Where Tea Master Tea Comes From (Part III): Mie
Greetings from Japan,
My name is Alex. I visit tea regions here in Japan on behalf of Daigoro San and Kanako San to give customers at Tea Master Matcha Café & Green Tea Shop in Downtown Los Angeles a better sense of where the shop’s tea comes from. You can read more about our connection in my reports on Yame Shincha from Spring 2023 right here: CLICK HERE! and check out the second installment of the series about Shizuoka Tea from Summer 2023 here: CLICK HERE!
This is the third installment and the first time I had the joy of touring a tea region with Daigoro San and Kanako San in person. We visited Mie Prefecture where the legacy of some of the pioneers of organic tea farming in Japan lives on in the teas of Odai Town’s Safety Re-Farm 88.
ISE TEA
Located in what might be considered the ‘middle’ of Japan, Mie Prefecture occupies a space of and between Japan’s second and third most populous regions: Kansai and Chubu. Some maps place Mie in Kansai: home to the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara as well as Osaka. Others consider it a part of Chubu: where mountainous areas like Nagano and Yamanashi sit above lowlands like Shizuoka and Aichi. Wherever Mie is placed in these geographic groupings, the one thing that most people agree on is that the prefecture’s Ise Grand Shrine is one of the most important places of worship and pilgrimage in all of Japan.
Constructed of solid cypress wood and without nails, Ise Grand Shrine is dedicated to the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu. Fitting then that it was the starting point of our early Autumn visit to the region in October 2023. We visited the shine in the late afternoon. I met with Daigoro San and Kanako San after taking a quartet of trains lines starting from my home in Kamakura through to Yokohama, Nagoya and finally to Ise City. Ise Grand Shrine sits on the outskirts of town.
Located at the convergence of the Isuzu and Shimamichi Rivers, the shrine is captivating even to those who have visited many of the storied Shinto shrines in the country. Strolling through the forest one is overcome by the sense of ease that comes from being in close proximity to great power, a sort of submission and reverence for that which is beyond our understanding. The scene is dominated by nature from the soaring trees to the paths to the thatched roof of the shrine buildings themselves. The structures are remarkable in their modesty. They lack the bright golds and reds that illuminate so many places of worship in Japan.
It's no accident that a shrine so fully dedicated to the goddess of the sun leaves the job of shining to her.
After visiting the famed shine in the evening and enjoying a replenishing overnight stay at a delightful onsen hotel nearby, Daigoro San and I returned to the shrine at sunrise. The silence was almost crystalline. A gentle, whispery chill was in the air. Later in the fall, tourists will flock to Ise Grand Shrine to see the surrounding forest burn in orange and yellow fall colors. For our visit though, we were almost completely alone. In the silence and humble but holy environs, neither of us dared articulate how excited we both were to fulfill a dream we’ve held for years: to finally visit a tea farm together in Japan.
As we exited the shrine, we crossed the smooth cypress planks of a bridge just as the sun goddess started kissing parts of the torii entrance gate gold. Before we left town to head toward the tea gardens, Daigoro San turned to me and grinned.
“Do you know Akafuku Mochi?”
When I confessed that I did not, he led the way to stop for an early morning treat. I would later discover that this convenient stop was one of the most important tea houses in all of Japan.
Over 300 years ago in 1707, during what was then the Edo Period of Japanese history, Akafuku was established as a tea house to refresh those making the pilgrimage to Ise Grand Shine. Akafuku mochi is made from pounded rice and azuki sweet red bean paste. The soft, wavy shape of the mochi is said to resemble the crystal-clear waters of the Isuzu River, which the tea house sits alongside.
Once seated, Daigoro San and I were served a pair of the iconic maroon pillows of mochi accompanied by a steaming cup of local Ise houjicha—local roasted green tea.
I bit into the soft but chewy mochi and immediately understood why its subtle flavors had appealed to shrine pilgrims for longer than the country of my birth, the United States, had existed. The texture of the pasty but crumbly red bean blended with the squishiness of the mochi magnificently. It was the type of treat that could be enjoyed any time of day, any season of the year. Still, it wasn’t until I washed the first bite down with the hot cup of houjicha that I felt fully at ease.
I let the soothing brew soak into me as the sun poked the rest of its head over the
horizon. I’ve had many special experiences with tea, but some can be downright
spiritual. Sitting with Daigoro San, a man I consider a friend and a tea teacher, while enjoying the simplicity of this perfectly soul-warming combination on the banks of the Isuzu River, I felt blessed by the sun goddess and the tea gods at once. Grateful would be an understatement. By the time I had savored the last gooey bite and sipped down the final gulp of roasted tea, I knew I would cherish the memory forever.
As we walked back to our hotel, joined forced with Kanako San and drove off for the tea mountain, I understood without needing ask why it wasn’t Mie Tea, but Ise Tea that brought us here. After all, in the preparation for this journey Daigoro San had given me one of his favorite tea books of all time: “Tea Leaf Legend,” By Heigo Toba (『茶葉伝説』鳥羽平悟 is the full title in Japanese).
THE TEA LEAF LEGEND
Tea is full of legends. From how leaves accidentally fell (or leapt) into the bowls of the first drinkers, to the way so many famous teas came into being. Tea and legends go hand in hand. But as far as Ise Tea goes, the legend of Toba San is an especially interesting one because it is a legend set in modern times.
Keeping in mind that his book, as of now, has never been translated to English, I read the entire 190 pages of text using only Google Translate as my aid. So, consider any inaccuracies errors on my part (or if you feel really compelled, you can blame the AIs at Google too). The briefest summary that I can offer, is the following:
Toba San was born as the second son of a tea producing family in 1929 in Watarai Town, Mie Prefecture. After his elder brother passed away in World War II, he took over the family tea farm, going on to win an unprecedented three consecutive awards from the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry for, essentially, the best tea in Japan. His commitment to excellent tea was evident in these years but in the early 1970s everything changed when he discovered contamination in the local drinking water from chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by tea farmers..
“The original taste of tea has faded,” Toba San’s father had told him at one point and in that moment, Toba San started to understand what he meant.
He noticed the contaminated water again while bathing, the way it felt slippery and the way his skin stung and felt tight after bathing. After confirming his suspicions with Professors from nearby Mie University, he decided he needed to do something to make a change. The legendary phase of his tea farming journey began in earnest. He became obsessed with recapturing not just flavor but the spirt of original, natural tea.
The agricultural cooperative policy in Japan even before the war didn’t just condone but actually recommended the use of chemicals in farming. By the 1970s these practices were considered ‘conventional’ farming standards. With his commitment to making the best tea possible and his personal experiences with chemicals, this wasn’t something Toba San was willing to accept. Others, including a collective of housewives and some editorials, were calling for more attention about agrochemicals in farming but hearing about the process from Toba San’s perspective in his book allows us to see how challenging the switch to organic farming was on the ground. It is illuminating to read about the sheer scale of the multi-year project of turning soil that had become dry, arid, and unusable because of the conventional farming practices into loose, moist, and biodiverse soil that farming organically required. Still, many of the biggest challenges he
faced were from other farmers in unions and organizations he was belonged to who simply were not willing to compromise their livelihood for the massive gamble of trying to make organic tea, even though that wasn’t a word they used back then.
Toba San and those brave farmers who joined him in a new collective committed to organic farming faced a number of other challenges on the farms and off of them but eventually, after many years and much effort, they were able to make organic teas consistently. By then though, an entire other set of problems popped up with the challenges of finding reliable buyers and consumers, setting off other harrowing business adventures that almost destroyed their livelihoods once more. Eventually, thanks to a relationship with an organic-focused consumer co-op called the SeikatsuClub—which began in 1965 in Tokyo and still exists today—they were able to not just make ends meet but actually thrive.
Toba San is no longer with us but what’s most striking about his work was his passion, belief, and commitment to do whatever it took to make delicious, natural, organic Japanese teas. At the end of the book he made a comment that has stuck with me:
“Organic cultivation is courageous cultivation.”
「有機栽培は勇気ある栽培です。」
For years I had tried to make sense of why it was so hard to find delicious organic teas in Japan. Reading Toba San’s book helped me see the sheer scale of the challenge for farmers and also gave me hope that domestic consumers like the Seikatsu Club had been helping drive demand in Japan for decades. Usually I’d only heard that Japanese tea lovers didn’t care about the label ‘organic.’
But before we continue our journey into the tradition of organic teas that Toba San helped bring to Mie Prefecture, we should take a break here to talk about the difference between ‘organic’ and conventional teas in Japan and how we can start to think about them as tea lovers.
ORGANIC & CONVENTIONAL TEAS
Tea lovers that stop by Tea Master often ask about organic teas and to help them with their questions, I wrote a bit on the Tea Master FAQ page about the topic that I will include here:
Great tea is combination of people and nature working together.
Whenever we find good quality, well-made teas that we enjoy
ourselves, we like to offer them to our guests. We pay special
attention to certified organic teas because we believe in the
collective responsibility we all have to sustain our planet by
supporting the health of natural environment and all the beings who
live here. Our guests often share these views and year by year we
are offering more organic teas whenever possible but it’s important
to explain why we don’t offer exclusively organic teas at our shop.
For an industry that’s thousands of years old, certified organic
farming is a relatively new development in the world of tea. Of
course, there have always been farmers across the ages and tea
producing countries like China, Japan and India that used
exclusively natural methods for cultivating and processing tea. Some
farmers, even after the introduction of industrial farming, continued
to make teas in an entirely organic fashion. The biggest difference
today is that there governmental and private organizations that
certify those processes as organic, allowing farmers and merchants
to market their products accordingly. In Japan, since 2000, the duty
of certifying agricultural and processed foods as organic —thus
allowing them to be marketed as such — has fallen on Japanese
Agricultural Standards (JAS), a division of MAFF (Ministry of
Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries).
Organic certification in Japan can be a slow, expensive, and not
always rewarding process for farmers and producers. Transitioning
to conventional tea farming to organic tea farming takes time. Since
global demand for certain Japanese teas—especially matcha—has
only increased, not all farmers and producers have found a way to
make the transition to fully organic farming yet. Producing matcha,
for example, requires highly skilled farming and production methods
that happen on a tight schedule and are always at the whims of
mother nature (if there’s not enough of any one element, or if it
happens too late or too early, it can be hard for farmers to keep up).
Conventional farming where producers can use fertilizers that
contain nitrogen, for example, can offer a more reliable yield.
Although studies about nitrogen fertilizers have been shown to effect
water runoff from farms that use them—causing concerns in local
populations where they are used at too large of a scale, too
often—there has been little to no evidence of nitrogen fertilizers
harming finished tea. Obviously organic fertilizers would eliminate
most of these concerns but until organic farming can catch up to
conventional farming methods—which has been in place for
decades—the transition will continue to be slow and costly for
producers. Organic farming is spreading in the tea world, but it is
happening gradually.
Unlike premium coffee in many parts of the world, where the best
beans are often exported for drinkers abroad, tea from many famous
growing countries (China, India, and Taiwan, for example) is still
mostly consumed in the countries where it is grown. The same is
true in Japan. Unlike many countries in the West, including the
United States, consumers in tea-producing countries have simply not
yet demanded fully organic farming processes in the same volumes
that they have elsewhere. As more and more tea drinkers show
producers that they care about organic farming, the certification
process should speed up, hopefully become more cost effective and
common, and ultimately be worth it for the farmers themselves. The
reality is that although incredible organic teas are on the rise in
Japan—and we offer some of them in our shop—the consistently
highest quality teas, made by the most skilled producers in the
country, are often still conventional teas. We look forward to this
balance continuing to shift going forward as all of us—famers,
producers, consumers, and vendors—support the practices that help
our planet continue to thrive and work with nature to create delicious
teas.
Now that we have some context about organic tea and Toba San’s story, let’s continue our journey into the Ise Tea with our visit to one of the farms carrying on Toba San’s commitment to organic farming and one that produces some of our favorite organic teas in the world: Safety Re-Farm 88 and their associated brand Yamarin Seicha.
SAFETY RE-FARM 88 VISIT
It was 9:30 AM when we arrived in Odai Town not far from the Miyagawa River. Like other tea farms I have visited for Tea Master in Fukuoka and Shizuoka, the tea fields start in the valley and stretch all the way up the mountains in neat rows. Rain is plentiful in this part of Mie Prefecture and the climate is ideal for growing tea. In fact, the teas in Mie are of such a high quality—and grown at such high volumes—that they have often been transported in the past to be mixed in and sold as Uji tea without most tea drinkers able to tell the difference. In that way, the quality of teas from Mie—Ise Tea especially—is far higher than its lesser-known reputation would suggest.
Daigoro San hadn’t visited Mie in almost a decade, and I could tell he was excited to meet his calm and collegial counterpart Kimihiko Hayashi, the CEO of Safety Re-Farm 88 who would be our guide for the day. I learned Hayashi San was a creative tea lover who was involved at every stage of the process, right down to coming up with the names for his teas, which he once even created his own kanji characters to represent. He showed us around the raw leaf factory, the roast factory, and the finishing factory, where teas were finally packaged.
The smell of the fall harvest was everywhere from the fields to the fresh factory where Hayashi San gave us a tour of the machines as plumes of leaf dust floated through the air. The fall harvesting and processing of bancha was underway. Some of the workers wore light sweaters since temperatures had begun to drift away from the heat and humidity of summer. The milder weather was pleasant for a tour of the factory, not too hot or cold. Hayashi San walked us through the various stages of processing, explaining the journey leaves must take after being harvested. We watched the machines work the tea as the mesmerizing fragrance of freshly steamed leaves felt intoxicating. Hayashi kindly explained that the roller machines will need 20 minutes with the bancha but when sencha was being processed it ratches up to 30 minutes.
It was fascinating to hear how the machines can be adjusted to account for temperature
and time depending on which tea was being processed, taking into consideration factors like the season or the time of day. Lifetimes worth of experience and expertise are packed into these tiny details. It boggled my mind to consider how many batches of tea Hayashi San and his team had processed in order to have this level of familiarity with his leaves. As we left the first stop, a few farmers pull up with bags of hearty, newly plucked leaves, and stems for processing into fall bancha.
We visited the roasting factory next. Daigoro San, Kanako San and I followed Hayashi San past stacks of karigane tea—the teas made from the stems and sticks of kabusecha, a covered tea that Mie is well known for. Kabusecha is found as part of the Rich Blend and Maro teas sold at Tea Master and are among Safety Re-Farm 88’s finest teas. Hayashi San told us how growing kabusecha organically is one of the more challenging types of tea. Covering the leaves deprives the plant of direct sunlight which changes the chemical components of the leaves to compensate, which increases the umami and sweetness and lowers astringency and bitterness when we drink the brew. Without the help of conventional nitrogen fertilizers many farmers use for shade grown teas like kabusecha (and gyokuro and matcha for that matter) it is too hard for the tea plants to quickly recover after this covering season on their own. This makes rotating the areas that are covered when growing kabusecha, adding yet another layer of challenge organic farmers must meet.
I considered this as the smell of freshly roasted bancha—houjicha—covered us like a blanket. It contains all the warmth and coziness of coffee and hot chocolate but neither as bitter as the former or as sweet as the latter. Even just a whiff makes me think of the colder months, the heaviest time of year when I drink houjicha.
As we stand there listening to Hayashi San, I’m overwhelmed not just by the rich smell of the roasting area but also the volume of other questions I have yet to ask about organic farming that came up while reading Toba San’s book. I listed some of them in the car to Diagoro San and Kanako San but since it would be a bit too cumbersome to berate Hayashi San with all these questions, I just ask about the fertilizer, which is so often the point of contention between organic and conventional teas.
In the 70s and 80s when Ise Tea farmers followed Toba San’s lead by going organic, finding the right natural fertilizers was an incredible challenge. Back then sawdust and chicken droppings became two of the best fertilizers. Hayashi San explained that regulations had grown stricter since then and it was harder to find organically raised chickens so they could no longer use the droppings. Instead, two of the more common ingredient these days are discarded fish material and the husks of sesame seeds.
I watched Daigoro San and Kanako San nod along as Hayashi San spoke about other challenges—including teaching the next generation how to farm in this more labor-intensive way. It’s something we’ve all wondered about and like all traditional methods in Japan something that a country with such a rapidly aging population often worries about. But I am also struck as we talk about all these details, by another wave of gratitude that I get to be here with Daigoro San and Kanako San. We spent many days and evenings talking about traveling to the source of Tea Master’s best teas and trying to pick apart all these details with our feet on the ground and now we were doing it together. Before I got lost in a cloud of bliss, I asked Hayashi San what was inspiring him in the tea world lately.
“Our Kiki Café,” he smiled brightly. “We will welcome you there later.”
Before heading down the hill to town and the newly opened café, we visited the finishing factory, where we got to see how the teas receiving their final touches before being put into packaging that our guests see on Tea Master’s shelves. Safety Re-Farm 88’s new tea bag machine was among the most captivating pieces of equipment I’d ever seen at a tea factory. Only a couple years old the bagging machine looked sophisticated even before it was turned on. Once it was fired up, it was a marvel. Tea bags were filled one at a time but such a smooth manner that was hypnotizing to behold. Despite being known and respected for their commitment to organic, natural teas, the tea bagging machine was indicative of the way that Safety Re-Farm 88 was also determined to modernize and meet the many challenges it faced with ingenuity.
One special moment of the tea finishing factory for me was seeing the room where they processed the organic green tea powder. Safety Re-Farm 88 doesn’t make matcha, but this tea powder was a kind of gateway for me personally into the world of matcha after I tried it over a decade ago, around 2010, at a sushi restaurant in West Los Angeles. This was actually the tea that eventually led me to Tea Master and to Daigoro San and Kanako San, so it was really a full circle moment to be there to see how the delicious tea powder came into being.
Eventually, the time came for us to make it down the hill to Odai Town. On the way I saw a line of wind turbines strung along the mountain crest on the horizon and local kids hit the ramps at a local skatepark in town. The sun was high in the sky by the time we parked and walked into the café.
KIKI CAFE
Kiki Café is a name with several meanings relating to trees, family names, the kanji character for tea, and tasting competitions. The newly opened café offers a chance for producers like Hayashi San to directly connect to tea lovers and watch the smiles grow on their faces as they try their teas and tea products.
At Kiki Café, we sample Houjicha (roasted green tea), Wakocha (black tea), kabusecha (shade grown green tea), bancha (tea plucked later in the season) and kutsurugi cha (sencha). They are all delicious but the kabusecha was especially interesting. We were all encouraged when we found out that Safety Re-Farm 88 might potentially offering it for customers to buy in the next year. Among the café items we tried including cheesecake, ice cream and warabi mochi lattes, the three of us were most impressed by the tea soda and agedango, a type of fried mochi ball on a stick. We ended up ordering extra, in fact.
Since Tea Master itself was built on these sort of in-person exchanges, it was a delight to try many of the items at Kiki Café with Daigoro San and Kanako San. These two hard working tea people finally got a chance to be served for once and it was easy to see the relaxation and relief on their faces. It was a well-deserved break, made possible by the spirit of Ise Cha.
TEA UNLIKE ANY OTHER
Like all my visits to tea regions, by the end I become spellbound by the expertise of the farmers and overwhelmed by sensory overload of how the natural beauty of a place can be transferred into a cup. I had so many more questions, but it was time for us to go. The staff at Kiki Café were kind enough to make sure we have tried everything we wanted. Our bellies are full. Our smiles wide and our bags of tea products bulged.
As we drive away, Daigoro San asks me if I had any new thoughts about organic tea farming in Japan following our visit.
On the one hand, I’ve heard the opinion that it was long past time for consumers to hold the producers and farmers accountable. There are those—mostly foreign—tea lovers who believe we should support only natural and organic tea as consumers. If enough people do this, the logic goes, then the farmers will have to make the change and the tea industry will evolve.
This attitude is one someone as convicted of Toba San would surely have empathized with but as we wrapped up our visit to Safety Re-Farm 88, I was struck by a different feeling.
Instead of an urge to pressure or judge the other farmers who have yet to go organic, I felt the need to celebrate, honor, and admire the farmers who have done so. For so many valid reasons, it is not easy to make the change and there are no guarantees. Tea farming is hard no matter how you do it. A great tea mind that I admire once said that the only true tea masters are the farmers themselves. If that’s true, then organic tea farmers are like the masters of the masters—and I will forever be grateful to better understand the delicious teas they offer tea lovers like me and my fellow Tea Master fans.
In the end, I found myself remembering the first tea I had during the experience in Mie: that houjicha with the Akafuku mochi right outside of the Ise Grand Shine. We didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out that Safety Re-Farm 88 produces that tea. It’s an organic houjicha that is specifically blended to fit with the sweet red bean mochi. It suddenly all made sense.
When I brought some of the houjicha and mochi from Akafuku back for a souvenir of the trip to share with my family, I craved the tea when I tasted the mochi and craved the mochi when I tasted the tea. I caved into the craving, bit into the mochi and drank the tea so it mixed in my mouth. It was a match made in heaven no doubt but with more than a little help from the sun goddess herself.
Did Akafuku seek out Safety Re-Farm 88 because it was organic? Or did it seek it out because it was delicious? Or both?
In the end, it didn’t matter. They fit perfectly together. Just like when I finished my last sip of Safety Re-Farm 88’s houjicha on the banks of the river with Daigoro San that special fall morning in Ise, I felt soothed by the houjicha when I got back home to Kamakura. If Toba San was still alive, I would admit to him that knowing the tea was organic made it taste just a little better after all.
I guess the taste of the best teas, like memories of the best legends, never really fully wash away.
- Written by Alex Dwyer (@adweezy), October 2023