From Abe-cha to Honyama

For centuries, the tea grown in the mountains above Shizuoka did not have a name of its own. People called it Abe-cha — Abe tea — after the river that runs down out of those mountains to the sea.

Utagawa Hiroshige, “Fuchū: The Abe River,” from The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1833). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

A crowded field

From the end of the shogunate onward, tea planting spread across Shizuoka. New tea districts appeared all over the province, and “Shizuoka tea” came to cover a great deal of ground.

For the growers in the old mountain gardens, that was a problem. Theirs was the oldest tea in the province, grown in river mist on steep slopes — and it was being sold under the same broad name as everything else.

The grower from Kiyosawa

The new name is credited to a tea grower born at the end of the Edo period in Kiyosawa, a village on the upper Warashina River. He spent his life working at how tea should be made, and his tea was good enough to be presented to the Emperor Meiji.

In 1917, the account goes, he put a new name on the tea he had grown in Kiyosawa: Honyama. It means, roughly, “the true mountain” — tea from the mountains where it really belongs.

The name stuck. Today, Honyama means tea from the upper reaches of the Abe and Warashina rivers, and it is one of Shizuoka’s three regional tea brands. The mist that rises off the rivers keeps the leaves thin and bright green, and the tea has what people here call a “mountain aroma.”

Where we fit

Mizumiiro sits on the Warashina side, downstream of Kiyosawa. Our Yabukita is Honyama tea — the line we think of as our everyday one.

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Sources: About Honyama tea · What is Honyama tea? · Honyama tea: its character and history. Japanese sources name the grower as 築地光太郎, though some write the family name as 筑紫, and accounts differ on when the name was first used. We give the version most sources share.