Place · in Kyoto
Wazuka
Wazuka is a small mountain town southeast of Kyoto that grows close to half of the prefecture's tea. Most of it leaves under someone else's name, because Wazuka leaf is a large part of what is sold as Uji tea, finished and blended by houses down in Uji and Kyoto city. The terraced hillsides here are the picture most people carry of Japanese tea country, and they are also the reason the town could never industrialise.
What grows here
Tencha for matcha and sencha, with kabusecha and some gyokuro. The mix has tilted hard towards tencha as matcha demand grew, and a good deal of new planting goes under cover. Wazuka is one of the hill towns the Kyoto trade depends on for actual leaf, alongside Ujitawara and Minamiyamashiro, and of the three it is much the largest.
The ground
A narrow valley system on the Wazuka river, with gardens cut into slopes steep enough that the rows follow the contour in short curved terraces rather than running straight. The valley holds morning fog and the nights are cold for the latitude, which is the standard Kyoto explanation for aroma. Aspect matters here in a way it never does on flat ground: one farm's plots can come ready a week apart depending on which way the slope faces. The gradient also rules out full-size harvesters, so picking is by hand or by two-person machine.
How it is made here
Wazuka is where the tencha ovens are. Shaded leaf is steamed and then dried in a brick oven without ever being rolled, and because that has to happen within hours of picking the step lives in the growing town rather than with the trade. Wazuka alone accounts for more than half of Kyoto's tencha, and sends the result down the valley as an unmilled ingredient. It is a clean split: the town makes the tea and the merchant makes the name.
What to look for
A Wazuka tea and an Uji tea can be the same leaf with different words on the tin, and the Uji version will usually cost more. The town has been putting its own name on its output for the last couple of decades, and buying it that way is the closest a matcha buyer gets to knowing where the leaf actually grew, given that the Uji designation admits leaf from four prefectures. What a town name will not tell you is who milled it, and for matcha the milling matters.
How it got here
Tea has been grown here since roughly the thirteenth century, spreading south out of the Uji gardens rather than starting on its own, and Wazuka supplied the shogunal tea trade as part of the Uji system rather than as a name in its own right. That arrangement held until very recently. In 2015 the tea landscape of Wazuka was written into the Japan Heritage designation covering the tea towns of southern Kyoto, which is a tourism instrument but also the first official recognition the town's own name has had.
Other places in Kyoto
- Uji
- Joyo
- Kyotanabe
- Minamiyamashiro
- Ujitawara