Taisho 5. That is 1916. The year Oguri Tea Farm began its work on the Makinohara Plateau in Shizuoka — a stretch of flat, wind-swept tableland above the Oi River where tea has been grown since the early Meiji era. Over a century later, the farm is still here, though what it does has changed.
We visited Oguri-san and one of his contract farmers, Sugita-san of Sugita Tea Farm, to see how a tea merchant and a grower work together on this plateau — and to taste what that partnership produces.
This is Part 1 of a two-part story. The fields and the farmer come in Part 2.
A tea merchant on the Makinohara Plateau
Oguri Tea Farm started as a grower. For decades, the family cultivated their own fields on the Makinohara Plateau, but over time, the business shifted. Today Oguri-san oversees a different kind of operation — wholesaling tea from contract farmers across the Makinohara and Kawane regions, processing leaves into tea bags, and shipping finished product to buyers throughout Japan and overseas.
The word "farm" in the company name is a holdover from those original roots. What Oguri-san runs now is closer to a tonya — a tea merchant — connecting producers to markets they could not reach alone.
We sat down with Oguri Hisatomo-san, the current president, as the company approached its 103rd year.
The history of tea on the Makinohara Plateau, he explained, begins with a political upheaval. After the hanseki hokan — the return of feudal domains to the emperor in 1869 — samurai who had served under Tokugawa Yoshinobu found themselves without a purpose. They turned to the plateau and began clearing land for tea. That decision, born of necessity, became the foundation of one of Shizuoka's largest tea-producing regions.
Shin-cha in March
Every year, on the third Sunday of March, Oguri Tea Farm hosts a shin-cha tasting event for the local community. Contract farmers, staff from the JA agricultural cooperative, and residents all come together to experience the first tea of the season — weeks before the normal harvest begins.
The timing is deliberate. In a typical year, first flush picking starts in early May. But May is when farmers are at their busiest, knee-deep in their own harvests. So Oguri-san and his partner farmers build vinyl greenhouses over select rows, controlling temperature to coax the plants into budding early. The result is a small, precious batch of shin-cha ready by mid-March.
The preparation starts right after the new year. Oguri-san is out there himself, helping farmers set up the greenhouse structures — plastic sheeting, supports, temperature checks.
"Everyone around here is a farmer — they have their own work to do. But Oguri-san shows up anyway, right after New Year's, and starts helping by himself," says Sugita Motoyuki-san of Sugita Tea Farm, one of Oguri's contract growers, laughing as he recalls it.
At the event itself, participants pick fresh leaves by hand, try temomi — hand-rolling, a technique almost no one practices commercially anymore — and follow the tea from raw leaf to finished cup. It is a rare chance to understand the full arc of production in a single afternoon.
Oguri Tea Farm also runs tea lessons at local elementary schools, sending farmers into classrooms to teach children where their daily cup comes from. A quiet, persistent effort to keep tea culture alive in a region built on it.
From the plateau to Kawane — and overseas
There is an irony in the Makinohara Plateau's history. When tea cultivation began here in the 1870s, much of the crop was black tea, destined for export to England and the United States. The farms eventually shifted to green tea for the domestic market, and the export channels went dormant.
Now, Oguri-san is reopening some of those channels. Japanese tea has found new demand across Asia, and Oguri Tea Farm processes organic black tea alongside its green tea lines — a return to the plateau's origins, in a way.
The tea Oguri-san handles comes primarily from the Makinohara Plateau, along the Oi River basin. But he also works with farms upstream in the Kawane area — a mountain region where the growing season starts later, the air is cooler, and the tea carries a different character.
Those Kawane farmers face a structural disadvantage. Because their tea matures later than in warmer lowland areas, by the time their leaves are ready, demand has often been met by earlier-harvesting regions. Prices suffer. Oguri-san's response was to build an organic matcha processing facility in Kawane — giving those farmers a product whose value is not dictated by harvest timing, and whose premium reflects the clean mountain conditions rather than penalizing the altitude.
"I wanted to raise the income of the farmers in that area," Oguri-san says simply. A practical solution to a geographic problem.
Two cups of Tsuyuhikari
The flavor of tea shifts dramatically with brewing temperature. The mechanism is straightforward — amino acids, the source of umami, dissolve readily at around 50 degrees Celsius. Catechins, which bring bitterness and astringency, release more aggressively as the water gets hotter. The same leaf, brewed at different temperatures, becomes a different tea.
Oguri-san prepared two cups of Tsuyuhikari for us to compare. Tsuyuhikari is one of the Makinohara Plateau's recommended cultivars — an early-budding variety known for vivid green liquor and pronounced umami.
This particular Tsuyuhikari receives extra attention. A week before harvest, the plants are covered with shade netting to block sunlight — a process called kabuse — which pushes the leaves to produce more amino acids. Only the youngest, most tender shoots — miru-me, the soft tips — are picked. The result is a tea with umami that most sencha cannot match. An everyday cultivar, elevated by the care around it.
The first cup was brewed at 80 degrees.
Even at that temperature, the sweetness was immediate — not sharp or grassy, but round, coating the tongue with something close to chestnut. The aroma drifted up soft and clean, vegetal without being heavy. What struck me was the finish. No bitterness clinging to the palate, just a smooth fade and a quiet sweetness that stayed. I tried this same Tsuyuhikari again later at home, and the balance held — umami and sweetness intertwined, neither one crowding out the other.
Susuri-cha — one drop, everything
Then Oguri-san set up something different. A small, square ceramic dish. One to two grams of Tsuyuhikari leaves. Soft water from the Oi River basin — the same watershed that feeds the Makinohara Plateau tea fields. And water warmed only to body temperature, barely enough to cover the leaves.
Two minutes. The leaves opened slowly, uncurling in the shallow pool of water. You could see the color bleeding out — a pale jade seeping into the liquid at the edges.
When the leaves had fully unfurled, Oguri-san tilted the dish to one corner and sipped from the edge. A single drop. Maybe two.
"With this amount of leaf, you could extract much more," he explained. "But by tasting only the first drops, you get the most concentrated umami — a luxurious way to drink tea. Boiling water at 100 degrees would bring out the catechins and make it bitter. At this temperature, you taste only what the leaf wants to give you."
I followed his lead. The drop that reached my tongue was not what I expected from tea. It was closer to dashi — a savory depth that spread slowly across the palate, coating everything with umami. Dense, almost viscous. The sweetness arrived a beat later, underneath, like a bass note rising through the body of the flavor.
This is susuri-cha — sometimes called shizuku-cha, drop tea. Not a daily practice. A way of tasting tea that strips everything back to essence. One drop carrying the full weight of the leaf.
When the color in the dish changes, it is ready. Let the tea sit on the tongue, roll it gently — the way you might with wine — before swallowing. The aftertaste lingers for minutes. Oguri-san also mentioned kori-dashi, ice brewing, as another way to draw out the same concentrated sweetness. I tried it at home later — ice placed directly on the leaves, melting slowly, and the tea that pooled beneath it was silky, almost honeyed.
Susuri-cha offers a second and third steeping too, each one lighter, the flavor shifting gradually. And when you are done, the spent leaves are soft enough to eat — a faintly grassy bite, a last trace of the plant itself.
Next — the fields of Sugita Tea Farm
Oguri-san's work is the connective tissue of the Makinohara Plateau's tea economy — linking growers and buyers, building infrastructure where the market falls short, keeping shin-cha traditions alive for the next generation. But the tea itself starts in the fields.
In Part 2, we visit Sugita Tea Farm — one of Oguri-san's long-time contract growers — to walk the rows, see the factory, and hear what thirty-five years of farming on this plateau have taught him.