Kawane Honcho sits upstream on the Oi River, tea fields scattered across the mountainsides wherever the slopes will hold them. The area has been known for fine tea for as long as anyone can remember.
Surrounded by the steep peaks of the Southern Alps, the valley sees sharp swings in temperature. Mornings bring river mist — a natural veil that settles over the leaves, feeding moisture to the slow-growing shoots. The tea that comes from these slopes carries an aroma you do not find in the flatlands. A fragrance that belongs to the mountain.
We drove out to visit Taruwaki Tea Farm, eight generations and more than 200 years in this valley, to understand what kawane tea tastes like when the land itself does most of the work.
Upstream on the Oi River
From the Shimada-Kanaya interchange on the Tomei Expressway, it is close to an hour by car. The road winds along the river, climbing steadily, and tea fields begin to appear — small patches pressed into the hillsides at angles that look barely possible.
This is Kawane Honcho. Remote, steep, quiet. Fine tea has been produced here for centuries.
The slopes are so severe that ride-on harvesting machines cannot reach many of the fields. In an industry moving steadily toward mechanization and scale, this terrain resists both. Manual labor, hand-picking, narrow paths between rows. The pace stays slow — has to.
And yet the same geography that makes farming difficult is what makes the tea exceptional. The surrounding mountains filter sunlight. The temperature drops sharply after dark. Morning fog rises off the river and drifts across the rows, softening the shoots the way a cloth canopy would — except no one has to put it up or take it down.
A gift and a burden, delivered in roughly equal measure.
Eighth generation, 630 meters up
Taruwaki-san's fields sit at 630 meters above sea level — roughly the height of Tokyo Skytree. The air is thinner here, cooler, and the light has a clarity that flattens out by the time it reaches the lowlands.
He manages about 2.3 hectares. Not large by national standards. But Taruwaki Tea Farm has been growing organically for more than 30 years, and when you factor in the labor that organic cultivation demands on terrain this steep — weeding by hand, hauling compost up slopes too narrow for a truck — 2.3 hectares is more than enough for one person.
One person. Taruwaki Yasuaki, eighth generation. His family once ran a forestry business, and he has been making tea for 20 years now — managing this entire organic operation alone.
"The land itself goes back about 200 years. Edo period, I think. When forestry stopped being viable in my father's generation, he cleared the cedar groves and planted tea. There were no other farms nearby, so pesticide-free, organic — it just made sense. Circular agriculture, you know? This place is suited for it."
For organic tea production, one of the key requirements is isolation. If neighboring farms use pesticides, the chemicals drift on the wind. Insects and wildlife congregate on the untreated fields, creating friction with surrounding farmers. It is a problem that makes organic cultivation in populated tea regions difficult — sometimes impossible.
Here, deep in the mountains with no other fields in sight, the isolation is not a disadvantage. It is the reason the whole thing works.
Not dashi — the savory Japanese stock made from kelp and bonito. Not that kind of tea.
"I don't want to make tea that tastes like dashi. I don't need heavy fertilizer for that."
The dashi-like tea Taruwaki-san refers to is the style that has dominated Japanese sencha for decades — shaded, deep-steamed, thick with umami and body. To achieve that richness, you need fertilizer. A lot of it. The umami in tea comes largely from nitrogen in the soil, and conventional farms push that input hard.
Organic tea, by contrast, carries less umami. What it carries instead is transparency. The cultivar's character, the terroir of the land — these come through without anything masking them. No heavy seasoning. Just the raw voice of the leaf.
That is what Taruwaki-san is after. Mountain tea where the individuality of the plant shines clean and clear — nothing added, nothing masked.
The aroma the mountain makes
Mountain tea, the old saying goes, finishes more fragrant. There are reasons for this, and they start with the fog.
The surrounding peaks block direct sunlight for part of the day. The morning mist — river water evaporating at dawn, pooling in the valley — settles on the leaves and feeds moisture to the young shoots. They grow slowly, staying tender longer than they would on the plains.
Tender shoots are easier to process. They need only a light steaming — asamushi, or shallow-steamed — to become pliable enough for rolling. Deep steaming, the dominant method in regions like Makinohara, applies more heat and draws out a thicker, more opaque liquor. But that heat comes at a cost. Some of the tea's native aroma evaporates with it. If you want to taste what the cultivar actually smells like, shallow steaming is the path.
Taruwaki-san takes this further. His tea is grown entirely in the open — roji cultivation, without any shade covering. Shading boosts theanine and deepens the color, but it also introduces ooika, the distinctive "covered aroma" that, while pleasant on its own, sits over the top of whatever the cultivar would have expressed naturally.
Open-field tea finishes with more astringency. That is the trade-off. But without the veil of covered aroma, you taste the variety and the place directly — the mountain, the soil, the particular angle of light that reached those leaves.
A cultivar's full voice
The sencha market has spent the last few decades moving in one direction: shaded, deep-steamed, dark in the cup, rich in umami. Taruwaki Tea Farm's approach — organic, open-field, shallow-steamed — runs exactly opposite.
When we first tried Taruwaki-san's tea, I was caught off guard.
The aroma. Above everything else, the aroma.
Take Tsuyuhikari, a cultivar born from crossing Asatsuyu — sometimes called a natural gyokuro — with Shizu 7132, known for its cherry-leaf fragrance. In Taruwaki-san's version, you can trace that lineage clearly. The umami is tighter than you would expect from an organic tea, concentrated rather than broad, and the finish opens into a floral sweetness — something close to cherry blossom, lingering well after the cup is empty. The cultivar's potential, drawn out fully, with nothing in the way.
"I'm not trying to make what's popular on the market — the covered, deep-steamed style. I'm not trying to have 100 people drink it and have all 100 say it's good."
Back at the farm's small sales room, Taruwaki-san brews a pot as he talks. The reason, he explains, is that his tea is demanding. It asks something of the person brewing it.
Deep-steamed tea is forgiving — fine particles, mild bitterness, hard to ruin. Taruwaki-san's tea has real astringency, real edges. Brew it carelessly and it punishes you.
"Get the brewing even a little wrong and it tastes terrible. That's why 100 people won't all say it's good. But if you nail the water temperature, get everything just right — it's unbelievably good. Brew it this way and you won't be able to go back to other teas."
Quiet confidence. No bravado, just a farmer who knows exactly what his tea can do when it is treated right.
A shiboridashi — a handleless brewing vessel — custom-made to Taruwaki-san's specifications.
Tea that can only come from here
"Deep-steaming in Kawane — that's just wrong. There's no point copying what Makinohara can already do."
The words sat with us long after we left. He was not dismissing other producers. He was stating something simpler — that a place should make the tea only it can make.
Taruwaki Tea Farm's kawane tea is precisely that. Variety, soil, altitude, fog. A mountain tea shaped by every element that makes this location difficult to farm — and impossible to replicate anywhere else.
"My father started organic in 1990. I'm grateful for that — it's why I'm here now, doing what I do. You can't just decide to go organic today and have it work tomorrow. It takes time."
Fields handed down for decades, for centuries. Tea is a perennial crop — the relationship between a farmer and a tea plant stretches across years, sometimes across a lifetime. The relationship between a family and a piece of land stretches longer still.
In Kawane, on organic fields inherited from his father, Taruwaki-san continues to make mountain tea. History in the soil, clarity in the cup.
We have tasted tea from dozens of producers across Japan. What stays with me about Taruwaki-san's is not any single flavor note — it is the sense that nothing has been added. The mountain, the mist, the cultivar, 200 years of the same family on the same slope. The tea tastes like all of it.
It could only be made here. Perhaps that is the point.