Region · in Japan
Fukuoka
Fukuoka means Yame, and Yame means gyokuro. The prefecture grows a small share of Japan's tea and the largest share of its gyokuro, and it has taken the producing-region prize in the national tea competition's gyokuro section for more than twenty years running, to the point where the result stopped being news. It is also where Japan's protected traditional-shading standard lives.
What grows here
Sencha is the bulk of what Yame actually makes, as it is nearly everywhere in Japan. What Yame is known for is what sits above it: gyokuro, of which Fukuoka produces more than any other prefecture, plus tencha for matcha and kabusecha, concentrated in the mountain districts in the south. Hoshino is the premium name inside Yame, with Ukiha nearby. Yame is one of the three classic gyokuro origins, alongside Uji and Shizuoka's Asahina valley, and the one whose reputation has risen most in recent decades.
The ground
The Yame hills and the Yabe river valley give small, steep plots with heavy river fog, cool nights and a wide day-to-night swing, which is the standard recipe for aromatic Japanese tea and also the reason mechanisation never took over here. The plots are too small and too awkward for the flat-field logic of Kagoshima, and that constraint is what preserved the labour-intensive methods the region now sells on.
The bushes
Yabukita is the backbone here as everywhere, but the prefecture's recommended list runs well past it, to Saemidori, Okumidori, Yamakai, Okuyutaka and Kanayamidori, chosen for how they behave under weeks of cover rather than for yield. Fukuoka's own research station trialled Saemidori specifically for gyokuro and rated its made quality above Yabukita's, and Okumidori is valued for gyokuro here in a way it is not elsewhere. A serious Yame gyokuro will usually name its cultivar, which is worth expecting, since in a category where the shading and the picking are doing most of the work, the cultivar is one of the few remaining signals a buyer can check.
Harvest seasons
Gyokuro is first-flush work and nothing else, picked in May after several weeks under cover. Because the best material is hand-picked one shoot at a time, the harvest window is effectively limited by how many people can be in the field, which is a real constraint on how much top gyokuro exists in any given year.
How it is made here
The distinguishing practice is Yame dento hon gyokuro, 'traditional true gyokuro', which in 2015 became the first tea entered in Japan's geographical indication register. It requires three things together: shade built from woven reed screens and rice straw on a frame rather than cloth draped over the rows; bushes grown in their natural form instead of clipped into table-top hedges; hand plucking throughout. Everything after that is standard: steaming, a long rolling and drying line, and the finishing that produces the dark needle leaf gyokuro is sold as.
What to look for
The line that matters is ordinary gyokuro against Yame dento hon gyokuro, the protected designation, which is a small fraction of what Yame makes and is priced accordingly. Below that line 'shaded' covers everything from three weeks under reed screens to a few days under black cloth, and nothing on the package is obliged to say which. So ask for the shading material and the number of days, then the cultivar and the harvest year. A Yame gyokuro whose seller will not state its shading period is telling you something.
How it got here
Yame's tea traces to 1423, when the Zen monk Eirin Shuzui returned from Ming China, founded Reiganji temple in what is now Kurogi and taught seed and method to the people who had backed him. Gyokuro production here dates only from the Meiji period, well after the method was worked out in Uji, and Yame's rise to the top of the category is a twentieth-century development built on holding onto labour-intensive practices that larger regions abandoned.
Places in Fukuoka
Named places inside Fukuoka. The ones with a page of their own are links.