Michio Hanamizu has served countless cups of tea since he started managing a tea farm 15 years ago, but one tasting was especially memorable. Compared with his usual prospective customers, this time it was particularly challenging to impress the participants’ palates: They were preschool students.
Hanamizu brewed a few different teas for the children, who were sampling them as part of an early childhood education program, and something unexpected delighted them.
“It seemed like the kids were not interested in green tea,” Hanamizu recalls. “But when we brewed black tea for them, their eyes shined.”
Hanamizu and his wife, Akiko, are the fourth generation of her family to operate Nagano-en, their tea farm in Sashima, Ibaraki Prefecture. Since Akiko’s great-grandfather established the farm in 1947, Nagano-en had produced only green teas, but the Hanamizus decided to start producing black tea after they saw those preschoolers’ reaction to it.
If black tea engages younger generations like that, Hanamizu thought, then it could be an essential product in the next era of Japanese tea.
Michio Hanamizu, seen here in his fields at Nagano-en in Ibaraki Prefecture, believes the future of Japanese tea is of the black variety.
| COURTESY OF NAGANO-EN
According to a report from the Global Japanese Tea Association, annual per-capita tea consumption in Japan is around 250 grams — just 50% of what it was in the early 1990s. By that time, coffee culture was already in its second wave of popularity, with coffee replacing tea as the daily beverage of many Japanese consumers. Bottled teas, with their convenient packaging and distribution, also contributed to the decline of loose-leaf tea consumption.
Japanese tea farmers and advocates are now looking for ways to preserve their industry. And Japanese black tea — known as wakōcha — may be part of the solution.
Wakōcha isn’t embedded in the country’s history and culture like green tea is — but nor does it share green tea’s reputation of being old-fashioned and mundane. For many domestic and international consumers, the novelty of Japanese black tea is highly attractive and could be an entry point to loose-leaf varieties in general, according to George Guttridge-Smith, head of international development at Kyoto Obubu Tea Farm in Wazuka, Kyoto Prefecture.
“Because sencha (a basic, steamed green tea), gyokuro (high-quality, shade-grown green tea) and other loose-leaf teas are less popular these days compared with things like matcha, if there’s a loose-leaf tea — like Japanese black tea — that can re-energize people’s interest in brewing loose-leaf tea … then it’s a short step to trying out some sencha again, or some gyokuro,” Guttridge-Smith says. “The popularity of (any one) loose-leaf tea type would be very good for the whole industry.”
Japan’s black tea revival
The Global Japanese Tea Association serves as a bridge between Japanese tea producers and global consumers. Simona Suzuki, who co-founded the association, has researched wakōcha’s history extensively. According to Suzuki’s research, Japan’s first attempt to produce black tea on a commercial scale was in the late-19th century. In 1895, Japan colonized Taiwan, another tea-producing region. Rather than allow Japanese and Taiwanese teas to compete on the global market, Japan continued green tea production domestically but left black tea production to Taiwan.
After World War II, there was some effort to restart black tea production in Japan, but when trade borders reopened in 1971, black tea could be imported from other countries that sold it at a much lower price point, causing production in Japan to lose momentum again.
In 2002, a cohort of tea producers hosted the first Jikocha Summit (jikōcha meaning “locally grown black tea”), an expo and trade meeting centered on Japanese black tea. Suzuki thinks the Jikocha Summit, now an annual event, helped start to popularize wakōcha again because it allowed producers to share ideas and strategize on how to promote the tea to consumers.
Simona Suzuki leads a Japanese tea demonstration. Photo courtesy of the Global Japanese Tea Association.
| COURTESY OF THE GLOBAL JAPANESE TEA ASSOCIATION
Then in the era of COVID-19, Guttridge-Smith says, green tea prices dropped so dramatically that many farmers decided it wasn’t even worth the effort. Some farmers instead turned to black tea, which has become more widely available in the 2020s.
“We can see it really was not overnight,” Suzuki says about the revival of wakōcha. “It was not one boom, one event, but a lot of small efforts coming together, and it took a good 20 years (since the first Jikocha Summit) to get where we are right now.”
Compared with traditional Japanese green teas, wakōcha’s possibilities are wide open. Green tea production is highly regulated. Growers can draw out distinct flavors from their farm’s terroir or the specific tea plant cultivar they’re using, but green tea production methods are still strict and standardized: For example, to produce sencha, tea leaves must be steamed, dried and rolled into a needle shape, and someone who makes sencha would use machines that were specifically manufactured for each step of this process.
But that’s not the case for black teas in Japan. With wakōcha, there are no standard techniques for growing or processing, no standard machines — in other words, no rules.
George Guttridge-Smith carries a bag of harvested tea leaves at Kyoto Obubu Tea Farm in Wazuka, Kyoto Prefecture.
| KENJI TANIMURA
“The wakōcha industry as a whole is experimentation every single time,” Guttridge-Smith says. “There are a lot of interesting things happening with wakōcha, which is part of this revival. … There’s more flexibility for farmers to test out different things.”
Oxidation is what makes tea black; the leaves must be exposed to air for some amount of time before they are rolled and dried. Guttridge-Smith says he has seen a variety of home-built oxidation machines, which means each person’s process is different from their peers’ — a factor contributing to the wide range of flavor profiles available among Japanese black teas, which can be anything from chocolatey to fruity to malty or even floral. Besides the machinery, Obubu and other producers have experimented with techniques such as oxidizing leaves that were shade-grown like gyokuro, roasting black tea leaves like hōjicha (roasted green tea) or smoking them like lapsang souchong.
Unlike with the more familiar green teas that Nagano-en had been producing for decades, Hanamizu had no tried-and-true methods to rely on for black tea. He built his own leaf-withering machine and later visited Taiwan to study its long-standing tradition of oolong tea production. It’s common for wakōcha producers to visit Taiwan or China to learn about tea oxidation, but even so, wakōcha’s taste is distinct because of Japan’s geography, climate and the varietals of the Camellia sinensis plant most common here.
These unique flavor profiles, in conjunction with creative and flexible methods for growing and processing, are what give wakōcha so much potential for novelty.
The organically grown black tea leaves from Chiyono-en in the Yame region of Fukuoka Prefecture are grown at a fairly high elevation, which means pests are scarce.
| PHOTO BY ALDO BLOISE OF IKKYU TEA
Another award-winning wakōcha producer, Masashi Harashima, operates an 80-year-old tea farm called Chiyono-en in Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture. Harashima takes advantage of his region’s high elevation and unique terroir to produce about 10 types of black tea with a wide range of tastes depending on cultivar, harvest season, oxidation level and other factors.
“Since our garden is located at an altitude of 500 to 650 meters, we are sure that we can make good black tea,” Harashima says. “We try to adapt (methods from China and Taiwan) to match the Japanese varieties (of the tea plant).”
With the ingenuity of farmers like Hanamizu and Harashima, wakōcha will continue evolving. Suzuki says she’s excited to watch as more creative approaches are tested.
“I’m sure we will see some uniquely Japanese products that don’t exist anywhere else.”
A turning point for tea?
If wakōcha succeeds in both the domestic and international markets, its popularity could accelerate general interest in Japanese loose-leaf tea and revitalize overall tea production in Japan. But although people tend to love wakōcha when they try it, Suzuki says, “the challenge is to get them to know that it exists.”
Harashima says he thinks Japanese consumers prefer domestic products when possible, so he continues selling his teas on the domestic market. However, he also exports his teas to the West through a Fukuoka-based tea company called Ikkyu. Because Chiyono-en is situated at a relatively high elevation, pests are scarce, so he can grow all of his teas organically, which makes it easier to export to countries with strict regulations about agrochemicals.
“Black tea produced and processed in Japan has become well-known and supported by tea lovers in Japan,” Harashima says. “Restaurants and cafes offering Japanese black tea are also increasing in number. But also, Japanese black tea has placed well in overseas competitions.”
Masashi Harashima pours tea for guests at Chiyono-en, his 80-year-old team farm in Fukuoka Prefecture.
| PHOTO BY ALDO BLOISE OF IKKYU TEA
Getting people interested in drinking loose-leaf teas from Japan is only half of the challenge. As tea production becomes less viable as a way of life, veteran farmers are leaving the industry, and younger Japanese are losing interest in taking over. According to census data, there were 53,687 tea farms in Japan in 2000, but only 19,603 by 2015.
Hanamizu’s dream is to pass Nagano-en onto a fifth generation, but it’s too early to know whether his 15-year-old son or 6-year-old daughter will want to take up that responsibility.
“If my son really wants to do it, he’s very welcome to,” Hanamizu says. “But if not, he’ll have his own future; I’m not going to force him. At that time, somebody else will connect Nagano-en to the future. That is my mission.”