"My farm's been around a long time. But my grandfather and my old man both died pretty young, so I never heard much about the history. Nobody taught me how to roll tea or any of that. I just gave it a go."
Nakayama Takao-san is seventy-nine. He speaks in a thick Shizuoka dialect — unhurried, direct, laced with the kind of dry humor that only comes from decades of physical work. When I visited him in January, he was still very much active: climbing into his pickup truck with practiced ease, steering it up a road that most people would hesitate to walk.
We had come to Fujieda, a city in central Shizuoka Prefecture, to see the tea fields of Nakayama Tea Factory. What we found was a Shizuoka tea farm unlike any other we have encountered — steep, remote, and home to a cultivar that nearly disappeared.
Fujieda. Where the rivers meet the mountains.
Fujieda sits between two rivers — the Abe to the west and the Oi to the east — both fed by snowmelt from the Southern Alps. The land between them rises sharply into forested hills, and it is on these slopes, where the soil is rich from centuries of runoff and the temperature swings hard between day and night, that Fujieda's tea has been grown for generations.
Nearly every tea farm here is in the mountains. The terrain is too steep for large-scale cultivation, too remote for easy access. But the tea it produces — shaped by altitude, fog, and cool mountain air — carries an aroma that flatland fields rarely achieve.
Nakayama-san's fields are scattered across these slopes. Getting to them requires his pickup truck, a steady nerve, and a certain disregard for comfort.
A road that earns the view.
"You can't get up there in that," Nakayama-san said, glancing at my rental car. He motioned me into the passenger seat of his kei truck — a compact pickup built for exactly this kind of terrain.
Within minutes, I understood. The road narrowed to a single lane of packed dirt, barely wide enough for the truck. The grade steepened. Loose gravel pinged off the undercarriage. Nakayama-san drove the way someone threads a needle — calm, precise, not a wasted movement. He has been making this drive for decades.
A gradient steep enough to make walking difficult.
At four hundred meters above sea level, I stopped thinking about the road.
Below us, the mountains fell away into a valley of green — tea rows stitched into the slopes, the sky wide and close. The only sounds were birdsong and the wind moving through the trees. Clouds dragged their shadows slowly across the hillsides, and as I stood watching the border between sunlight and shade shift, the cold reminded me where I was. January. Four hundred meters up. The air had a bite to it.
Tea, mountains, sky. In every direction, nothing else. The kind of landscape that makes you forget to speak.
"Right now I've got about three hectares. Adding another one this year," Nakayama-san said.
In mountain tea farming, fields are small by necessity — each one carved from a different slope, connected by roads like the one we had just climbed. Every trip between plots means another ride in the truck. It explains why Nakayama-san handles it the way he does.
Expanding is not simple. He brings in heavy machinery to clear a section of forest, cuts the trees, hauls them out.
The stumps that remain have to be pulled from the ground before the soil can be prepared for planting. Hard, slow work.
Some of the stumps are enormous — wide as a person, roots reaching deep into the mountainside.
Nakayama-san manages all of this, and he is still expanding. But his path to this point was not the steady inheritance that most Shizuoka tea farm stories follow. It was something rougher, more improvised, and far more uncertain.
A cultivar born in Fujieda.
Fujieda Kaori — the name tells you where it comes from. A cross between Yabukita, the dominant cultivar in Japanese tea, and a breeding line called Inzatsu 131, it was developed in Fujieda City. About twenty years ago, local authorities promoted it as a regional specialty, hoping to give the area something distinct in a market overwhelmed by Yabukita.
Within a few years, nearly every producer who had planted it pulled it out. The problem was not the tea itself. The problem was what Shizuoka tea had always been built on.
The Yabukita consensus.
Shizuoka Prefecture has led Japan's tea industry for as long as records exist. Yabukita — reliable, high-yielding, adaptable — was born here in the early twentieth century and spread across the country through the 1950s. Today it accounts for over seventy percent of all tea produced in Japan. In Shizuoka, the figure is over ninety.
That dominance shapes everything, including the final step in processing: gogumi, the blending of multiple lots to stabilize flavor year to year. Blenders combine teas from different fields and harvest dates, balancing sweetness against astringency, body against clarity. It works because most of what goes into the blend is Yabukita — a cultivar bred to play well with others.
Fujieda Kaori does not play well with others. Its defining characteristic — a floral, almost jasmine-like fragrance — is vivid in isolation but disruptive in a Yabukita-centered blend. The very quality that makes it remarkable made it, in the eyes of Shizuoka's blending tradition, unusable. Producers dropped it. By the time Nakayama-san made his decision, almost no one was left growing it.
"I bit into a bud and thought, this could be something."
At the event where Fujieda Kaori was first introduced, Nakayama-san did something that nobody else seemed to do. He broke off a bud and chewed it.
"I bit it, just to see. And I thought — this is interesting. This is worth trying. Everyone else started small, maybe five ares, maybe ten. I went in at about a hectare."
A hectare. Roughly a third of his entire farm at the time. He replaced established, income-producing tea plants with saplings of a cultivar that no buyer was asking for. Tea bushes take five years to reach harvestable maturity. Five years of no yield from a third of his land.
As other growers abandoned their Fujieda Kaori, Nakayama-san collected their discarded plants — gathering stock from neighboring farms, transplanting it into his own fields. A bet that kept getting larger.
"I saved Fujieda Kaori. So Fujieda Kaori had better save me."
He said it matter-of-factly, but the weight behind those words is real. His grandfather and father had both died young. Nakayama-san inherited the farm without the mentorship that most tea families pass down — no lessons in rolling technique, no accumulated wisdom about when to pick or how to read the weather. He figured it out on his own, with help from neighbors and sheer persistence. The farm survived, but the economics were always difficult. Fujieda Kaori was not a passion project. It was a lifeline.
Jasmine, cherry blossom, a clean astringency.
"I just worked like mad," Nakayama-san says. That effort shows in the cup.
The liquor is a pale gold leaning toward yellow-green — lighter than most Shizuoka sencha. The first sip carries a brisk, clean astringency that tightens across the palate, the kind that makes you sit up. And then the aroma arrives — jasmine, a hint of something close to sakuramochi — a rice cake wrapped in a pickled cherry leaf, a sweetness that is floral rather than sugary. It lingers in the empty cup long after the tea is gone.
It is immediately clear why this tea does not fit into a blend. The fragrance is too distinct, too present. But as a single-cultivar tea — tasted on its own terms — Fujieda Kaori is unlike anything else we carry.
We came to it through a detour. Our first encounter with Fujieda Kaori was through Yamamoto Tea Farm, one of the original growers who had championed the cultivar since its release. The first time I tasted Yamamoto-san's Fujieda Kaori, I knew it was the kind of tea we had been looking for. But Yamamoto-san had retired — age had caught up, and the previous season was his last.
It was Yamamoto-san who connected us with Nakayama-san. The two had a history — Nakayama-san had studied under him, learning how to grow and process this particular cultivar. A chain of knowledge, passed from one grower to another.
You will not find Nakayama-san with an internet search. There is no website, no social media presence. It was Fujieda Kaori itself — the cultivar, the network of people who believed in it — that brought us to his mountain.
Three generations on the mountain.
Nakayama-san's son has taken over the daily management of the factory now. They still work the fields together — father and son, side by side on the slopes. A grandson is currently studying at a tea school. The farm that Nakayama-san built without a manual, without inherited technique, without any guarantee, is becoming something that will outlast him.
Fujieda Kaori is grown almost nowhere outside Fujieda City. That we can offer a tea that Nakayama-san staked his livelihood on — a cultivar he rescued when everyone else walked away — still carries a weight we have not quite found words for. The cup arrives with a jasmine-scented finish, quiet and unhurried, and no explanation is needed.