How the Japanese Tea Industry Is Structured

Every so often I get a message from a cafe owner who wants to add matcha to their menu and has decided to go straight to the source: a Japanese matcha farm. The logic seems obvious. Cut out the intermediaries, get closer to the farm, pay a fairer price. I understand the instinct. I had a version of it myself when I was first building Tealife.

What these cafe owners eventually discover, sometimes after months of unanswered emails and dead ends, is that the farm cannot actually help them. Not because farmers are unhelpful, but because of something structural about how Japanese tea is made that most people outside the industry have never been told.

Japanese tea operates on three tiers. The first tier is the farm (茶園, chaen), which grows the tea and produces either aracha (荒茶), the semi-finished raw leaf for sencha and other teas, or tencha (碾茶), the unrolled leaf destined to become matcha. The second tier is the manufacturing wholesaler (製茶問屋, seicha tonya), which sorts, roasts, and blends the raw material into a finished product. The third tier is retail: specialty tea shops, cafes, and international retailers like Tealife, where the finished tea reaches the consumer.

The chasho (茶商) is what the seicha tonya becomes when its accumulated identity is strong enough to function as a brand. Houses like Marukyu Koyamaen and Ippodo are chasho. Inside every chasho is a chashi (茶師), the craftsman of selection and blending whose skill determines what the tea ultimately tastes like.

If that is what you needed, you are done. If you want to understand how these roles work and why the middle tier is where quality is actually made, read on.

The tea garden is where everything begins, but it is rarely where everything ends. Most farms in Japan produce what is called aracha (荒茶), literally "crude tea," a partially processed leaf that has been steamed, rolled, and dried but is not yet a finished product suitable for consumers.¹

For matcha, however, the farm's role is distinct from the start. Tencha, the unrolled leaf that gets stone-milled into matcha, must be grown under shade cover for approximately twenty to thirty days before harvest. This covered-cultivation practice, using either traditional reed screens or modern synthetic shade netting, is what drives the accumulation of umami and the suppression of bitterness that makes high-grade matcha possible. A farm growing tencha is not interchangeable with a farm growing sencha. The decision to shade is made weeks before harvest and shapes everything that follows.

Japan currently has approximately 20,000 tea farming households, down from around 46,000 in 2008, cultivating around 36,000 hectares of tea gardens.² The decline reflects a broader agricultural reality: the average Japanese tea farmer is now over sixty, and a significant portion of tea gardens are over thirty years old. The farms that remain are getting larger on average, particularly in Kagoshima, while Kyoto, the heartland of tencha cultivation, accounts for roughly a quarter of Japan's total tencha production.

The three-tier structure is the norm, but there is a deliberate government effort to change it at the margins. Japan's 六次産業化 policy, the sixth industry initiative, encourages primary producers to integrate processing and retail into their own operations, collapsing all three tiers into one. The name comes from the multiplication 1 × 2 × 3 = 6: a farm that grows, processes, and sells its own finished tea multiplies its value rather than simply passing raw material up the chain.³ The supporting legislation, the 六次産業化・地産地消法, has been in force since 2011, and there are now approximately 2,600 certified integrated farm businesses across Japanese agriculture, including a growing number in tea.⁴

For buyers, a sixth-industry tea farm is a genuinely different entity from a standard chaen. It has its own finishing capability, often its own stone mills for tencha, and sometimes its own brand. Buying from one is closer to buying from a small chasho than from a farm in the traditional sense. The single-origin products that appear in export catalogs often originate here. But these farms remain the exception. The vast majority of Japanese tea still leaves the farm as aracha or rough tencha, destined for the next stage.

The seicha factory is the first processing stage. For sencha, gyokuro, and most other leaf teas, it receives fresh-picked leaves, runs them through steaming, rolling, and drying, and produces aracha. For matcha, the factory takes shaded leaves through steaming and drying without any rolling, producing rough tencha (荒碾茶). The two outputs involve different equipment, different techniques, and different downstream relationships. A factory set up for aracha production is not simply interchangeable with one set up for tencha.

In some cases the farm and the factory are operated by the same person or family. In others they are completely separate operations. Either way, what leaves the seicha factory is still a raw material, not a finished product. The decisions that will determine how this tea ultimately tastes, and whose name it will carry, have not yet been made.

The term tonya (問屋) simply means wholesaler, and in most industries it describes a logistics function: aggregate supply, manage inventory, distribute to retailers. In tea, a pure logistics-only tonya technically exists but is rare enough to be marginal. The MAFF's 2019 industry survey on tea distribution treats chasho (茶商) and seicha tonya (製茶問屋) as effectively interchangeable, and the Shizuoka tea market, the largest in Japan, lists its approved buyers as primarily seicha tonya and beverage manufacturers.⁴ When aracha arrives at a seicha tonya, the real work begins.

The seicha tonya performs four core functions that transform aracha into a finished leaf tea product.⁵ The first is selection (品質検査 / kannou kensa), the sensory evaluation of incoming aracha to decide what to buy and at what price. Practitioners describe markets with an enormous variety of aracha available in a single season; the ability to evaluate quickly and accurately is the first measure of skill.⁶ The second function is refinement (仕上げ, shiaage), the physical sorting of aracha through graded sieves to remove stems, dust, and irregular particles that would cause uneven roasting or compromise the final flavor. The third is hi-ire (火入れ), roasting. This is a two-stage process: first, the moisture content of the aracha is reduced further; then, as a separate and optional step, additional hi-ire is applied to develop aroma by triggering a reaction between the amino acids and sugars in the leaf.⁷ The fourth and final function is gougumi (合組), blending.

Gougumi is where individual skill becomes decisive. The goal is to create a product with a consistent taste, aroma, and appearance across a full year's supply, using tea that varies by farm, harvest date, and weather conditions. As one practitioner at Tada Seicha, a seven-generation Osaka wholesaler, explains: gougumi is not simple addition. Blending can suppress a tea's best qualities just as easily as it can amplify them. Some teas that perform brilliantly alone lose their character in a blend, while others that seem unremarkable individually come alive when combined.⁸

The chashi (茶師) is not a separate layer in the supply chain. They are the craftsman inside the seicha tonya or the chasho, the person whose hands and judgment actually perform the finishing work.

The word has shifted in meaning across time and region. In Edo-period Uji, the chashi were a licensed guild. In Shizuoka today, the term can still refer to anyone involved in tea production. In the contemporary commercial tea world, it has narrowed to mean the craftsman responsible for selection (mekiki, 目利き), hi-ire, and gougumi. A Shizuoka chasho owner puts it clearly: the work of a chasho involves selecting raw material while imagining the final appearance, aroma, and flavor, then performing hi-ire and gougumi suited to that leaf, and all of these together constitute the chashi's craft.⁹

This is why the chashi's role looks identical to the seicha tonya's role. It is: the chashi is the person doing the work that defines the tonya or the chasho. A seicha tonya has a chashi inside it. A chasho also has a chashi inside it. The question is not whether the institution has a chashi, but whether that chashi's accumulated judgment has produced something recognizable enough to carry a name across generations.

The National Tea Grading Competition (全国茶審査技術競技大会), which awards ranks from one to ten, tests selection skill specifically: competitors must identify harvest number, cultivar, and origin from dry leaf alone, without ever brewing the tea.¹⁰ The 10-dan holders, of whom there are only around fifteen in all of Japan, represent the outer limit of what the evaluation side of the craft can reach.

What makes the chashi invisible to most consumers is that their name rarely appears on the packaging. The product carries the name of the institution. The chashi's art is embedded in the product, not credited on the label.

The chasho is a tea merchant house with its own brand identity, grade range, and in-house chashi. It performs the same physical operations as a seicha tonya: sourcing raw material, sorting, hi-ire, gougumi, packaging. O-CHA NET lists both 茶問屋 and 茶商 together as the entities performing finishing-stage work across approximately 1,300 factories nationwide.¹¹ The operations are identical. The distinction is not what they do but what they have become over time.

A seicha tonya is primarily a function. A chasho is what a seicha tonya becomes when its accumulated character is strong enough to function as a brand. It is a name that carries meaning across generations, a house that a customer returns to year after year because they trust what comes out of it. The chasho's chashi is typically developed in-house across decades, which is what allows a consistent house character to persist despite annual variation in raw material. As Kanbayashi Shunsho articulates, gougumi is what gives each house its "distinctiveness and its ability to secure customers."¹² That accumulated distinctiveness is what transforms a wholesaler-processor into a chasho.

Both Marukyu Koyamaen and Ippodo are chasho in the full sense, and both handle both leaf tea and matcha. Marukyu Koyamaen blends tencha from different cultivars and growing conditions to match the specific flavor profiles of each named matcha, allowing their products to remain consistent year after year despite annual variation in the harvest.¹³ Ippodo selects quality leaves from producers and applies gougumi to create each named product's distinctive character, a model it has followed since its founding in 1717.¹⁴ Neither is a seicha tonya in the institutional sense, even though both perform finishing work. The difference is brand depth and continuity of identity.

International distributors are the final leg, and this part of the chain has changed more in the last two years than in the previous two decades.

The traditional model is a direct authorized partnership between a chasho and an overseas distributor. Tealife operates this way with both Marukyu Koyamaen and Ippodo, with direct wholesale relationships with each house. The product arrives as a finished, named tea from a house whose chashi has made every quality decision. The distributor's role is to receive it properly, store it correctly, and deliver it to the customer.

What has emerged alongside this, driven by the global matcha boom, is a newer category of operator: a trading company that aggregates finished matcha from multiple producers across Japan and sells to international buyers without manufacturing anything itself. A company like this might represent farms in Yame, seicha tonya in Kagoshima and Shizuoka, and finishing operations in Kyoto simultaneously, offering a broad catalog spanning culinary grades through ceremonial grades from a range of producers and origins.

This model is legitimate and fills a real gap. Establishing direct relationships with Japanese producers requires Japanese language ability, knowledge of the supply chain, and the time to build trust. These operators have done that work and act as procurement agents, connecting international buyers to Japanese supply with relevant certifications already in place: FDA registration, FSSC22000, Halal, organic JAS. Based on what I have seen in the market, their pricing tends to reflect factory gate costs with a commission or agency fee added, and their inventory is often the producer's own stock rather than goods they have taken ownership of, though this varies by operator.

What these operators do not provide is the craft layer. The tea arrives finished before it reaches them. There is no chashi making selection or blending decisions. What you are buying is genuine Japanese matcha from real producers, aggregated and facilitated for export. Whether that is what you need depends on what you are looking for.

The cafe owners who reach out to farms are discovering that the farm is not equipped to be their supplier. Most farms produce crude tea or rough tencha, raw materials that still need to be finished into a product. The farm does not have the chashi, the stone mills, or the commercial infrastructure to deliver a consistent, packaged matcha to a cafe in Singapore.

This is the structural reality that the whole article has been describing: Japanese tea is a three-tier system. Most agricultural products are two-tier, a farm grows something and a retailer sells it, which is why the instinct to contact the farm directly makes sense for almost everything else. If you want better corn, you find a better farm. Tea does not work this way. Between the farm and the retailer there is a mandatory middle layer, the seicha tonya, where crude tea is sorted, roasted, and blended into a finished product. The farm produces a raw material. The seicha tonya turns it into tea. Without that middle layer, there is no product to sell.

What those cafes are actually looking for is finished matcha from a credible source, delivered reliably. There are now multiple ways to get there. A trading company aggregator can source across Japan's supply chain and offer a range of grades and origins. An authorized retailer of a named chasho sells that house's specific finished products: the named grades, blended by their chashi to a consistent profile, the same tea that has defined the house's character across generations. These are not the same thing, and understanding the difference is what this article has been building toward.