Place · in Miyazaki
Gokase
Gokase is a mountain town in the far north of Miyazaki, up against the Kumamoto and Oita borders, and it is one of the few places in Japan where pan-fired green tea is an ordinary local product rather than a revival. It is high and cold for a Japanese tea district, cold enough that the town runs the southernmost ski slope in the country a few valleys from its tea gardens.
What grows here
Kamairicha, the green tea fixed in an iron pan instead of a steamer, is what the town is for, and Gokase with neighbouring Takachiho is the centre of what is left of that category nationally. The same small workshops have also become one of Japan's more interesting sources of wakocha, domestic black tea, which suits a place with skilled hands, small lots and no prospect of competing on volume.
The ground
Steep upland several hundred metres above the Miyazaki coast, on ground cut by the Gokase river gorge, heavily fogged and cold by the standards of southern Kyushu. The plots are small, awkward and effectively unmechanisable, and that is not incidental to the tea: pan-firing survived here because the volume model could never reach this ground. In 2015 the FAO recognised the surrounding upland farming landscape, Takachihogo-Shiibayama, as a globally important agricultural heritage system, and Gokase sits inside it.
What to look for
Gokase, Takachiho and the other Nishiusuki towns lie along one continuous stretch of mountain and make the same tea, so treating them as competing appellations is a mistake. The distinction that does carry information is the pan. This is Aoyagi country, a smaller pan mounted flat, against the large slanted pan Ureshino works in, and the two schools leave a different toast. Kamairicha here is a workshop product made in small lots, so the maker's name is worth more than the town name.
Other places in Miyazaki
- Takachiho