Region · in Japan
Saga
Saga is where tea in Japan is traditionally said to have started, and it grows a small share of the national crop today. Almost all of what it does grow comes from a single town in the west, Ureshino, and almost all of that is curled leaf rather than the needle the rest of Japan makes. The prefecture is also the point where two Chinese imports came ashore, the plant and the pan.
What grows here
Tamaryokucha, the curled green tea that skips the final needle-shaping roll, in both its steamed and its pan-fired forms, overwhelmingly from Ureshino. Sencha is grown in the hills along the northern border as well, but Saga's standing in tea rests on the curly leaf.
How it got here
Eisai returned from Song China in 1191 and, by tradition, sowed his seeds at a temple on Mount Sefuri in what is now Yoshinogari, which is the best known of Japan's competing claims to the oldest tea ground, though Nara dates its own temple tradition three centuries earlier. The event that mattered commercially came later and landed in Ureshino: Chinese potters settled in the Hizen kiln country during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and are credited with bringing the pan-firing method with them. That is why Kyushu, and Saga in particular, held onto a Chinese processing habit the rest of Japan gave up for steaming.