"Shizuoka for color, Uji for aroma, Sayama for taste" — the old proverb ranks Sayama last, the one that finishes the job. The closer, the knockout punch. I think about that word, todome, every time I drink Yokota-san's tea. It does not dazzle on the first sip. It settles in, quietly, and then you realize you have been reaching for the cup again and again.
Sayama is not a region that announces itself. The tea fields here are small, the producers few, the output modest by any national measure. But the tea lingers in a way that larger growing regions rarely achieve.
An hour from Tokyo, another world entirely
Sayama sits in Saitama Prefecture, about an hour from central Tokyo by train. We are used to visiting tea farms in the deep mountains of Shizuoka or the wide plains of Kagoshima. Sayama is neither. Tea fields appear between houses, alongside roads, tucked into the gaps of an ordinary suburban landscape. The contrast still catches me off guard.
Because the farms are small and the city is close, most Sayama producers have long sold their tea directly — not through brokers or auctions, but from their own shops. The customer walks in, talks to the person who grew the tea, and buys it by the bag. This has been the way for decades, long before the rest of the industry discovered direct-to-consumer.
That proximity shapes the tea itself. When you know who is drinking what you make, you listen differently. You adjust. You refine. The result, across Sayama, is a kind of individuality that mass production cannot replicate — each producer's tea carrying a distinct character, tuned to a specific audience.
Takahiro Yokota — Yokota-san — was thirty-one when we visited in 2021. Young for an owner, old enough to know what he wants. He runs Yokota Tea Farm, a family operation with over a hundred years of history, and he thinks about sayama tea not only as his own product but as a regional proposition. What should Sayama tea be, given everything it is and is not? The question drives him.
Already preparing for next year
When we arrived, the fields told the story before Yokota-san said a word. The first flush had just ended, but instead of resting, he was already at work on next year's harvest.
Several rows had been cut back hard — a technique called chudan-gari, mid-level shearing. Every few years, the upper portion of the tea bush is removed entirely, branches and all, leaving the plant stripped bare. It looks drastic, almost violent.
The reason is structural. As a tea bush grows, its branches multiply and thin out. More branches mean more buds, which sounds like a good thing — until you consider that each bud now receives a smaller share of the plant's nutrients. Volume goes up. Concentration goes down.
By cutting back to the thicker wood, Yokota-san forces the bush to regenerate from sturdier branches. Fewer buds emerge the following spring, but each one carries more — more amino acids, more depth, a denser umami. A trade of quantity for quality, paid forward by a full year.
He told us he would skip the second flush entirely this year, letting the plants rest and store energy for the following spring. The first harvest had barely ended, and he was already thinking twelve months ahead.
Soil that lives
Three years before our visit, Yokota-san shifted from chemical fertilizers to organic ones. The change was deliberate, gradual, and — by his own account — transformative.
"We used to put in a lot of chemical fertilizer. Now we are focusing on organic inputs that work with the ground itself — building the soil rather than feeding the plant directly. Three years in, the flavor has changed."
There is a curious paradox in this. Laboratory analysis consistently shows that chemically fertilized tea contains higher levels of free amino acids — the compounds responsible for umami. Yet in blind sensory evaluations, tasters tend to perceive stronger umami in organically grown tea. The numbers say one thing. The tongue says another.
Yokota-san knelt between the rows and turned over a handful of soil. Tiny insects scattered. Threads of white mycelia laced through the dark earth. The trimmings from the mid-level shearing — leaves, twigs, small branches — had not been removed. They lay between the rows, decomposing slowly, feeding the organisms that would, in turn, feed the roots.
Tea grows from this soil. The clippings return to it. Microorganisms break them down. The cycle closes.
Rich soil, built by insects and fungi. Mycelia wrapping around the roots, protecting them. And from all of this, tea that tastes noticeably better than it did a year ago. This year's leaves from Yokota-san carried a cleaner sweetness, a rounder umami — the kind of improvement that does not happen by accident.
Searching for what Sayama can be
Yokota-san grows fifteen or sixteen cultivars. Each one is an experiment in progress — evaluated for flavor, aroma, yield, processing characteristics, and whether it can contribute something to the identity of Sayama tea as a whole.
What caught our attention most was his thinking about icho — wilting.
Wilting is the step where freshly picked leaves are left to rest and partially oxidize before processing. It is standard practice for oolong and black tea, where that oxidation produces floral and fruity aromas absent from the raw leaf. For sencha, it is far less common. But in recent years, a growing number of Japanese producers have begun incorporating controlled wilting into their sencha production, chasing a different kind of fragrance.
"When it comes to shaded cultivation — kabuse — we cannot compete with Shizuoka or Kyushu. They have the scale, the infrastructure. So I started wondering whether wilting and aroma could be where Saitama shows its strengths instead."
This is why Yokota-san's cultivar collection includes varieties like Okuharuka, Nagomiyutaka, and Fukumidori — plants chosen not for yield or early budding, but for the aromatic complexity they reveal when wilted. Each one responds to the process differently, and part of Yokota-san's work is mapping those responses, finding the point where each cultivar's character opens up.
Among everything he made that year, one tea in particular stayed with me.
Yonkon tea, made from the yabukita cultivar
Yonkon tea. A sencha made without seicho — the final rolling step that gives conventional sencha its signature needle-straight leaf shape. Skip that step and the leaves keep their natural curl, twisted and irregular, nothing like the tidy dark-green needles most people associate with Japanese green tea.
The omission is not cosmetic. Without fine rolling, certain harsh edges in flavor — a sharpness, a trace of bitterness — soften. The cup becomes cleaner, more transparent. The tea's own character, rather than the processing character, comes forward.
Yokota-san made his yonkon tea from wilted Yabukita. A gentle roundness on the palate, a delicate floral fragrance that drifted upward through the nose, and beneath it a clean umami built by three years of organic soil work. The clarity was striking — a tea you could drink cup after cup without fatigue, each infusion revealing something the previous one had held back.
He told us it was the first time he had made it. An experiment, nothing more. The fact that a first attempt could taste this resolved was surprising enough. But what surprised us more was the machine that made it possible.
A dryer no one remembers
Tea processing is, at its core, a controlled removal of moisture. Every step — rough rolling, medium rolling, fine rolling — applies heat and pressure to draw water from the leaf. Yonkon tea, by skipping the fine rolling stage, loses one of those drying steps entirely. The final drying phase has to run longer to compensate.
Longer drying, though, means more heat exposure. And heat strips aroma. The cultivar fragrance, the delicate wilting notes — everything Yokota-san had built into the leaf during the field and withering stages — would evaporate under a conventional hot-air dryer.
That is when he turned to something that had been sitting in the corner of the factory for years. A Kuriyama-style dryer.
Inside, tiers of shelves lined with Japanese paper — washi. We have visited dozens of tea factories across Japan and had never seen anything like it. The manufacturer no longer exists. Yokota-san said the only other one he knew of was at a prefectural tea research station.
His father had bought it years ago, more out of curiosity than necessity. It processed small volumes and took a long time, and for conventional sencha production there was no obvious use. So it sat, unused, gathering dust in the back of the workshop.
Unlike standard dryers that blast hot air directly onto the leaves, the Kuriyama machine heats the air inside the chamber and circulates it gently. No direct contact between airflow and leaf. The drying is slow, even, almost tender — the kind of patient heat that removes moisture without tearing away fragrance.
"When you apply fire to tea, a certain scent lingers in the cup. I wanted to replace that fire-scent with the wilting aroma instead — so that what stays in the cup after you drink is not the heat, but the flowers."
The machine his father never found a use for turned out to be the last piece Yokota-san needed. A dryer designed for gentleness, waiting in the factory for a tea that required exactly that. There was something almost fated about it — and it made clear that this particular tea could not have been made by anyone else, in any other place.
Small scale, sharp focus
"Wilting is something you can do because you are small. It takes time, it takes space, it takes hands. On a large farm you would need dedicated equipment, and you are at the mercy of the weather. But for us, it is a weapon — a way to make tea that is drunk for its aroma, without forcing shading or competing with regions that will always out-produce us."
Time, space, attention. The three things a small farm has that a large one does not. Yokota-san has built his approach around that advantage — not trying to match the volume or the deep umami of shaded teas from bigger regions, but finding the aromatic register that only a small Sayama producer, working by hand, can reach.
He had sent us samples the previous year as well. What struck us this time was how much better the tea had become. The weather may have helped, but weather alone does not account for this kind of leap. The improvement was the work of a producer who studies, adjusts, and refuses to repeat himself.
Single-origin tea, by nature, changes every year. The same field, the same cultivar, but a different spring, a different set of decisions. Yokota-san embraces that impermanence. Each harvest is a new answer to the same question — what can this place, these plants, this year's conditions produce that nothing else can?
Eight years into tea-making when we met him. A hundred-year farm behind him, a lifetime of seasons ahead. When we left, the cut-back rows were already greening at the base — small buds pushing up from the thick wood, slower than the rest of the field, but going. We are already curious what next year's tea will taste like.
