Family Watanabe (Kagoshima)
The Watanabe family's organic tea garden is located on Yakushima, a small, idyllic island in the far south of Japan. Yakushima Island is located about 160km south of the city of Kagoshima. Yakushima belongs to Kagoshima Prefecture, where tea cultivation plays an important role. However, on the small island of Yakushima, which is largely mountainous and forested, there are only a few areas where tea cultivation is possible.
The highest peak on Yakushima is Miya-no-ura-dake, which rises to a height of 1,935 meters and is also the highest volcano in the Kyushu region. From the coast, the landscape rises steadily until it reaches Miya-no-ure-dake. The areas on Yakushima where tea garden plots could be created begin just a few meters from the coastline and extend to the edge of the mountain forests of Yakushima. ⇒ Read more
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Ms. Goto (second from right in the top picture), who read a book about changes in Japanese eating habits in the 1990s, came across the idea of organic farming. Mankichi Watanabe, who already had a strong connection to nature but had not yet engaged in organic farming, was quickly inspired by Ms. Goto's idea of organic tea cultivation. Since then, Mankichi Watanabe's tea garden has been farmed organically. Once the legal framework had been established in Japan, Mankichi Watanabe began the process of having his tea garden certified for organic farming. Green tea in its many different forms is, of course, part of the range produced by Mankichi Watanabe's garden. Here, green tea is produced and processed both in shaded cultivation [Japanese: kabuse saibai] and in unshaded cultivation [Japanese: roji saibai]. One of his finest green teas is certainly the “Watanabe Tokujou Kabuse Asanoyu,” which is already quite well known in this country. As the name suggests, Mankichi Watanabe primarily uses the Asatsuyu tea bush variety, which is very rare in organic cultivation, for this tea.