In Part 1, we spent the morning with Oguri-san, a tea merchant on the Makinohara Plateau, tasting his blends and hearing how he thinks about flavor. Now, in the afternoon, we drive a few minutes down the road to meet the farmer who grows the leaves — Sugita-san, an organic tea producer who has been working this land for thirty-five years.
Two families, one plateau, two very different relationships with the same soil.
Thirty-five years on the Makinohara Plateau. Sugita Tea Farm.
Sugita Tea Farm did not begin as a tea farm. Sugita-san's father and grandfather were in the construction materials business — heavy machinery, earthmoving, the kind of work that reshapes terrain. About thirty-five years ago, the family turned that equipment toward a different purpose: clearing uncultivated land on the Makinohara Plateau and planting tea.
They started growing organically before Japan's JAS organic certification system even existed. (The JAS organic standard was not introduced until August 2000 — reference.) Today, the farm produces organic sencha and organic black tea alongside conventionally grown Benifuki black tea, Yabukita and Tsuyuhikari sencha, and Okumidori tencha — the shade-grown leaf that becomes matcha. Four cultivars, two farming philosophies, one family of four.
That is a lot of tea for a small operation. During harvest season, the Sugita family brings in extra hands — young people apprenticing on nearby farms, aspiring growers looking for experience. The fields become a kind of informal school.
We sat down with Motoyuki Sugita, the second generation.
"My father and grandfather were in building materials, so we had the heavy machines," Sugita-san tells us. "The organic fields we farm now — that land was not a tea field before. We cleared it ourselves, broke the ground, planted from scratch. We have only been doing this since my father's generation, so our history is still pretty short."
Sugita-san was in middle school when his father made the switch. That father went on to become a recognized practitioner of temomi — hand-rolled tea, a technique that has nearly vanished from modern production. He is a member of the Temomi Hozonkai, the preservation society dedicated to keeping the craft alive.
The elder Sugita's conviction — that natural things should be grown naturally, with as little artificial intervention as possible — set the direction the farm still follows.
A farmer and a merchant, two generations deep
Oguri Tea Farm, the merchant we visited in Part 1, once grew their own tea as well. Over time, the trading side of the business consumed all their attention, and they began leasing their land to farmers. Sugita-san's family was one of the first to take it on. The relationship between the two families stretches back a generation — Sugita-san's father and Oguri-san's predecessors worked together, and now their sons continue the partnership, pushing each other toward new kinds of tea.
What organic means on the Makinohara Plateau
Oguri-san and Sugita-san are currently growing organic black tea for export. The reason they chose to specialize in organic for the overseas market is straightforward: every country has different pesticide residue standards. Organic sidesteps the problem entirely.
But organic farming on the Makinohara Plateau is not a simple decision. Oguri-san explains the difficulty plainly.
"Very few people do organic here. When you are surrounded by conventional farms, being the only organic operation is nearly impossible. If the farm next door sprays, the wind carries it over. When inspectors test the leaves, sometimes the numbers come back positive — and there is nothing you can do about it. You need isolated land, set apart from the others."
There is also the matter of consistency. Organic fields are harder to stabilize. Output fluctuates. Quality shifts with the weather.
"Sugita-san's method is a natural-cycle approach," Oguri-san continues. "He barely uses machines. The risk is that flavor changes from year to year — you cannot control it the way conventional farming can. But when the conditions line up, the tea is extraordinary. It surpasses anything you would expect."
Their organic black tea has found its way into high-end supermarkets across Japan. A quiet validation for the way Sugita-san farms.
Chagusaba — where better tea led to a richer ecosystem
In Shizuoka, there is a traditional farming method called chagusaba — literally "tea-grass field." In 2013, the FAO recognized it as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS). The principle is simple. Grasses — bamboo grass, silvergrass, and other wild plants — are grown on land adjacent to the tea fields, cut, dried, and laid between the rows of tea bushes as mulch.
The dried grass suppresses weeds, feeds nutrients back into the soil as it decomposes, and gradually builds a layer of organic matter that transforms the texture of the earth beneath it.
We walked into one of the chagusaba fields, and the difference was immediate underfoot. The soil gave — soft, spongy, alive in a way that compacted conventional fields simply are not. Without herbicides, the spaces between the rows need to be weeded by hand, which is slow, repetitive work. But the soil repays the effort.
In the grassland areas where the mulch plants grow, over three hundred species of wild flora have been documented, including endemic and endangered varieties. The grasslands also harbor beneficial insects — natural predators that help keep pest populations in check on the tea fields nearby. A system designed to make better tea ended up protecting an entire local ecosystem. Sugita-san has incorporated chagusaba into his organic fields as a core part of his method.
Unka — the pest that makes honey-scented tea
Green tea and black tea come from the same plant. Different processing, different results — but the starting material is identical. I learned something during this visit that I had not fully understood before: the same cultivar can become either one. The deciding factors are how it is grown and how it is processed afterward.
Cultivars suited for black tea tend to be poor candidates for green tea, and vice versa. Benifuki, for example, is high in catechins. As green tea, the astringency overwhelms everything else — harsh, unpleasant, difficult to drink. But oxidize those same leaves into black tea, and the catechins transform. The astringency finds balance. A strong, fragrant cup with a clean finish.
Then there is the exception.
"With conventional farming, Yabukita makes a mediocre black tea," Sugita-san says. "But organically grown Yabukita? That makes a black tea with real fragrance and quality. Something completely different."
The reason is a small, pale insect called unka — the tea green leafhopper. In conventional farming, unka are pests. They feed on the sap of tea leaves, weakening the plant, discoloring the foliage. But in organic fields, where no pesticides intervene, their presence triggers a defense mechanism that changes the tea entirely.
"When a tea plant is attacked, it releases aromatic compounds to protect itself," Oguri-san explains. "All plants do this — it is a survival response. The scent changes. It becomes sweeter, softer. You can smell it during harvest, this gentle sweetness rising from the leaves."
If you look closely in an organic field, you can find unka feeding on the underside of leaves. Where they have fed, the leaf turns red and curls slightly — what producers call unka-me, "unka buds." Those damaged leaves, when oxidized into black tea, produce a fragrance often described as honey-like. A sweetness that would never develop in a leaf left untouched.
"For black tea, that is exactly what you want," Sugita-san says. "But for green tea, the color shifts from green to red. That is a problem."
A pest that ruins one kind of tea and elevates another. The same insect, the same leaf — the outcome depends entirely on what you intend to make.
The terraced field they carved from the mountain
Sugita-san manages ten to fifteen separate plots. We drove to one of them — a terraced organic Yabukita field on a hillside, reached by a narrow road that climbed steeply through the trees. We passed a wild boar fence, rounded a final bend, and the view opened up.
This was the field the family had cleared thirty-five years ago. The one they built from nothing.
"This area used to be rice paddies," Sugita-san says. "Rice paddy soil is clay — dense, waterlogged, no good for tea. So we reshaped the land into terraces for drainage, and then hauled in soil from the Makinohara Plateau. The red earth there is ideal for tea. We only had to do it once, but even once was an enormous amount of work."
The decision to go organic came later, and it came from something small. A few years after the tea plants had matured, Sugita-san's father found a dead earthworm in the field — killed, he believed, by the chemicals they were using.
"He thought, 'We have built something in a place with such a good natural environment — it does not make sense to kill the creatures living in it.' That was the moment we switched to organic."
It was midsummer when we visited. The sun was fierce, the air heavy with heat, and the tea rows were a vivid, almost electric green — the color of leaves that have never known a chemical spray. Standing on the high ground with the valley falling away below, the view was nothing but tea and sky. Thirty-five years of careful stewardship had turned this cleared hillside into a quiet, self-sustaining world. The soil soft, the air still, the insects going about their work undisturbed.
There is a downside to farming this way. The wild boars come.
"We have spent over thirty years building these pesticide-free fields," Sugita-san says. "The soil is full of microorganisms and earthworms — that is what happens when you do not spray. But it also means the boars know exactly which fields to target. They come straight for ours, right through the rows.
"The chagusaba grasslands help, though. They harbor natural predators — insects that feed on the pests. The plants and the insects reach a balance through the food chain. It takes a long time to get there, but once the ecosystem matures, it sustains itself."
A year-round vigil for a single harvest
I asked Sugita-san what the hardest part of tea farming is.
"Nature does not repeat itself," he says. "The climate, the temperature — never the same two years running. The timing of the buds, the firmness of the stems, the moisture in the leaves, the softness of the new growth — all of it shifts. And if you want to sell a consistent product, you have to adjust. Every year, you are figuring it out from the beginning."
Everything Sugita-san does across the calendar points toward a single moment: the first flush harvest in May. The ichibancha. Every decision — when to fertilize, how to prune, which weeds to pull — is made in service of those few weeks in spring when the year's best leaves emerge.
But the harvest is not an ending. The moment the leaves are picked, the next cycle begins. The portions of the plant left behind after picking become part of the foundation for next year's growth — they must be protected from insects and disease through the summer, autumn, and winter. Fertilizing, pruning, weeding, mowing the surrounding grass, laying down chagusaba mulch in the cold months. Day after day, season after season, all of it building toward another May.
Three factors, infinite possibilities
I asked Sugita-san what he wants to do next.
"Tea still has so many possibilities that people have not explored," he says. "Take Yabukita — you can make it into green tea or black tea. Cultivar, farming method, processing method. Multiply those three factors together and the number of possible teas is almost limitless. That, to me, is what makes this work so interesting.
"I think there should be all kinds of tea. We probably make more varieties than most farms our size" — he pauses, smiling — "but I like the idea of collaborating with other things. Tea paired with different foods, different contexts. The combinations keep opening up."
If he were to take on a new cultivar, he says, it would be Koshun — originally a green tea variety, but one that, when processed as black tea, produces a mellow, aromatic cup with a flavor close to milk tea. A gentle sweetness, a rounded body, something you could drink without sugar and not miss it.
The plateau, the people, the next cup
"Tea brings people together," Sugita-san says. "At home, at work — wherever people gather, there is tea." On the Makinohara Plateau, the dominant cultivar is Yabukita, the same variety that accounts for roughly 72 percent of all green tea produced in Japan. Deep-steamed Shizuoka sencha — the kind most people picture when they think of Japanese green tea — starts here, in these fields.
"Yabukita is the standard. But I hope younger people will discover other cultivars too, and find more reasons to be drawn to tea."
What we want to share through these articles is not expertise. It is the freedom to enjoy tea on your own terms — without rules, without pretension. You do not need specialized knowledge to brew a good cup. But knowing who grew the leaves, how they were raised, what the farmer was thinking about as the buds emerged in spring — that changes the way the tea tastes. Not chemically. Something quieter than that.
At the end of our visit, I told Sugita-san that I had enjoyed hearing all of his stories. He tilted his head slightly and said, "Well, that was not even all of them."