Mori, Shizuoka: The Tea Town With No Name of Its Own

Q: Where is Mori tea from?

Mori is a town in Shuchi District, western Shizuoka Prefecture, in the hills along the upper Ota River. The town's tea merchants' association gives the total planted area as around 400 hectares.

Q: Is Mori no Cha a registered tea name?

No. The Japan Patent Office lists four registered regional trademarks for tea in Shizuoka: Kakegawa Matcha, Kawane-cha, Shizuoka-cha and Higashiyama-cha. Mori no Cha is not among them.

Q: Can Mori tea be sold as Kakegawa tea?

Yes, in part. Under the definition published by Kakegawa City, revised in March 2019 and in force from April 2020, Kakegawa-cha must be made entirely from crude tea grown in a listed area that includes Mori, with at least 75 percent processed at a crude tea factory inside Kakegawa City.

Q: What does Mori tea taste like?

The local tea merchants' association describes it as iki na aji, a stylish taste: sweetness with a measured astringency behind it, body and aroma. Shizuoka's tea industry body treats the upper Ota River valley as a long-standing area for high-grade tea.

Q: How did Mori tea become known?

Through a rokyoku ballad. During the depression of the early Showa era the first head of the Mori tea merchants' association wrote a verse to promote the town's tea and persuaded the star performer Torazo Hirosawa to perform it. The association itself calls it an early example of a commercial jingle.

Mori has no protected name. It got known anyway, and the method is not what you would guess.

Uji tells you who finished the tea. Nishio tells you where the leaf grew and where it was milled. Mori tells you nothing, because Mori has no protected name at all — and its leaf can legally be sold under the name of the town next door. This is the third of these pages I have written, and it is the one that changed how I read a tin.

Shizuoka has four registered tea names. Mori is not one of them

Japan protects regional food names through a registration system run by the Patent Office. A cooperative applies, the area is defined, and after that the name means something legally enforceable.

For tea in Shizuoka — the prefecture that grows 25,800 tonnes a year, second in the country — there are exactly four.

Registered tea names, Shizuoka
Kakegawa Matcha
Kawane-cha
Shizuoka-cha
Higashiyama-cha

Japan Patent Office, register of regional collective trademarks.

Mori no Cha, the tea of Mori, is not registered. Neither are most of the names Japanese drinkers actually use. The register is thinner than the map of reputations.

And Mori’s leaf can be sold as Kakegawa

Kakegawa City publishes the definition of its own tea, revised by the local promotion association in March 2019 and in force from April 2020. It is worth reading closely.

Kakegawa-cha must be made entirely from crude tea grown within a listed area — Kakegawa City plus several neighbouring former municipalities, Mori among them — with at least 75 percent processed at a crude tea factory inside Kakegawa City itself.

So up to a quarter of a tea sold as Kakegawa may have grown in Mori. The name on the bag is Kakegawa. Mori’s name does not appear.

I do not think this is a scandal, and I want to say why plainly. The definition is strict in the other direction: if crude tea from anywhere outside that listed area is present, even one percent, the tea cannot be called Kakegawa at all. The list was drawn using pre-merger municipal boundaries precisely so that soil, climate and method would match. Mori is on the list because its tea belongs there. Being included is not the same as being taken.

But the structure is the same one I found at Uji, where leaf from four prefectures may carry the Kyoto name. There, the name outlived its geography over four centuries. Here it is happening between two towns in the same prefecture, under a rule written in 2019.

How a town with no name got known

This is the part I did not expect.

In the depression of the early Showa era — the 1930s — the first head of the Mori tea merchants’ association wrote a verse to promote the town’s tea. He then persuaded Torazo Hirosawa, the biggest rokyoku performer of the day, to perform it. Rokyoku was popular narrative ballad singing, carried on records and radio into ordinary households. The line that travelled was about sending a daughter off to pick tea.

The association’s own website describes what happened next in one flat sentence: the tea of Mori became widely known. And then it adds its own verdict, which is the reason I am writing this section at all.

The producers themselves call it an early example of a commercial jingle.

I find that unusually honest. A tea region writing its own history could easily have reached for temples and centuries. Mori’s association says, in effect: we had no famous name, so we bought one from popular culture, and it worked.

NOTE FROM JAPAN

浪曲

ROKYOKU

sung storytelling, with shamisen

Rokyoku was mass entertainment rather than court art, at its height in the first half of the twentieth century and carried into ordinary homes by records and radio. It was the popular music of its day, not the refined one.

FROM YUKIA tea town reaching for rokyoku in the 1930s was reaching for the widest audience available to it, not the most tasteful. That choice reads to me as a small act of nerve.

What is actually grown there

Mori sits in Shuchi District in western Shizuoka, in the hills along the upper reaches of the Ota River. The prefectural tea industry body treats the upper Ota valley, together with the upper Tenryu, as a long-standing area for high-grade tea.

The town’s tea merchants’ association gives the scale plainly: around 400 hectares of tea in total, and no large estates, because the land is mountainous. There is nothing here like the Makinohara plateau an hour east, where tea runs to the horizon.

What the hills give instead is the standard mountain-tea combination: well-drained soil, river mist through the valley, and a wide swing between day and night temperature. The association describes the result as iki na aji — a stylish taste. Sweetness, with a measured astringency behind it rather than in front of it.

On matcha, Shizuoka as a whole made 505 tonnes of tencha in 2023, about twelve percent of the national crop and third behind Kagoshima and Kyoto. I have not been able to find a published figure for Mori alone, so I am not going to estimate one.

What this means when you buy

A tea can be excellent and unnamed. Registration protects a name; it does not grade the tea. Four registered names in Shizuoka does not mean four good areas.

Conversely, a protected name is not a quality mark either. It tells you where something is from and, sometimes, how it was made. That is all it promises, and it is worth knowing exactly how much that is.

If the seller names the town, that is information the label was not required to give you. Mori, Kawane, Honyama, Tenryu. Somebody chose to tell you.

→ The rest of this series: Uji, Nishio, Yame, Kagoshima and Ise.

What I take from it

Three towns, three completely different relationships between a name and a place.

Name	What it guarantees
Uji	Finished in Kyoto by a Kyoto company. Leaf may come from four prefectures
Nishio no Matcha	Grown, processed and stone-milled in the same two cities
Mori no Cha	Nothing. There is no registration

I started this series assuming a place name on Japanese tea meant roughly one thing, with local variations. It does not. Each name was written by a different group of people, at a different time, to solve a different problem — a shortage of local leaf in Kyoto, a single product in Aichi, and in Mori, no problem that a name could solve at all, so they wrote a song instead.

The tea in the bag may be identical either way. But you can now tell which question the label is answering, and that seems to me the useful thing to carry into a shop.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Mori tea from?
Mori, in Shuchi District, western Shizuoka, in the hills along the upper Ota River. Around 400 hectares of tea in total.

Is Mori no Cha a registered tea name?
No. Shizuoka has four registered tea names: Kakegawa Matcha, Kawane-cha, Shizuoka-cha and Higashiyama-cha.

Can Mori tea be sold as Kakegawa tea?
In part. Kakegawa-cha must be entirely from a listed area that includes Mori, with at least 75 percent processed inside Kakegawa City.

What does Mori tea taste like?
The local association calls it iki na aji — sweetness with a measured astringency behind it. The upper Ota valley is treated in Shizuoka as a high-grade area.

How did Mori tea become known?
Through a rokyoku ballad written by the head of the town’s tea merchants’ association in the 1930s and performed by Torazo Hirosawa.

Sources: Japan Patent Office, register of regional collective trademarks; Kakegawa City, definition of Kakegawa-cha; Mori Tea Merchants’ Association; Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Industry Council; Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.