea's introduction in the 1980s, and the volumes kept climbing after that. In 2021, Japan overtook Germany to become the world's single largest rooibos-importing country for the first time since the 1960s, a title Germany had held since before the plant ever reached Japan. Japan is now rooibos's single biggest buyer.

The tea that reached Japanese shelves in the early 1980s did not travel through the trade relationship's official channel, and it did not travel around it. It travelled through the same contradiction the whole relationship was built on: a formal door closed to South African visitors in Japan, and a formal exception open to Japanese visitors in South Africa, the two of them standing at the same time for years. Between 1962 and 1991 and 2021, a great deal changed. That particular door never closed.

Sources

1. "Learnings from Anti-Apartheid: Akira Nakajima", Anti-Apartheid Legacy Centre, on the 8 February 1962 first print use of "honorary white" in The Star, the 3 February 1962 Die Burger cartoon on the swimming-pool debate, and Japan's position as apartheid South Africa's largest trading partner by the mid-1980s.
2. The Japanese government announces that South Africans will no longer be granted visas to enter Japan, South African History Online, on the 5 June 1974 visa ban and its stated trade-driven rationale.
3. Rooibos Importers: Japan, Klipopmekaar, an extract of Boris Gorelik's "The Story of Rooibos" (South African Rooibos Council), on the early-1980s introduction to Japan via James van Putten and Annekie Theron, Elizabeth Joubert's polyphenol research, Sammy Kakefu and the "Taste Tea" brand, the sanctions-era import figures, and Clinton Gass and Rooibos Ltd's Japanese subsidiary.
4. Japan Lifts South Africa Sanctions, Christian Science Monitor, 22 October 1991, on the specific sanctions Japan's government lifted and the ANC's response.