A Journey to Shizuoka

Where the land rises toward Mount Fuji, Shizuoka unfolds in two colours: the green of tea terraces climbing the hills, and the clear water running down from the mountain. This is Japan’s tea heartland — and the birthplace of its wasabi. Come with us.

Tea fields with Mount Fuji in Shizuoka

Japan’s tea heartland

Tea fields rolling across the hills of Shizuoka

Much of Japan’s green tea begins here. Under Fuji, deep-steamed (fukamushi) leaves are grown and finished the slow way — like the organic tea from Hamamatsu we carry — while in Fujieda a workshop bottles single-origin tea with the care of a winery. You can taste the culture first-hand: near the fields, the Fujinokuni Tea Museum offers a matcha tea-ceremony experience.

→ Organic Fukamushi Green Tea · Mt. Fuji Kōshun Craft Brew Tea

Wasabi needs water this clean

Follow the water upstream from the tea fields and you reach Utogi, a village 700 meters up the Abe River. Sometime in the Keichō era, over 400 years ago, villagers here found wild wasabi growing on the mountainside, moved it into a spring they called Idogashira, and watched it thrive — the beginning of cultivated wasabi in Japan. The plant is unusually particular about where it will grow: it needs spring water holding steady between 10 and 15°C, all year, without exception. Utogi has it, and so its wasabi fields are still built the traditional way — stacked, stone-edged terraces the locals call tatami, laid step by step down the mountainside so the cold water never stops moving.

Stone-terraced sawa-wasabi beds in Utogi, fed by cold spring water year-round

One family, the Shiratori, has tended this valley since that first planting — seventeen generations, unbroken. In 1607, their wasabi was presented to Tokugawa Ieyasu himself, and as the local telling goes, he liked it enough to keep Utogi's wasabi off-limits to outsiders for years after. By 1744, cuttings from here had traveled south to start the wasabi fields of Izu, which now supply most of Japan's crop. And in 2018, the United Nations named the whole practice — suiwasabi, "water wasabi" — a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System.

We visited during the rainy season, and the village kept two sounds only: the river's roar where the water ran fast, and, everywhere else, something close to silence — quiet enough to hear a white butterfly's wings. A monkey startled at the sound of our car and vanished into the trees.

Wasabi here is patient work: each root takes a year and a half to reach the table. The plants of different sizes in a single bed aren't different ages — they're the same age, at different points in a slow climb, the stem lengthening bit by bit above the soil as the months pass.

Trimming freshly harvested wasabi stems by hand in Utogi

Almost nothing is thrown away. The stem is pickled into wasabi-kasu-zuke; the leaves go into tempura. At Utsurogi, a small restaurant in the village, the local dish is sabi-meshi — rice topped with grated wasabi and bonito flakes, finished with a little soy sauce, eaten on the hottest days when appetite runs thin.

Sabi-meshi at Utsurogi, Utogi's local restaurant — rice, grated wasabi, and bonito flakes

The women of the Shiratori family let us buy wasabi straight from their hands and guided us through the fields. One kindly showed us the trimming work up close. Another sent us off with a gift of wasabi leaves — nothing here goes to waste, she said, and she looked glad to prove it. The water in the channels running past every house was cold and clear enough to see straight through; families use it to keep vegetables and fruit cool.

Most of Japan's wasabi today comes from the fields this valley started, generations south in Izu. But the discipline began here, in a village quiet enough to hear a butterfly.

→ Tamaruya Wasabi Paste

Citrus and green, down to the coast

Follow the prefecture to the sea and the green gives way to orchard. In Hamamatsu, a small farm turns local mandarins and yuzu into marmalades the slow way; on the Izu peninsula, mulberry leaf is dried into a quiet, gentle tea.

→ Enami Farm Marmalade · Mulberry Leaf Powder

A landscape made for living well

Green tea, fresh wasabi, mountain water, citrus from the coast — Shizuoka feels built for living long and living well. It is, quietly, the heart of what we mean by a richer table.