The plateau running from Makinohara into Shimada carries around two thousand six hundred hectares of tea. The climate is mild, the hours of sunlight are long, and the yields are high. It should have been straightforward.

It was not. Leaves grown here, steamed for the usual time during processing, produced a tea with body and umami but also a persistent astringency that would not go away. The answer somebody arrived at was to steam for two to three times as long. The bitterness softened, the liquor thickened and clouded, and what came out was rounder and easier. That is fukamushi, deep-steamed sencha, and it is said to have already existed here about a hundred years ago.

Further north, in the hills above the plateau, the tea is different again: lighter crops, higher aroma, the expensive end of the range. Along the Oi river the terraced gardens climb the slopes, and the pattern of green rows against mountain is the thing people photograph.

What I keep returning to is the origin. Nobody set out to invent a style. Somebody was trying to fix a fault in their own leaf, extended one step in the process, and ended up defining how an entire region's tea tastes.