Twelve hectares of tea fields in Shimane Prefecture. Roughly two and a half Tokyo Domes, if that helps. Among the producers we work with, most manage between two and five. The national average per household is 2.7. Izumo Seicha operates on a scale that belongs to a different conversation entirely.
Shimane is not a name that comes up when people talk about Japanese tea. It faces the Sea of Japan, snow piles up in winter, and annual daylight runs about three hundred hours shorter than Kagoshima. Tea can grow here. Whether it should — that is the question most people would ask.
The answer, when you taste what Izumo Seicha produces, is immediate. A sweetness that spreads slowly across the tongue, thick and almost viscous. Umami that lingers without sharpness. An aroma so clean it nearly disappears — no grassiness, no astringency fighting for attention. Just a soft, enveloping warmth. If we had to describe their tea in a single word, it would be umami.
A TV producer turns tea farmer
Oka Yuta-san was thirty-four when we visited — already the head of Shimane's largest tea operation, already managing a workforce and twelve hectares of fields and a processing facility. Before any of that, he worked in television. A few years in Tokyo, producing content, navigating the rhythms of media. Then he came back to Izumo and started making tea.
The career shift sounds dramatic when condensed into a sentence. In person, Oka-san talks about it the way he talks about everything — calmly, practically, as though the decision were obvious once you saw the facts clearly enough. He had taken over as representative just the year before our visit, inheriting a scale of operation that would overwhelm most newcomers. But he carries it lightly, the way someone does when they have already decided this is the work they want to do.
Smart, and then some
I had met Oka-san once before visiting Izumo — briefly, in Tokyo. My impression then was of someone unusually sharp about the business side of tea. He spoke about cultivation and market positioning with the same fluency, switching between the two without effort.
"This year's climate is tracking very close to 2010, so I think we can expect good results."
"We use a chlorophyll meter to determine the right duration for shading. You cannot just guess."
He collects weather data, growth records, chlorophyll readings — year after year, building a body of evidence that makes his process reproducible rather than intuitive. Not relying solely on instinct. Building a system.
"Otherwise I cannot pass anything on to the younger staff. No data, no continuity."
In an industry shadowed by the question of who comes next, that kind of thinking matters more than most people realize. Oka-san is a producer, but his background gave him something else — the instincts of someone who has managed teams, met deadlines, thought in systems. He runs the farm the way a good producer runs a show. Every detail accounted for, every decision traceable.
That was my read, anyway. Smart. Efficient. A new generation bringing business acumen to an old craft.
Then I visited the farm. And I realized my impression, while not wrong, was incomplete.
Eight hectares under shade
The fields were mid-kabuse when we arrived — rows of tea plants draped under black netting, sunlight blocked for one to two weeks before harvest. Kabuse, or covered cultivation, serves two purposes. Shading prevents theanine — the amino acid responsible for umami — from converting into catechin, which brings astringency. It also forces the leaves to produce more chlorophyll, deepening their color to a vivid, almost luminous green.
The technique is common in premium teas — gyokuro, tencha for matcha. Some sencha producers use it as well, covering a portion of their fields to add richness. What is not common is the scale at which Oka-san does it. Eight of his twelve hectares are shaded. Each row runs about fifty meters. One hundred rows make a hectare. That is eight hundred lengths of heavy netting to lay, monitor daily, and retrieve before picking begins.
The nets are heavy. They fray over years of use, requiring hand repair. Each day during the shading period, someone walks the rows checking coverage, adjusting where the wind has shifted things, reading the leaves for signs that the timing is right. And when harvest approaches, all of it must come down again — every meter of netting collected and stored before the picking machines move through.
When Oka-san told me the number, I felt something close to vertigo.
No net touches a leaf
Most producers who shade their fields lay the netting directly over the plants. It is the practical choice — faster to set up, faster to take down. But when cloth or plastic rests on the leaves, problems follow. The shoots cannot grow straight. The surface of the leaf hardens where it rubs against the mesh. And if the covering is vinyl, its scent can transfer to the tea.
Oka-san does not accept any of that. Green arches line his rows, holding the covering above the canopy so that nothing touches the leaves. The previous generation used direct covering. Oka-san switched nearly everything to arches.
This is not a small decision. Every arch must be installed, maintained, and worked around during harvest. Multiply that across eight hectares. The labor is enormous — the kind of commitment that cannot be explained by efficiency or business sense alone. This is where the smart young businessman I met in Tokyo revealed his other side. Stubborn. Uncompromising. Willing to absorb staggering amounts of manual labor if the tea demands it.
"If you want to make something good, you have to put in the work. There is no shortcut."
Walking the fields with him, hearing those words, I understood they were not a slogan. They were the operating principle behind every row, every arch, every net.
A tea that could only come from here
After the field tour, Oka-san offered us tea with the same easy directness he brings to everything.
"Want some tea?"
The cultivars Izumo Seicha works with — Yabukita, Okumidori, Saemidori, Sakimidori — share a common trait. Their aromas are clean and mild, without the assertive grassiness or floral top notes of some southern varieties. Under kabuse, this mildness becomes an advantage. The shading deepens the umami without introducing competing flavors. The result is a tea where sweetness and savory richness exist in an almost undisturbed balance.
The San'in climate, with its harsh winters and limited sun, restricts which cultivars will survive. Cold-hardy varieties only. But within that constraint, Oka-san found a style — umami-forward, deeply shaded, soft on the palate — that turns the region's limitations into its identity.
"A small production area has to find its own way. Differentiation, I guess you would call it."
The cup he poured was Izumo Tea Kiwami — their highest grade, a blend of Saemidori, Yabukita, and Okumidori. The liquor had a weight to it, almost oily, coating the tongue before the flavor arrived. Then the umami, broad and calm, filling the mouth without any edge. A trace of sweetness behind it, clean and lingering. No bitterness to speak of. No astringency. A tea so gentle it barely announced itself — and then stayed for minutes after the last sip.
In a market that has spent the past decade chasing deep-steamed teas with low bitterness and dark infusion color, Izumo Seicha added one more dimension. Umami as the foundation, not the accent.
What is behind the taste
Tea farming is relentless work. Cultivation, processing, distribution — each one a full-time concern, and Oka-san had only just taken over as head of the operation. He travels to other prefectures to handle his own sales calls, pitching his tea in person. He comes back to the fields and keeps refining. Trial and error, season after season.
Perhaps it takes someone who has worked outside the industry to see this clearly — the sheer weight of what tea-making demands, and the willingness to carry it anyway. The former TV producer who came back to Izumo has become something the industry rarely produces. A leader who is equally comfortable in a meeting room and knee-deep in a row of shaded tea plants. Someone who understands, from his years in media, that making anything well is fundamentally difficult — and who chose this difficulty on purpose.
This year's tea will be better than last year's. Next year's will be better still. Listening to Oka-san — the steadiness of his voice, the precision of his plans, the scale of effort he treats as ordinary — it is difficult not to believe that.
The day we visited was warm — warm enough to take off a jacket and stand in the spring sun. Izumo Seicha's first flush comes later than most, the cool climate slowing the buds. The new shoots were still small, just beginning to unfurl. Tiny, pale green, catching the light.