Japan's Tea Fields & Tea Culture Landscapes

About this book

Every famous Japanese view has a tea field in it. This book turns the picture around and makes the fields the subject.

Japan's Tea Fields & Tea Culture Landscapes covers 200 tea places in one traveller's format — the fields and the land, the history and culture that planted them, how to visit the tea country, and the notes that belong to that place. The ruled green ocean of the Makinohara plateau and Chiran's southern sea. The terraced amphitheatre of Wazuka and the single celebrated slope of Ishitera. Gyokuro fields roofed with straw in Asahina and Uji, matcha's shaded tencha gardens, Suizawa's black-canopied kabusecha blocks. Gorge tea in Kawane and the Tenryu, kamairi terraces in the Shimanto headwaters, fermented Awa bancha in Tokushima's barrels, and at the extremes, Murakami's snow-country fields at the northern limit of Japanese tea and the subtropical clearings of Okinawa's Yanbaru.

It is honest about what a tea field is: a working farm and private land. Nothing in this book asserts that a farm is open today or a picking experience is running; every entry closes with the same instruction to confirm access and availability in official sources, and the practical chapters teach you to read a tea landscape — plateau, terrace, gorge, shade garden — before you ever set out. No health effects are claimed for any tea; the culture, the history and the land carry the argument.

Come and read Japan through the fields that flavour it.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.