Region · in Japan
Shizuoka
Shizuoka has more land under tea than any other prefecture, though Kagoshima passed it on volume in 2024, and it is also Japan's trading floor: the prefecture grows about four tenths of the country's aracha but ships about half of its finished green tea, because leaf from all over Japan comes to Shizuoka city's merchants to be fired, sorted and blended, whether or not it grew here. So the name covers two different things, a real set of mountain valleys with their own character and a commercial hub, and telling them apart is most of what a buyer needs to know.
What grows here
Sencha, at every steaming level, is the overwhelming majority. The prefecture also contains the sub-origins that Japanese buyers actually shop by: Honyama, the old upstream valleys behind Shizuoka city, Kawane and Tenryu in the mountains, Kakegawa and the Makinohara plateau for deep-steamed leaf, and Okabe, whose Asahina valley is one of Japan's three classic gyokuro origins alongside Uji and Yame.
The ground
Two landscapes doing opposite jobs. The inland river valleys of the Abe, Oi and Tenryu are steep, cool and fogged in the mornings, which slows growth and gives the aromatic teas the prefecture built its reputation on. The Makinohara plateau is flat, open and sunny, which grows a stronger and harsher leaf in far greater quantity. In parts of Kakegawa growers still mulch their rows with grass cut from adjacent semi-wild grassland, the chagusaba method, which the FAO listed as a globally important agricultural heritage system in 2013.
The bushes
Yabukita was selected here, in Shizuoka city, in 1908, by a farmer picking out the best bush in a cleared bamboo grove, then sat almost unused for nearly fifty years: the prefecture's research station registered it only in 1953 and the province named it recommended in 1955, which is what actually started the planting that ended with one selection covering most of Japan. It still dominates the fields, so alternatives are worth noticing where they appear: Kanayamidori for body, Koshun (2000) for a floral cup whose fruit sits over an unusually hoppy bitterness, and Tsuyuhikari (2003) for aroma, a cross of an unregistered cherry blossom seedling and the vegetal Asatsuyu. Yamanoibuki and others hold smaller plantings still. In the mountain valleys the older, unimproved plots have their own following, for the usual reason that low yield and slow growth flatter the cup.
Harvest seasons
Ichibancha runs from late April on the plateau into May in the mountains, and the altitude spread means the prefecture's own harvest is staggered by a couple of weeks. Nibancha follows in June. Many of the better mountain producers stop there rather than taking a third picking, on the argument that repeated cutting costs them the following spring, which is the sort of choice that separates a quality garden from a volume one here.
How it is made here
Deep steaming was worked out here, across the Makinohara plateau and the Kakegawa area from the 1950s on, to tame exactly the kind of thick, sun-grown leaf that flat ground produces, and it spread from there across Japan. Which town invented it is still argued over locally and no documentary record settles it. The other Shizuoka speciality is finishing. Farmers sell aracha into the market, a large minority of it grown outside the prefecture, and the city's merchant houses do the final firing, sorting and blending, which is where the house styles live and why a Shizuoka tea often has a blender's name on it rather than a grower's.
What to look for
Treat 'Shizuoka tea' as a starting point, not an answer, because it can mean a mountain-valley single-origin or a competent blend assembled in the city from leaf grown anywhere. The sub-region names are where the information is: Honyama, Kawane, Tenryu, Asahina. Deep-steamed against standard-steamed is a style decision rather than a quality ladder, so pick the cup you want, a thick cloudy one or a clear aromatic one, and buy accordingly.
How it got here
The Honyama valleys trace their gardens to Shoichi Kokushi, a monk said to have sown seed brought from Song China at Ashikubo in the 1240s. The decisive event is much later and much stranger: from 1869, Tokugawa retainers left jobless by the fall of the shogunate were settled on the dry, unfarmed Makinohara plateau and set to clearing and planting it, joined by the porters who had carried travellers across the deliberately bridgeless Oi river until that crossing was abolished, turning useless upland into the largest expanse of tea field in Japan. The port at Shimizu turned that output into an export industry, and the merchant houses it created still make Shizuoka the country's tea market.
Harvest terms from Shizuoka
The harvest words a label from here is likely to carry.
The tea year
Typical windows, not dates. Every one of these moves with the weather, the latitude and the year: the pages say by how much.
Places in Shizuoka
Named places inside Shizuoka. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Sources
- Yabukita was formally registered by Shizuoka's own tea research station in 1953, two years before the prefecture separately named it a recommended cultivar in 1955 Brekell, A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Teas: Selecting and Brewing (2022), 'Yabukita'
- Koshun, registered in 2000, gives a floral aroma with fruity notes balanced by a comparatively strong, hop-like bitterness Brekell, A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Teas: Selecting and Brewing (2022), 'Koshun / Yutakamidori'
- Tsuyuhikari, registered in 2003, is a cross of the unregistered Shizu-7132, known for a cherry blossom aroma, and Asatsuyu, known for vegetal notes Brekell, A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Teas: Selecting and Brewing (2022), 'Tsuyuhikari / Shizu-7132'