The deep-steamed Sencha from Makinohara — with its rich umami, dense green liquor, and the kind of full-bodied sweetness that lingers long after the cup is set down — is one of Shizuoka's most celebrated teas. Behind it lies the story of a former samurai who staked his second life on a desolate plateau that no one else would touch.
The Makinohara Plateau in Shizuoka Prefecture was a desolate place, abandoned even by local farmers during the great transformation at the end of the Edo period (1603–1868).
About Chujo Kageaki
Samurai days
Chujo Kageaki was born in 1827 as an illegitimate child of a samurai family in Edo (present-day Tokyo). He served the 13th Shogun, Iesada, and was an accomplished swordsman who taught martial arts to the samurai in his household. In 1867, when the 15th Shogun, Yoshinobu, surrendered political power to the Emperor and relocated to Shizuoka, Kageaki served in the elite escort that accompanied the former Shogun to his new home. That mission completed, the escort was disbanded.
With the fall of the Shogunate, Kageaki and his fellow samurai were forced to start over entirely — to build new lives from nothing.
Cultivation begins
Kageaki chose to take on the Makinohara Plateau — leading a group he called the "Kanayahara Cultivation Group." At the time, this land was a wilderness that even local farmers had written off as unworkable. The soil was thin, the water supply inadequate, and the plateau sat exposed to wind with no established infrastructure of any kind. According to accounts, Kageaki swore to the statesman Katsu Kaishu: "If you give me this land, I will pledge my life to cultivating it."
At age 42, Kageaki led the Cultivation Group onto the plateau and began. It took four years before the land yielded its first, modest harvest of tea buds. Four years of clearing, planting, and waiting — on a plateau that gave nothing back easily.
Late days
As the Meiji era progressed, land that had been government-owned was gradually opened to private sale. Members of the Cultivation Group began to drift — some stayed as farmers, others left the plateau entirely. The group that had once moved as one started to fracture.
During this period, the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture extended an offer to Kageaki — a position that would have meant leaving Makinohara behind. Kageaki refused. He wanted to see the cultivation through.
He later attempted to establish the "Makinohara Tea Manufacturing Company" to collect the plateau's harvests, process them together, and create an export operation. The petition for business funding was rejected, and the company was never founded.
Despite these setbacks, Kageaki devoted his life entirely to Makinohara. He died in 1896 at the age of 69, never having left.
Achievements of Chujo Kageaki
Outstanding leadership
Kageaki moved in distinguished company. He had personal ties to Katsu Kaishu and Yamaoka Tesshu — two of the most influential figures of the Meiji transition, sometimes called the "Three Masters of the Late Edo Era." Kageaki was a leader of the same mold.
At 42, he commanded a Cultivation Group of around 200 people. With their families included, it was a substantial community. What made this more remarkable was the composition of the group: former high-ranking samurai, Noh actors, and others with no farming background whatsoever. A group of complete amateurs in agriculture — brought together by the same loss of the world they had known.
That Kageaki managed to hold this diverse group together — through four years with no harvest, through the slow fracturing of the Meiji transition — long enough to transform a 200-hectare wilderness into a working tea garden says something about the quality of the person who led them.
With the pride of a samurai, he gave his second life to Makinohara
The leap Kageaki made was not a small one. Moving from the role of a trained guard in the Shogun's inner circle to the rough work of clearing and planting an untested plateau — that kind of transition takes more than ambition. It takes conviction.
When the Governor of Kanagawa offered Kageaki a way out, Kageaki's reply has been passed down through the years: "Once I have climbed a mountain, I would never come down, no matter what. I would sooner become fertilizer for the tea trees." It is a line that tells you everything about the man.
Kageaki never cut his topknot — the traditional mark of a samurai — for the rest of his life. He dedicated himself to Makinohara with the discipline of a warrior, not a farmer. When he died, Katsu Kaishu served as chairman of his funeral committee, a mark of deep respect. The members of the Cultivation Group visited his grave every day for 21 days.
The present Makinohara plateau
Today, Makinohara turns brilliant green in the season of the first flush. When Kageaki arrived, it was a 200-hectare wasteland — roughly 42 times the area of Tokyo Dome — with barely enough water to sustain life, let alone crops.
The Cultivation Group expanded that to 5,000 hectares. About 1,063 times the size of Tokyo Dome. A plateau that no farmer wanted became one of the largest tea gardens in Japan.
After Kageaki's death, the work continued. The land and the leaves were refined over generations, and the distinctive "deep-steamed" processing method — longer steaming time, which breaks down the leaf structure and produces a denser, more vibrant brew — was developed in the years that followed. Today, Makinohara tea is one of the defining names in Shizuoka, known for exactly that quality.
Kageaki's story belongs to a specific moment in history. But the shape of it — a person who loses everything and commits, without reservation, to building something entirely new from the ground — holds something that travels across time.
We source the kind of deep-steamed Shizuoka Sencha that Kageaki's plateau made possible — bright, full-bodied, and rich in umami. The same land he cleared, the same commitment to the leaf. Browse our green tea collection to find it.