A hundred and fifty years
of Japanese tea, from a single house in Yaizu.

Yokichi Tatara was born in 1855 in Wada village, on the outskirts of what is today Yaizu City. He was twenty years old when, in the ninth year of the Meiji era, he began the business that would eventually become Nagamine Seicha — then an unassuming trade in the goods his neighbours grew: rice, barley, seasonal produce, and the tea that each household was hand-rolling with growing ambition.

Shizuoka tea, at that moment, was finding its voice. Farmers were refining their methods, and merchants in the newly opened treaty port of Yokohama were sending this tea onward — in the form of large, hand-fired baskets — to the tables of America. Yokichi shipped from Shimizu to the Acacia trading house in Yokohama, one of the foreign-managed firms then operating from the port. For the next half-century, his business travelled to English-speaking cities he would never see.

In January 1951 the family business was formally incorporated as Tatara Seicha Kojo K.K. — Tatara Tea Factory Company. By then, Japan’s tea export trade to America had sharply declined, and the company’s second and third generations had already pivoted toward domestic wholesale. Through the 1950s and ’60s, our trucks carried tea under the Tatara mark to retailers throughout Tokyo, Kanagawa, and beyond.

The photographs from this era are remarkably direct. Staff standing before their delivery trucks in signature hanten aprons carrying the words umai ocha — “delicious tea” — in bold gold script. A new year’s procession of six trucks laden with tea chests, on the occasion of hatsuni, the ceremonial first shipment of the year. This was a tea merchant of its time: serious about provenance, devoted to wholesale, proud of its work.

In April 1977 we changed our trading name to Nagamine Seicha K.K. The change reflected a formal business and capital alliance with a Tokyo partner, and an ambition to modernise the way tea reached consumers in the two great cities of the east — Tokyo and Yokohama. New offices opened in Chiyoda, Shinbashi, and Shinjuku. Direct-to-consumer retail stores opened in Yokohama and Tokyo. Our online shop followed in 1999, and remains in continuous operation to this day.

The master blender in our factory began entering prefectural competitions, and winning them. Three Highest Gold Prizes at the Shizuoka Tea Refining Competition. The Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Award in 2010, followed by nine consecutive years of prefectural awards. The craft in our finishing room quietly became a matter of public record.

When Takayuki Tatara took the front of the house, two things had grown faint: the soil our trade had long depended on, and the export orientation our founder had set in 1876.

The soil came first. On Mount Takakusa, the slope rising above Yaizu where generations of farmers had worked, tea fields had been falling out of cultivation for two decades. By the time we returned to two of them — in 2021, then in 2022 — the rows were buried in undergrowth; the bushes that remained were over fifty years old, some over a hundred and forty.

We are tea merchants, not farmers. But as a tea merchant in Yaizu, we could not set aside the responsibility to the work of those who came before. The aim was modest: to bring two small fields back into cultivation, to grow tea on them again without pesticide or fertiliser, and to leave the slope visible as tea fields to anyone who climbed Takakusa for the view. The black tea from the first restored harvest, in April 2024, was recognised at the Japan Domestic Black Tea Grand Prix the same year. Read the Wild Tea story →

Lacto-fermented tea — Bodai-Sancha — was developed in collaboration with three other tea producers in the Bancha Study Group, where the fifth generation serves as vice-chair. Years of joint research on the post-fermented tea traditions of Japan led to a new anaerobic fermentation method, registered under Japanese Patent No. 7085174. From that work came bodhi, our patented sparkling tea, and a joint venture, bodhi tea & culture LLC. Read the bodhi story →

And from those products, a return to the founding orientation — tea as an export, crafted for distant tables. One hundred and fifty years from Yokichi Tatara's first shipment to Yokohama, the fifth generation is once again sending tea overseas.