We made a second trip down to Wazuka in March, on a late afternoon.
Although the farm was in a dormant stage: early spring, a maintenance season ahead of the first harvest usually around May to June, Uejima-san made time to guide us through the different sites of Uejima Souroukuen.
At the heart of Wazuka’s rolling tea fields, Ueijima Souroukuen continues a practice shaped by both precision and intuition: growing, selecting, and blending tea from within its own land to create matcha that reflects place as much as process.
In this collaboration, we worked together to create SIMPLY NATIVE TEA FIELD NO.1, a single expression of Samidori from our own tea field, tended by Noriyasu Uejima.
Noriyasu Uejima is widely regarded within Kyoto’s tea community for his exceptional craftsmanship, including recognition in regional competitions where top evaluations are rarely awarded and standards are extremely strict: an achievement that reflects the precision behind his work rather than a single moment of success.
Long rows of Samidori, Gokou, Uji-hikari, Okumidori & Saemidori stretch across the landscape. Walking between them, you get a clear sense of scale and discipline, carefully maintained hedges forming an ordered rhythm across the hillside.
Uejima-san took over the family business at a time when Yabukita dominated much of Japan’s tea production, relatively few farmers were dedicated to tencha cultivation. Yet he made a deliberate choice to plant cultivars such as Samidori and Gokou, alongside others that have become central to high-grade matcha today.
A philosophy rooted in the field
For Uejima Souroukuen, even within a single farm, differences in soil, elevation, sunlight, and cultivation create subtle shifts in character. Some fields express deeper umami, others bring brightness or aromatic lift.
Rather than trying to erase these differences, the approach is to understand them.
The result is a method that shapes tea where possible, while respecting what cannot be changed.
Grower and Blender
Unlike producers who separate cultivation and blending, Ueijima Souroukuen works across both. This dual role allows a deeper relationship with the tea: knowing not only how each field behaves in isolation, but how they might interact when brought together.
Blending, in this context, is not about masking difference: it is about composition. Each field contributes something essential, and the final matcha becomes a reflection of the farm as a whole rather than a single point within it.
Balance as Intention
Because tea fields differ inherently, no two harvests are ever identical. The role of the producer is not to eliminate that variability, but to guide it into harmony.
In this blend, structure and softness, depth and lift, are brought into alignment through careful selection. The aim is not dominance of one field over another, but equilibrium.
A Living System
What emerges is not a fixed product, but a living system, one that changes slightly with each season, yet remains grounded in the same landscape.
We then made our way to the processing facility, where the transformation from leaf to tencha takes place. It is defined by precision and restraint, where timing, temperature, and handling quietly determine the final character of the tea.
The final stop was the the tea field that became the origin of SIMPLY NATIVE FIELD NO.1. Sitting along a row of cherry blossom trees, with patches of lilac wildflowers scattered across the edges of the field.
It became clear that this is not just about matcha, but about a landscape - one shaped by careful cultivation, generational knowledge, and the dialogue between land and farmer.
SIMPLY NATIVE FIELD NO.1 carries that moment forward into a single origin tea that holds the character of Uji tea in its purest form.
