By Julia Misaki 

My mother grew up not far from Yame, in the mountains of Kyushu. I spent a good part of my childhood in Osaka before my family moved abroad when I was fourteen. Japan has never been a foreign country to me — it's the country I carry inside me. So when we booked our flight to visit the farm that grows our matcha, it didn't feel like a business trip. It felt like going home.

There's something about being in that part of Kyushu — the particular quality of the light, the smell of the air — that slows your breathing without you noticing. By the time I reached the Unoike farm, something in me had already settled.

 

 

Meeting Chisako-san

We had only ever corresponded by email — and even then, it was with her family who handle the day-to-day running of the farm. I knew Chisako-san by name and by reputation. I didn't quite know what to expect when I walked through the noren.

She was sitting just inside, behind the cashier counter. Quietly present, watching the door. I introduced myself in Japanese, explained who I was and why I had come, and placed a small gift of chocolates from the States on the counter between us — omiyage, the kind of offering you bring when you visit someone in Japan, because arriving empty-handed would be unthinkable. Her face opened into a smile. We were off.

The farm today is really run by her younger family members — her children and grandchildren — and it was one of them, the person I had been emailing, who came in shortly after and took the lead in conversation. We talked for a long time: the cultivation process, optimal temperatures, how this harvest was comparing to last year's, where the matcha market is heading. The family speaks with the same quiet expertise you'd expect from people who have been embedded in this work their whole lives.

 

 She would disappear for stretches, then reappear in the doorway with a smile already on her face — a question she'd been turning over, a comment she couldn't resist. There was nothing formal about it. She treated us like people she had known for years.

 

As she proudly presented us with the tea field behind the tea house — in full first flush, the rows at their most alive — she told me about her husband — how in his later years he had poured himself into the farm alongside her, helping bring it to the level of craft that earned them award after award. She wanted to make sure we saw those before we left. She showed us each one.

 

 

"She started this farm at nineteen. In postwar Japan. As a woman. Without a manual, without a blueprint — just the land, and the knowledge she would spend a lifetime building."

 The fields in first flush 

They were kind to meet with us at all. First flush — the very first harvest of the year, when the youngest, most tender leaves are picked — is the most important and demanding time in the entire farming calendar. Every person on the farm is needed. Every hour counts. And yet Chisako-san and her family gave us a full morning.

After tea, we drove together to another matcha field nearby — a separate plot, slightly apart from the main harvest activity, where the shade-grown rows stretched out beneath black tarpaulins in long, quiet lines. The covering isn't decorative. In the weeks before harvest, blocking the sunlight forces the plants to produce more chlorophyll, more L-theanine — the amino acid responsible for that clean, calm focus that good matcha gives you. The darkness is deliberate. It's where the depth comes from.

Chisako-san walked the rows with us, pointing things out. The height of the new growth. The particular green of this season's leaves. The way you can tell — if you've been doing this for seventy years — whether a harvest is going to be exceptional before you've picked a single leaf.

As we were saying our goodbyes and walking back to the car, we heard quick footsteps behind us. Chisako-san had run out from the farm to catch us before we left. She pressed a pouch into my hands — freshly harvested shincha. The very first tea of the season, picked that week. She wanted us to have it. We drove away holding it like something fragile.

 

 

 

Shincha — 新茶, "new tea" — is not sold commercially in large quantities. It's the first picking of the year, prized in Japan for its freshness and sweetness, often shared rather than sold. It was not a product sample. It was a gift. From a woman who had been farming for seventy years, in the middle of her busiest week, who ran after two people she had just met to make sure they left with something of hers in their hands.

Why this matters to Hikari

I built Hikari on a belief I've carried since childhood — that the ritual of preparing and drinking matcha is one of the most honest forms of slowness available to us. Not slowness as an aesthetic. Slowness as a practice. The kind that asks something of you.

Being half Japanese, growing up between cultures, I've always understood matcha as something more than a wellness trend. It's a thread — to a place, to a way of moving through the world, to people who have devoted their lives to a single craft with a patience most of us will never know. Sitting with Chisako-san in Yame, speaking Japanese across her family's table, holding the shincha she ran out to give us — I understood more clearly than ever why Hikari exists and what we owe to the people at the source of it.

This is her matcha. We are just the ones honoured enough to bring it to you.