Place · in Shizuoka
Shimada
Shimada holds both ends of Shizuoka tea inside one set of city limits. It sits on both banks of the Oi, and two mergers gave it the western part of the Makinohara plateau at Kanaya in 2005 and a stretch of the Kawane valley upstream in 2008, so the flat sun-grown tableland and the cool river gorges that Japanese buyers treat as opposites are now the same municipality. Kanaya is also where the national tea research station has stood since 1919, which is why cultivars planted all over Japan were bred here.
What grows here
Sencha in two registers, one from each half of the city. The plateau side around Kanaya makes the thick, strong, usually deep-steamed leaf Makinohara is known for. The Kawane side upstream makes the lighter aromatic mountain sencha the Oi gorge is known for, and it sells under the Kawane name rather than Shimada's. Both reach a shelf as Shizuoka tea far more often than as either, which is the ordinary fate of a Shizuoka sub-origin.
The bushes
Yabukita dominates the fields here as it does everywhere, but the interesting plants are the ones that left. Kanayamidori came out of the station at Kanaya, from a 1949 cross of Yabukita with a Shizuoka landrace selection, and was registered in 1970. It is named after the place, is planted in small quantity nationally and is sought out for a soft milky body Yabukita does not give. It is not the only release to come off those benches, which is a different sort of claim from a famous garden and a more durable one.
Harvest seasons
The city's harvest is staggered because its two halves are. The plateau at Kanaya picks among the earliest in the prefecture and the Kawane valleys inland run a couple of weeks behind it, so a single municipality's first flush spreads across most of a month. For a buyer that means Shimada on a label narrows the picking date very little and the district name inside it narrows it a lot.
What to look for
Shimada is an administrative line drawn across two tea landscapes, which makes the city name close to the least informative thing on a packet. The names underneath it carry the meaning: Kanaya and Makinohara for plateau leaf, Kawane for mountain leaf. The boundary fails in both directions, too. The Makinohara plateau runs well beyond Shimada, and the Kawane valley is shared with Kawanehon town next door, so neither name is Shimada's to own. Buy the district, or better still the producer.
How it got here
The Oi was a deliberate gap in the Tokaido. The shogunate kept no bridge over it, and Shimada and Kanaya were the post towns on either bank that lived off getting travellers across. When the crossing was abolished in 1870 that work vanished, and the men who had done it were among the labour that cleared and planted the plateau above them, alongside the Tokugawa retainers settled there from 1869. The national tea research station opened at Kanaya in 1919 and is still there, so the same plateau became Japan's largest tea field and its main tea laboratory at once.
Other places in Shizuoka
- Honyama
- Makinohara
- Fujieda
- Ashikubo
- Kakegawa
- Kanaya
- Kawane
- Okabe
- Tenryu
- Warashina