The Farm Behind Your Matcha

Where it is

Japan grows tea in about fifteen prefectures. This is the northernmost one.

Tea likes warm. Almost all of Japan's tea is grown in the south and west. Sayama sits at the top of the map, on the cold edge of where the plant will grow at all.

Map of Japan with tea-growing prefectures in green and Sayama in Saitama marked

Sayama is a district, not a town. It covers three towns west of Tokyo: Iruma, Tokorozawa and Sayama. This farm is in Tokorozawa, and the city starts at the edge of the field.

Map of Saitama prefecture showing the farm in Tokorozawa and its distance to Tokyo Station

How rare it is

Saitama grows 1.3 per cent of Japan's tea.

Almost all Japanese tea comes from the south. Shizuoka and Kagoshima are first and second by a long way. Saitama is eighth, and its whole crop is 838 tonnes a year, which is 1.3 per cent of the country's tea. Matcha is a small fraction of even that.

The reason is the winter. Growers in Kagoshima pick four times a year. Here it is twice.

That sounds like a problem. It is the whole point.

The plant stops for months. The leaf it puts out in spring is thicker than the leaf further south, and thick leaf is where the flavour is. There is not much of this tea, and the growers here decided a long time ago that this was fine.

The field, and the houses on the other side of it.

Everyone in the Japanese tea trade knows this line:

Shizuoka for colour. Uji for aroma. But for flavour, Sayama.

It comes from a work song, sung by the people picking the leaf. Sayama's own tea merchants later took that one line and put it on everything, which is exactly what you would expect them to do. It worked. It is how most of Japan first heard of this place.

Two more habits worth knowing. In most of Japan one company grows the leaf, another processes it and a third sells it. In Sayama the same family usually does all three. And every Japanese green tea gets a final drying, but Sayama holds that fire hotter and longer, and has done for so long that the technique carries the name of the place. It is why tea from here is known for weight rather than delicacy.

Why it tastes like this

The last three weeks, in the dark.

Before the leaf is picked, it is covered. Cutting the light slows the plant down. It holds on to what tastes sweet and makes less of what tastes bitter. That is the whole trick.

Here the shade is a structure. Posts and wire stand over the rows all year, and the cloth is pulled across the top in spring. The plant grows in open air, in the dark.

Out of the leaf, and the frame is already there.

Rows of tea running to a vanishing point beneath black shade cloth

Early April. The cloth is going on.

If a customer asks you one thing, tell them it was grown in the dark on purpose.

View out from beneath the shade cloth toward houses and cherry blossom

Underneath, looking out. The pink is cherry blossom.

Close view of new tea leaves with rooftops out of focus behind

Still weeks from picking.

Thick grey woody trunks inside the tea bush beneath the green canopy

Push the green aside. The wood underneath is old.

The farm

Arai-en Honten 新井園本店

Tokorozawa, Saitama · since 1924 · their own fields, their own factory

Shinichiro Arai standing in the tea field in a black Arai-en polo shirt

Shinichiro Arai 新井真一郎, the third generation.

Most matcha changes hands several times between the field and the tin. This one does not.

Arai-en grows the leaf and processes it themselves. The factory is the building you can see behind the shade frames in the photograph below. It is the same address.

Shade frames over the tea rows with the processing building directly behind

The factory is at the edge of the field. The leaf does not travel.

The family has been doing this since 1924, and Shinichiro Arai is the third generation to do it. In 1996 their tea took the Emperor's Cup, the top award at Japan's national agriculture festival. In 2012 they sent a green tea powder to the Pope. In 2025 one of their teas won a prize at a Japanese tea competition in Paris.

We put our work into the soil first, mainly with organic fertiliser.

Arai-en Honten, in their own words

You can go

Twenty-eight minutes from Tokyo, on a normal train.

Most tea farms worth visiting are a flight and a hire car away. This one is not. The family keeps a shop and a small tea room in the next town, six days a week, twenty-eight minutes from Ikebukuro on the express.

If a customer ever tells you they are going to Japan, this is a real answer to give them.

When you drink it

Body first. This is not a delicate matcha.

Cold winters, thick leaf, and a region that has always chased flavour over finesse. It arrives with weight, and it does not disappear under milk.

Behind the bar

Sift it. Freshly milled matcha clumps more than matcha that has been sitting around. That is a good problem to have.

Keep it closed and cold. Matcha loses to air and light faster than it loses to time.

If someone asks

Four answers you can give across the counter.

Why is it so sweet?

It spent its last few weeks growing in the dark. The grower covers the rows on purpose. Less light, more of what tastes sweet, less of what tastes bitter.

Where is it from?

Sayama, thirty-five kilometres from Tokyo. Tea fields with houses on three sides. The same family has farmed it since 1924, the third generation is running it now, and they grow it, make it and sell it themselves.

Is it rare?

Saitama grows 1.3 per cent of Japan's tea, and matcha is a fraction of that. It is cold there, so they only pick twice a year instead of four times.

Is it actually good?

Their tea took the Emperor's Cup in 1996, which is the top prize at Japan's national agriculture show. They have also sent tea to the Pope, and won in Paris last year.

Your matcha grew 35 km from Tokyo.