Suzuwa Shoten was founded in 1848, at the close of the Edo period, on this same spot. I am the sixth generation. We have been here for roughly 180 years.
Shizuoka is home to many tea-growing districts, each with its own character. In our view, what shapes the final flavor most is the finishing and blending. That is why blending technique sits at the center of everything we do.
We buy both at the tea market and directly from growers. Even when we buy at market, we make sure we know the person behind the tea. Once the busy season passes, we visit the growing districts to talk through the year's trends and prices, and to discuss how the next crop might be made. With some growers we commit to buying their entire annual production, working out details down to the steaming together.
Not Standing Out Is Our Character
Rather than pushing a tea's individuality as far as it will go, we aim for something easy to drink — a tea you could return to every day without tiring of it. If we were making ten thousand cups, we wouldn't want to reach ten thousand people once each. We'd rather one or two people drank all ten thousand. Perhaps not standing out is its own kind of character. Drinkability comes first.
We Buy the Whole Year, Success or Failure
With some growers, we commit to buying everything they produce in a year. That commitment lets them make tea the way we've discussed together — steaming, timing, even teas that have never been made in that district before. If an experiment fails, we still buy it. Once you've said you will, you do. That's what makes it possible to try something new at all.
Tea Isn't the Land. It's the Person.
The tea we've selected comes from Ryuso, a district so small that only about five growing families remain. Fifty years ago it produced far more. It sits at around 450 meters on a mountain that rises past a thousand, on slopes so steep that the work is punishing and the farm roads were never properly built. One after another, growers have given up. The ones still there are working very hard indeed.
Ryuso is wedged between famous names — Honyama on one side, Ryogauchi in Shimizu on the other — and almost nothing reaches the market, so however good the quality, the name never sold and prices stayed weak. Even people in Shizuoka know Ryuso as a mountain they hiked as schoolchildren; you can't see the tea fields from the trail, so hardly anyone realizes tea is grown there at all. Four years ago we decided to take the whole crop and sell it alongside them, so the name might finally be heard.
Tea, unlike wine or coffee, has less to do with terroir than people assume. It's something made. Two growers fifty meters apart can produce entirely different tea, because everything depends on judging the right moment to pick and how the leaf is handled afterward. The grower we work with in Ryuso is meticulous — serious, careful, and absolutely committed to picking early, while the buds are still soft, to get that gentle, umami-rich character he's after.
To Tea Lovers Around the World
A Message from the Maker
Matcha is enjoying extraordinary popularity abroad right now. But sencha is just as much a part of Japanese culture, and a culture isn't really recognized until it travels. We'd simply be glad if people outside Japan came to know that Japanese sencha exists, and found something interesting in it.
There's a lot to find. When tea arrived from China, Japan absorbed it and made it into something else entirely — even the yokode kyusu, the side-handled teapot, is a Japanese invention that emerged along the way. That kind of thing is fascinating, and we'd love to share it.
