We spoke with Toshimi Nishi, the representative director of Nishi Tea Factory in Kirishima, Kagoshima in order to learn just how his company is able to create the high-quality organic matcha that the factory is famous for. In the first half of this interview, we visited their tencha factory and were amazed at their use of the latest production techniques and quality control methods. This time, we take a look at just how much detail the company puts into its tea fields.

Trees should be raised as trees

Nishi Tea Factory was founded in 1954 by Hiroshi Nishi (Mr. Nishi’s grandfather) as a leaf purchasing business. Then, in 1985, Mr. Nishi’s father, Yoshimi Nishi, opened his own tea farm and cleared the mountainous area to create his tea fields.

“My father was a very intelligent man, and he consistently gave his all when making tea. He didn’t just follow convention, since he wasn’t satisfied until he could work out the logic behind an idea for himself. I wanted to create my own tea farm and create tea I could be proud of, so I started creating tea fields when I was about ten years old.”

The company found the best land for growing tea in the mountains of Kirishima, and then used backhoes and bulldozers to cultivate the land. That has been their process for close to forty years now.

As I take a closer look at Mr. Nishi’s tea fields, I notice just how sturdy and robust the plants look from their base on up. The buds growing from the tips of the stems are a thing of beauty, but you can tell that the plant’s entire core is strong. In response to us admiring the tea fields, Mr. Nishi told us the following.

“In order to create tea fields that are robust, we make sure that we nurture our tea plants like they were trees. When you think of tea fields, plants trimmed to resemble kamaboko fish cakes probably come to mind, but we use more of a fan shape for our tea fields. We constantly prune the tea plants while they are still young in order to properly shape them. However, we feel it is important to grow the plants as if they were trees, so once we’ve planted a tea plant, we allow it to grow for a few years. After it has reached a certain height, we cut off a few dozen centimeters in a process that is known as mid-cutting. This causes the branches to grow straight up, which makes the plants much taller than they are in other fields. See? Notice how the thick trunk is pointing upwards?”

“I am particular about how I prune the plants—only doing so when I have considered how it will affect the roots. I feel like the nutrients needed for the spring buds’ growth comes not from the soil, but rather from special organs belonging to the plant that are known as storage roots. You can get delicious tea by growing it in fields that feature a lot of nutrients within those storage roots from early autumn. Therefore, it is vital that you trim the branches at just the right time if you wish to make flavorful tea.”

Refusing to compromise on needed capital investments

As I look out over the fields, I notice something else. There are no fans designed to prevent the buildup of frost. Such equipment usually takes the form of tall poles with electric fans attached to the end, and are commonly found in tea fields. You would think in an area such as this, where frost is often present due to the mountainous surroundings, such equipment would be a necessity…

“In our fields, we actually installed sprinklers to prevent frost instead of the usual anti-frost fans. This is known as the water sprinkling icing method, and due to the presence of water droplets on the tea leaves, the buds themselves do not drop below freezing. This method enables the plant to withstand temperatures as low as -8 degrees Celsius. I came to the conclusion that having the sprinklers contributes additional stability to our tea production process.”

The effort to prevent frost damage is a major concern for tea growers between winter and spring. Once I hear about how effective these sprinklers are, it seems like it’d be a good idea if all of the tea growers were to adopt them for themselves. However, Mr. Nishi is quick to point out that installing and maintaining the system is not as easy as it sounds.

“It is expensive to install sprinklers and there are no subsidies available for them either. They are also difficult to manage and feature high running costs. You also need to have equipment for proper irrigation. We even built a reservoir in order to run the sprinklers. So even a single sprinkler requires a considerable amount of money and effort. However, when you’re able to implement a measure that can prevent frost damage to the tea leaves and thereby eliminate product loss, I think it’s ultimately a small price to pay overall.”

It is quite impressive to hear that Mr. Nishi and his employees worked so hard to clear the fields, install these sprinklers, and even go so far as to irrigate the land in order to operate them. Indeed, most of these tasks would be considered beyond the scope of a typical tea farmer’s duties. I can’t help but be impressed when I consider that the tea I drank earlier was the product of these tea fields spread out before us as well as the result of good, honest work carried out by two generations of this family over the course of forty years.

There are no weeds despite it being organically grown?!

We get back in the car and drive again for a few minutes, and this time we approach a large, covered facility that resembles a cowshed.

“This is our compost pile. The type of organic farming that we engage in is also referred to as ‘microbiology farming.’ The microorganisms that are present in the compost break down organic matter and produce nitrogen, which is essential for growing tea plants. What you see here may look like soil, but it’s actually a mixture of various organic matter, including chicken and horse manure, bamboo, grass, and also logs that have mushrooms growing on them.”

“It’s been about four to five years since we started making this compost. When you first start mixing it together, the fermentation process occurs extremely rapidly, so you need to stir it about once every two months. After roughly the third year, you barely need to touch it and can just let it sit. It also really doesn’t smell that much anymore. The power of microorganisms is an amazing thing. When we prune the tea plants, the branches and leaves are left in the field, but after a few months, they simply decompose without a trace.”

“Once it reaches this point, the soil gets to the point where it ‘wants to eat as soon as possible.’ The process accelerates the decomposition of the soil. And in doing so, it completely prevents weeds from growing. People who farm organically often say that it’s hard work to weed all the time, but we only have a single person in charge of weeding all of our 45-hectare field.”

Aiming to be a company that is free from criticism

The surprising facts about this place just keep coming, one after the other. Mr. Nishi expresses Nishi Tea Factory’s approach to making tea in the following way.

“We rely on science to make our tea.”

He says that this attitude is something he inherited largely from his father, Yoshimi.

“My father was highly intelligent, and it seemed like tea was his only real interest. He was someone who always questioned the status quo, and then tested out his own solutions, while constantly studying why things turned out the way they did. Through the application of reason and deriving the subsequent results, we have gradually established the foundation for Nishi Tea Factory’s method of making tea. Our current system is the result of applying the methods my father developed over his lifetime, improving upon them, and then creating a system that allows people to properly manage them.”

However, Mr. Nishi follows that statement up with a laugh, saying, “Although, my father and I were constantly fighting at the factory.” Yoshimi harbored a passion for making tea and also possessed numerous theories on the best way to do so. As a result, he also apparently had “nothing but constant criticism” for Toshimi. Tragically, Yoshimi died in 2010 in an accident while working on the farm. His departure was shocking in its suddenness. It was from that moment on that Toshimi took over the business as the eldest son. Looking back at that time, Mr. Nishi shared his memories of the situation.

“There was no time to properly grieve, really. The very moment I returned home after dealing with the accident, I had to make all of the company’s decisions, down to even the smallest details, on my own. Every night before I went to bed, I’d sit and ask myself, ‘Did I do everything that needed to be done today?’ I found it hard to even sleep.”

Since Yoshimi had reinvested all of the company’s profits back into the business, the company’s finances were strained at the time and it held a large amount of debt. Upon taking over as president, Mr. Nishi worked tirelessly to repay the company’s debts and stabilize its management structure.

“I didn’t feel like I could simply approach the matter as if I’d carry on my father’s wishes and do what I could to simply keep the company running. I decided that if I was going to succeed, I had to have the attitude that this was my company now, so it’s up to me whether I want to tear it down. That’s when I came up with a ten-year plan. I set a goal for ten years into the future, then worked backwards to clarify what I needed to do five years later, one year later, and even the next day, if I was going to reach that goal. At the time, the ten-year goal I set for myself was ‘to make the company a place that is free from criticism.’ I thought that if I could create such a company, it would be a good parting gift to my father.”

Rather than operating the company defensively, Mr. Nishi decided to go on the offensive instead. Keeping that in mind, he decided to increase the company’s production. The factory increased its operating rate and doubled the number of employees. To further expand his growing area, he went around to dozens of other farmers and asked them for their fields.

As a result, the management skills he demonstrated after becoming president helped the company repay its debts within his first year of assuming the position. However, he was not content with simply paying off the company’s debts. He continued to think about what was best for the business and took various measures to make it happen. Recently, his company has helped launch tea cafes, primarily in Tokyo, and even developed an end-to-end system that handles everything from production to sales. In response to the intense global demand for organically grown matcha, his company produces hundreds of tons of tencha, which is the raw material needed for making matcha.

He also works in cooperation with nearby tea farmers to create a system that benefits people in the area. I feel it is safe to say that Mr. Nishi has succeeded in his goal of creating a company that is free from criticism.

“It is thanks to many different people that we can say our business is successful at the moment, but when you look at the tea industry as a whole, you can see that it is in decline. I understand the desire to show off the dedication of tea farmers, but I think that dedication itself is rather insignificant in the face of young people and also people overseas who simply want to enjoy tea in a more casual way. We state in our company motto that it is important to create a ‘new culture surrounding green tea.’ It is vital that we don’t limit our demographics when it comes to tea drinkers. There is huge, worldwide demand for matcha at the moment, but I feel it’s dangerous the way the industry is blindly gravitating toward that. I think the key is for tea sellers to create additional value with their products in order to secure continued success.”

Throughout the course of my lengthy tour of the fields and factories, I was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Nishi Tea Factory’s efforts. I was also surprised at just how thoroughly those efforts were rooted in both theory and practice.

Additionally, Mr. Nishi says that even when tea has been made with such meticulous care, “In the end, it doesn’t matter how you drink it.” Given that tea is said to be an industry on the decline, I felt like this would be the ideal way for other tea farmers to run their business. At the same time, however, I also realized that Nishi Tea Factory’s methods, scale, and attitude were all rather unique and pretty much impossible to imitate. I found Mr. Nishi’s suggestions to the industry to be quite striking.

In closing, I asked Mr. Nishi what his goal was now that he’d successfully made “a company that is free from criticism.”

“I don’t have any particular goal in mind, really (laughs). If I had to say, I guess I’d want to ‘see this through to the very end.’ By that, I mean that I want us to be around forever. If we were to go bankrupt, then it would mean that there was nowhere else left to produce tea in Japan. Therefore, I want to make sure that we’re still around as long as the industry itself is.”

Nishi Tea Factory utilizes the abundance of nature found in Kirishima to its advantage while also constantly striving to improve its methods and spread the word about tea throughout the world. In this way, Toshimi Nishi leads the charge toward progress, with the hopes and dreams of an entire industry safely resting atop his broad shoulders.

Toshimi Nishi
Born in 1975, he is the third generation owner of Nishi Tea Factory in Kirishima, Kagoshima Prefecture. The company was originally founded in 1954 by Mr. Nishi’s grandfather, Hiroshi Nishi, as a leaf purchasing business. Later on, his father, Yoshimi Nishi, opened his own tea farm and the company has continued to expand ever since. In 2000, the company received official Japan Agricultural Standards certification as an organic tea farm. It also built a tencha processing factory in 2005. In 2010, Toshimi Nishi was appointed as representative director.

Nishi Tea Factory
798 Manzen, Makizono-cho, Kirishima-shi, Kagoshima
nishicha.com

Photo by Eisuke Asaoka
Text (originally in Japanese) by Rihei Hiraki
Edit by Yoshiki Tatezaki
Coordination by Nanami Kanai