Hi everyone! This is LEON (leon Ono) from Denei. At our zazen meditation experience at Jusho-in, a subtemple of Myoshin-ji in Kyoto, the very first thing we offer our guests is a welcome tea—and that tea is Mandokoro-cha.
Today, I want to tell you why we fell so completely in love with this tea, along with a report from the day we actually visited the tea fields where it grows.
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What Is Mandokoro-cha? Denei’s Welcome Tea
Mandokoro-cha is a rare Japanese tea grown in Mandokoro, a small mountain village in the Oku-Eigenji area of Higashiomi, Shiga Prefecture—a valley deep in the Suzuka Mountains, east of Lake Biwa. Three things set it apart:
- A native varietal—less than 2% of all tea grown in Japan: Rare today, these plants are grown from seed rather than cuttings, so every single tree has its own individual character. Their supple branches even survive winters under more than a meter of snow.
- An entire region grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer: To protect the local water source, the only fertilizer used is natural material—pampas grass, fallen leaves, and rapeseed oil cake.
- 600 years of history: Cultivation began in the Muromachi period (1336–1573). There’s even an old tea-picking song that goes, “Uji is the place for tea, but Mandokoro is the tea…”—that’s how renowned it once was.
Planted by a Zen Master, Served to a Warlord
Here’s the part of the story that gave me chills.
Six hundred years ago, the villages around Mandokoro were home to woodturners called kijishi. The mountain frost made ordinary farming nearly impossible—until Ekkei Shukaku, a Zen master and the fifth abbot of nearby Eigenji temple, noticed that this terrain was made for tea: the sharp temperature swings of the valley, the morning mist, the well-draining slopes. He encouraged the villagers to plant it, and Mandokoro-cha was born.
In other words, the welcome tea we serve before zazen meditation was first planted by a Zen master. In Japan, tea and Zen have never really been separate things—and this tea carries that history in its leaves.
Its reputation only grew from there. Legend has it that Mandokoro-cha was the very tea a young Ishida Mitsunari served to the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the famous “three cups of tea” story. In the Edo period it was presented to the imperial court and the lords of Hikone domain, and at its peak, more than a thousand tea workers crossed the mountains from Mie every harvest season to help pick the leaves, staying twenty to thirty days while tea-picking songs echoed through the fields.
Today, only around thirty farming households remain. Which brings me to why we went.
A Wild Encounter on the Way to the Tea Fields
The other day, I traveled to the Mandokoro tea fields together with Mr. Nakagawa, the owner of Nakagawa Seiseido, a tea wholesaler founded in 1858 in Otsu, Shiga.
On the drive over, he told me that the road leading up to the fields used to be an unpaved mountain path—a single narrow lane that was tough to drive. On one of those old drives, he actually spotted a Japanese serow, a protected wild mammal designated as a Special Natural Monument of Japan. At first he thought it was a dog, until he realized what it really was!
While we were swapping stories like that, we arrived at the tea fields of Mandokoro.
An Aroma That Rushes Through You—and the Secret Behind It
Mr. Nakagawa led me to the home of Ren Yamagata, the youngest tea farmer in Mandokoro. As she told me, “Apart from me, everyone here is elderly.”
She isn’t originally from the area. Her connection to Mandokoro began through a class at the University of Shiga Prefecture. Later, I read a book about the region and learned just how deeply she has always committed to being on the ground: during her studies she interviewed elderly residents in rural villages across Japan, and after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 she was among the first to reach a fishing village in Miyagi to help with recovery.
For years afterward she kept visiting Mandokoro while working elsewhere—but for someone who had felt real problems with her own hands, simply “visiting” wasn’t enough. Eventually she rented an empty house in Mandokoro and decided to settle there for good, an episode recorded in the book The Origins of Japanese Tea by Tatsuhiko Iida.
In it, her own words are quoted: she couldn’t forget the emotion of her first visit to Mandokoro—the landscape shaped by a life of quiet, honest work, and a flavor of tea unlike anything she had tasted before. Having grown up in a new suburban development, and having seen the aftermath of the earthquake in Tohoku, she wanted to live a life with no regrets.
It isn’t easy for an outsider to be accepted into a traditional rural community, and at one point she nearly gave up on even renting a house. But by patiently building connections and earning the trust of the local people, she found her resolve to make her life in Mandokoro. I found that genuinely moving.
Then she brewed me a cup of the sencha she had grown, using spring water from Mandokoro itself.
At the first sip, an aroma I had never experienced before rushed gently and cleanly all the way through the back of my nose. It was a stunning experience.
So why does such a special aroma exist?
I believe the secret lies in Mandokoro’s geology and the life force of the native varietal.
The Mandokoro tea fields sit on well-draining sloped land formed by an ancient geological layer known as the Chichibu Paleozoic stratum. The native tea trees drive their roots straight down, deep into the earth like a drill, drawing up the nutrients locked in that ancient layer.
It’s the combination of these natural conditions that creates an aroma found in no other tea. The moment I tasted it was the moment we decided Mandokoro-cha had to be Denei’s welcome tea.
Ren Yamagata’s Answer to Sharing Mandokoro-cha
Afterward, Ren and I talked about how to help more people discover Mandokoro-cha.
Because she pours herself so fully into the tea every day, she has no time left for promotion. She had also considered raising her prices, but with a hard limit on how much she can harvest each year, that didn’t feel like the right answer either.
The answer she arrived at was this: let people enjoy Mandokoro itself, as a tour. That way, she could keep facing the tea each day while still sharing its magic with the visitors who come from near and far.
Hearing that, I found myself genuinely hoping that one day Denei might be able to create a tour that shares the wonder of Mandokoro.
She then showed me a tea tree estimated to be 300 years old, designated a natural monument of Shiga Prefecture in 2002. Said to be among the oldest tea trees in the prefecture, it’s astonishingly still in active harvest—picked every year to produce gyokuro. I was overwhelmed by the sheer vitality of the plant.
Closing Thanks
To Mr. Nakagawa of Nakagawa Seiseido—thank you so much for bringing us to Mandokoro.
And to Ren Yamagata—thank you for taking the time out of your busy days to share so many stories, to serve us such delicious tea, and to show us your fields. It was a truly wonderful day.
Long before this visit, I’d been drawn to Mandokoro-cha—a native varietal, grown without pesticides since cultivation began. For the welcome tea at our zazen experience, I wanted our guests to drink what tea originally was in Japan: a medicine for the mind and body. That’s why I asked Mr. Nakagawa to introduce me to Ren Yamagata.
And when I took that first sip, I didn’t analyze anything. The word “oishii” and a smile just slipped out on their own.
Through the experiences we offer at Denei, we’ll carry the magic of this Mandokoro-cha to guests from all over the world.
