In the mountains above Shizuoka lies a village called Umegashima. A tea is grown there that for decades was never sold under its own name.
This is the story of that tea, of the people who refused to give up on it, and of why we chose to bring it to Sweden.
The tea that was sold hidden inside other teas
Kakurecha means the hidden tea, and the name runs two layers deep.
The literal one is that the tea gardens of Umegashima sit at 750 to 800 meters altitude in the mountains around the headwaters of the Abe river, toward the Southern Alps, and that morning and evening they lie wrapped in mountain and river mist. You can barely see them.
One of the gardens, seen from the mountainside above. You can barely see it.
The second meaning is the one that explains why the association exists.
At that altitude the leaves mature slowly, and the slowness is what builds the flavor: the longer a leaf gets to grow, the deeper the cup becomes. But the Japanese market pays for the calendar, not for the cup. The best prices go to tea picked by hachijūhachiya, the eighty-eighth night after the first day of spring, a date so central to Japanese tea culture that it has its own children's song. Up in Umegashima, the harvest always comes later than that. So for decades the leaves were bought up by tea merchants and disappeared into other producers' blends, and the name Umegashima never came along.
The merchants knew exactly what they were getting, of course. The mountain tea gave depth to their blends. It was only the name that never made it onto the label.
In practice, Umegashima's tea has been hidden twice over: once by the mist, once by the market.
We understood how concrete this is only when the association wrote to us. The harvest had finally finished, so late it would be unthinkable down on the plains, they wrote. While the rest of Shizuoka had long since finished, they were still picking at the end of May.
Harvest at the end of May, weeks after the plains.
So the price has been set by the date. The taste has been saying something else all along: the same slow ripening that makes the harvest late is what gives the tea its body and sweetness. The market and the cup have disagreed about this tea for decades. That disagreement is finally being put right.
The moment the bag was opened
We ordered samples before we ordered anything to sell.
The sencha powder took us straight back to Japan, to the first time we drank a truly good matcha, but softer and more balanced in aroma. There is a body and a fullness to it that is rare, especially in teas we have bought outside Japan. Sencha powder is not matcha, and should not pretend to be: it is whole sencha leaves ground into a fine powder. But the character is exactly what you look for in a truly good matcha, here in a rounder and more everyday-friendly form. We knew almost immediately that this was something we wanted to stand behind.
The hojicha was a similar experience in a different way. It has another kind of roundness. It reminds us of the deep calm you sometimes manage to land in when summer is turning into autumn: self-reflection, a return to your own routines and rituals after an active season. The aroma is grounded and steady, with a roasted tone that comes close to coffee and chocolate without quite crossing into that territory. It keeps the friendly, airy feel of tea.
But mild should not be mistaken for weak. It is what the Japanese call nōkō: rich, concentrated, with weight.
Both teas felt authentic and clean in character. Finely ground, no odd off-notes, nothing that grated. Today both the sencha powder and the hojicha powder are in the shop.
38 years without pesticides
What we tasted has an explanation that is not poetic but practical. Or rather, several.
Some of the bushes in Umegashima are zairai: raised from seed rather than cloned cuttings, a direct continuation of the tea that came to the Abe valley in the Edo period and has been adapting to the mountains ever since. This is how all Japanese tea was once grown. Today less than two percent of the country's tea cultivation is zairai, and the share keeps shrinking. The shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu is said to have valued the Abe valley's tea so highly that he had it carried to his castle in Sunpu. In the cup, seed-grown bushes give what no clone can: every bush its own character, together a broader and more layered flavor.
The hojicha carries one more piece of craft: it is made from first-harvest leaves, roasted in hot sand in the traditional way. The sand's infrared heat seals the aroma into the leaf instead of driving it out. That is why the roast in the cup is warm and round, never burnt.
And then there is the growing itself. The fields in Umegashima have been kept entirely free of pesticides and herbicides for 38 years. It is long work that costs more than it pays, and according to the association itself, it is one of the reasons no successors are stepping forward. The growers are getting older. No one takes over. Thirty-eight years is not a stamp on a package. It is a working life of conviction: that this is how tea should be grown.
The garden under snow. The work goes on all year, even in the years no one sees it.
The tea has been analyzed by Eurofins, one of the world's larger accredited food laboratories, for 730 different pesticides. Every single one came back "not detected". Not below the limits, zero. At home in Shizuoka, the tea has also been selected among the prefecture's hundred finest mountain teas.
We think that kind of fact is worth more than beautiful words about purity, precisely because it can be verified.
Now it is sold under its own name
Since 2009, The Association for Preserving Kakurecha Hidden Tea has worked to preserve Umegashima's historic tea gardens, restore abandoned fields, and pass the unique tea-field landscape of Umegashima and its tea knowledge on to the next generation. And above all, they do what had not been done for decades: they sell Umegashima's tea under its own name, Kakurecha.
Umegashima. This is what the association wants to remain.
We do not know for how much longer it will be possible to drink tea from Umegashima. It depends on whether the work finds its successors, and on whether enough people get to taste the tea while the growers who know the craft are still standing in the rows. But we know which side of that story we want to stand on.
Drinking the tea is the association's stated way of letting the work continue. It is also our reason for selling it.
From our range
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Basim Ali Yoshiguchi is the founder of Nekko Kitchen. After many trips to Japan and a long-standing interest in Japanese food and culture, he has immersed himself in Japanese tea, from cultivation and processing to brewing in his own kitchen. Every product in the range is personally tested before it is added.
