Shizuoka Prefecture, which is Japan’s biggest tea producing region and accounts for around 40 percent of all the nation’s tea production, is seeing its tea market slowly die due to severe aging issues among tea farmers and a plunge in tea leave prices caused by wholesalers looking for cheap leaves to satisfy the demand of increasingly popular plastic-bottled tea.
Now, with almost no successors to take over their businesses, elderly tea farmers are abandoning their mountainside tea farms.
To raise awareness of such issues and introduce Shizuoka green tea to the world, Akito Ohashi, who grew up on a tea farm in Shizuoka, began a tea-experience business called “The Tea Bridge.”
Joined by his business partner Sandra from the U.S., Ohashi is attracting tea lovers from all over the world to Honyama City in Shizuoka, where they have the opportunity to experience life on a tea farm, visit a local tea factory.
