"The seedlings they planted five years ago have grown this tall." Hiraoka-san tells me this with a warmth that makes it clear the happiness was mutual. A quiet pride, the kind that does not need to announce itself.
Late May, the first flush just finished. Every year around this time, he invites visitors to his farm in Tokorozawa, Saitama Prefecture, to pick tea. The seedling-planting event happened five years earlier — children pressing potted plants into the soil, two thousand per block, a patient afternoon's work. Seeing those same children return and find a grown tea field where their tiny seedlings once stood, faces bright with disbelief. That, for Hiraoka-san, is what tea farming is about.
Eleven generations in Tokorozawa
Tadahito Hiraoka. Eleventh generation. Hiraoka Tea Farm, Tokorozawa City, Saitama Prefecture.
The family's presence in this area stretches back roughly three hundred years, to a land-reclamation project in the middle of the Edo period known as the Santomi Kaitaku. The original settlers were vegetable farmers, but they planted tea bushes along the ridges between their plots — narrow strips of green stitched between rows of radish and sweet potato. That was how tea began here. Not as a main crop, but as a border plant. Almost an afterthought.
Three centuries later, the tea is no longer an afterthought. Inside the processing facility, you can see the years layered one on top of another — worn tools, darkened walls, machines that hum with the memory of ten thousand batches. Among the producers we have visited across Japan, very few can trace their tea-making back this far. The tea industry in Kagoshima, for comparison, only took off about sixty years ago. Hiraoka Tea Farm was already ancient by then.
Tadahito-san took over nineteen years ago. He graduated university, spent a year training in Shizuoka, then came home.
"I always assumed I would take over the farm. I was the eldest son — it just felt like the natural thing." He says it plainly, without sentimentality. A fact of life, quietly accepted.
Sayama tea and the finishing roast
There is an old saying in Japan: "Color belongs to Shizuoka, fragrance to Uji, but for taste — Sayama finishes it." Sayama tea comes from western Saitama, the tea-growing region closest to Tokyo. It is a colder place than most Japanese tea country. Where Shizuoka and Kyushu enjoy mild winters and early springs, Sayama sits further north, exposed to sharper cold. The shoots grow slowly here, storing nutrients through the long chill, and the leaves that emerge are noticeably thicker than their southern counterparts. Dense, sturdy leaves. Built for a harder climate.
But what sets the region apart is not climate alone. It is the culture of independence.
In major producing areas like Shizuoka and Kagoshima, the supply chain typically runs through chasho — tea merchants who buy, blend, and redistribute. The producer grows and processes; the merchant decides how it reaches the consumer. In Sayama, the tradition has long been different. Producers here grow, process, and sell their own tea, start to finish. No middleman. No compromise on vision.
The consequence is small volumes — the tea rarely travels far from its home region — and a producer community that makes exactly the tea it wants to make. Each farm's character comes through undiluted.
And then there is sayama-bi-ire — the Sayama finishing roast. All sencha undergoes a final heating step to drive off moisture and develop aroma, but in this region the roast runs deeper and longer. The heat coaxes out a robust, toasty fragrance and draws a full-bodied sweetness from the leaf that lighter roasts would leave untouched. The exact temperature and duration vary from producer to producer — each farm guards its own calibration — but the result is unmistakable. A warmth in the cup that lingers well after the last sip. Something close to caramel, something close to roasted chestnut, and underneath it all a clean sweetness that keeps pulling you back.
The forest that feeds the fields
"Since you are here, shall we go look at the tea fields?"
Hiraoka-san leads me through his property, and before we reach the tea rows, we pass through a forest. Zelkova and cedar, tall enough to form a canopy overhead. Dappled light on the path. This is not accidental woodland. It was planted during the Edo period for a specific purpose — and it is still serving that purpose today.
Every autumn, the leaves fall and are gathered into compost piles. That compost feeds the tea fields. Forest to soil, soil to tea, season after season. A closed loop, running unbroken for three hundred years.
"When this area was first settled, the land was not really suited for farming," Hiraoka-san explains. "The forest was created as a windbreak and as a source of compost — to turn poor soil into something that could sustain crops. Circular agriculture, going back to the Edo period. When you think about it, that is quite something."
The forest does more than supply fertilizer. Walking through it, I notice how the air shifts — cooler, damper, quieter. The canopy filters the wind that would otherwise dry out the tea fields. The leaf litter holds moisture in the soil long after the rain has stopped. A microclimate, engineered centuries ago by farmers who understood the land far better than they could have articulated.
Ten cultivars and a seven-year oolong
Hiraoka Tea Farm grows roughly ten cultivars across two and a half hectares — Yabukita, Sayamakaori, Harumidori, Hokumei, Musashikaori, and several others. Each occupies its own rows, managed according to its own rhythm. For a farm of this size, the variety is striking. Most producers in the region settle on two or three proven cultivars and build their year around them. Hiraoka-san treats the field more like a laboratory.
The most revealing project is the oolong tea he makes from Musashikaori, a cultivar developed specifically for the Saitama climate. Seven years of development before its release in 2020. The aroma is disarmingly floral — closer to a Taiwanese high-mountain oolong than anything you would expect from the outskirts of Tokyo. Ripe fruit and white flowers, a fragrance that opens gradually and keeps unfolding as the tea cools. I found myself holding the cup near my nose longer than I intended, catching each shift as the temperature dropped.
Beyond the oolong, he produces single-origin black teas from multiple cultivars and experiments with the same variety grown under different conditions — open-field and shaded — to see how each method reshapes the leaf. He also grows both open-air and kabuse (shaded) versions of the same cultivar, comparing the two side by side. The impulse is not novelty for its own sake. Curiosity, applied methodically, over years.
Seeing their faces
Without a merchant to broker the relationship, Hiraoka-san's customers are his own to find. He started selling online early, and he uses social media with a fluency that many producers twice his age — and half — might envy. Drone footage of the tea fields from above. The quiet, meditative work of trimming the hedgerows. The careful choreography of blending sencha. These are the moments most consumers never see, and Hiraoka-san puts them out into the world with a matter-of-factness that makes them feel intimate rather than performative.
The farm also has a shop on the grounds, and when I visited, a regular customer stopped in to buy tea. A small, ordinary transaction — a few words exchanged, a bag handed over — but you could sense the familiarity in it. Not a marketing strategy. A relationship, built bag by bag, season by season.
"I keep going because I can see the faces of my customers," Hiraoka-san says. No grand mission, no manifesto. Just the knowledge that the people drinking his tea are real, and reachable, and pleased.
We pass along the impressions customers share with us to the producers we work with. Every time, without exception, they light up. For someone like Hiraoka-san, who has spent his whole life in a region where the tea rarely travels beyond the nearest town, hearing that a stranger on the other side of the country — or the world — found something in his cup worth remarking on, that is not a small thing.
An hour from Tokyo, three centuries deep
Tokorozawa is less than an hour from central Tokyo by train. Close enough to feel suburban, far enough to hold on to its fields and its forests. The tea rows end where the zelkova canopy begins, and beyond that the city spreads outward in every direction. It is an unlikely place for a three-hundred-year-old tea farm, and perhaps that is part of why Hiraoka-san's work feels the way it does — quiet, stubborn, rooted in something older than the suburban sprawl surrounding it.
As I leave, the scent of the processing facility stays with me for a while. Toasted grain and a trace of something vegetal, lingering in the fabric of my jacket. The smell of a place that has been making tea for longer than most countries have existed.