Region · in Japan
Miyazaki
Miyazaki is Japan's fourth tea prefecture by volume and its first by a wide margin in one category: kamairicha, the pan-fired green tea that fixes its leaf in a hot iron pan instead of a steamer. Most of the country's kamairicha comes from here, and nearly all of that from the Nishiusuki mountains in the north, Takachiho and Gokase above all. In a country that steams essentially everything, Miyazaki is the exception with the largest output.
What grows here
Kamairicha above all, though most of the prefecture's actual tonnage is ordinary steamed sencha grown on the warm coastal plain. The northern mountains around Gokase and Takachiho make the pan-fired tea. Steamed tamaryokucha is made here as well, so a curled leaf from Miyazaki is not automatically the pan-fired kind.
The ground
Two prefectures in one. The coastal plain around Miyazaki city is warm, bright and early, and it grows the volume. Gokase and Takachiho sit inland several hundred metres up, which is high and cool by Japanese tea standards.
Harvest seasons
Southern Kyushu picks early, so the plain here follows Kagoshima's calendar rather than the main island's. The mountains run weeks behind their own coastline, which stretches the first flush out considerably inside a single prefecture. Kamairicha is also made from later leaf more readily than sencha is, and makers here take a summer picking and an autumn one as well as the spring crop.
How it is made here
Pan-firing is the whole point. The leaf goes into a large iron pan heated to several hundred degrees and is kept moving constantly so it fixes without scorching, then it is rolled and dried with the needle-shaping step omitted, so it stays curled. The result smells toasted rather than marine and pours a clear pale yellow-green instead of the cloudy green of a deep-steamed sencha. It is slower and more skilled work than running a steamer, which is most of why the category kept shrinking everywhere except here.
What to look for
A tea labelled only Miyazaki could be plain-country sencha or a mountain kamairicha, and the two have almost nothing in common in the cup, so look for the town before the prefecture: Gokase, Takachiho. Kamairicha is sold under at least three names, kamairicha, kamairi-sei tamaryokucha and guricha, and only the first two are unambiguous. Toasty is not the same as roasted: kamairicha takes its aroma from the fixing pan and not from a later firing, so it is not a hojicha and should not taste like one.
How it got here
Kamairicha reached Kyushu from China and split into two regional schools that differ in the pan itself. Ureshino in Saga tilts a large one on a slant; the Aoyagi school of Kumamoto and Miyazaki uses a smaller pan mounted flat, and that is the one these mountains work in. Miyazaki did not invent the method but it is where the method survived. As the rest of Japan mechanised around steaming through the twentieth century, the pan stayed viable in exactly the places too steep and too remote for the volume model, which is why the national kamairicha map now points at a handful of mountain towns.
Places in Miyazaki
Named places inside Miyazaki. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Miyazaki
Tea styles tied to Miyazaki or to somewhere inside it.