Hinokuni Kumamoto

About

Introduction Third generation tea farmer Satoru Fujisako is a dedicated to cultivating clean, organic tea. Size : About 8 hectares Certification : JAS Organic certified by the Organic Certification Organization Co. Ltd. Tested free from radiation, tested free from pesticide residue annually (262 pesticides tested). Our Story We never use chemicals. Our resolve is ingrained in the history of FUJISAKO TEA ESTATE About 30 years after the first generation Jyuichiro opened his own tea garden, in 1946 his son Fujisako Tsunao (second generation Jyuichiro) established a tea garden in Sagara Village in the southern part of Kyushu, southwest Kumamoto Prefecture. Known as the "Origin of the Mist", the estate is surrounded on all four sides by mountains rising up 700 meters or more. The extreme temperature difference bewteen morning and night makes this valley the perfect place for growing tea. Tea cultivation began here when 70 families received 100 sacks containing the seeds of Japanese tea. However, of those 70 households, only 30 were able to grow anything. When the tea leaves eventually budded, only three tea farming households had managed to grow enough to make saleable products. 96% gave up along the way. Cultivation from seed is truly a difficult task. It takes as many as fifteen years to raise tea to a stage where it’s ready to be plucked. Until then it isn’t clear if the plants will even bud or not. One of the main difficulties is that running a tea estate is an expensive business, especially when you can’t develop any products for the first fifteen years. In order to pay for the upkeep of his tea fields, the first generation Fujisako tea master Tsunao moved to Tohoku, a region of northwest Japan. He worked in construction for ten years, regularly sending money back home to Sagara on the island of Kyushu, south Japan. At that time, no other tea farmers in Japan were cultivating their tea from the seed. The cultivation process itself is slow. It takes a long time befor