九州で見えてきた新しい茶文化A New Tea Culture Seen in Kyushu

This September I have been spending most of my time in Kyushu. Until now, I had been deeply fascinated by the Jomon period and was often drawn to northeastern Tohoku, where distinctive Jomon culture can still be traced, but although I had visited Kyushu several times, I had rarely spent enough time there to think, reflect, and gain deeper insights into its rich history and culture. However, as I spend a significant period here this time, I have come to realize many things. Above all, Kyushu is a large island. Since ancient times, Kyushu has been divided into multiple cultural spheres, and to interpret them correctly one must first bring the communal illusions that obscure them to nothing.

What has historically been a major obstacle in gaining insights into Japan is the tendency to centralize our perspective—treating an island nation as if it were a continent and centering everything around Yamato, Kyoto, or Edo. This mindset becomes the hidden premise for understanding “Japan” and “Japanese,” but ignoring this obstacle is impossible, and as long as we live on this archipelago, we must confront how to engage with it and how to open up new realms beyond it. Because the impression of Japan as merely an island nation has become excessively strong, it has indeed become difficult to cultivate other perspectives, but precisely for that reason it is imperative to incorporate the movements of people across the historical seas far more than we currently imagine.

The attitude of seeing Japan from the perspective of maritime tribes is not a new attempt in itself, but during the era of prewar imperialism, when Japan had to justify itself, and later during the postwar years when Japan had to rebuild rapidly, this question was never taken seriously. Even today, the perspective that emphasizes the sea remains almost ignored in archaeology and history, though in folklore studies, which rely heavily on fieldwork, it has been consistently advocated. In this sense, incorporating the folkloric viewpoint while building upon the achievements of archaeology and history demands from each of us a difficult steering of perspective in how we view Japan.

As I travel across Kyushu, it also becomes clear that many issues facing Japan are condensed here. For example, just today it was reported that almost 30% of Japan’s population is now aged 65 or older, but when traveling outside the major metropolitan areas, the reality is progressing so rapidly that such data already feels too lenient. As a result, most young people, especially women, leave their hometowns quickly, not necessarily for Tokyo or Osaka, but at least for the more urbanized areas within their own region. Outmigration is accelerating.

Thus in Kyushu, while Hakata is its largest city, even Hakata already feels overcrowded to me, and when viewed from the perspective of compact cities where people can live with a certain degree of ease, places like Kokura and Oita City appear far more favorable. This points to the entire northeastern region of Kyushu, but in contrast, areas such as Miyazaki and the Osumi Peninsula lack momentum as urban centers. Around Aoshima and Nichinan south of Miyazaki City, there has indeed been an increase in migrants, but what is striking is that their aspirations do not align at all with those of the local residents.

Especially between Aoshima and Nichinan, the wonderful climate and sea have long made it a paradise for Japanese surfers, drawing many newcomers. I had the opportunity to speak with some of these migrants, and many of them came here either for surfing or because they were exhausted by the competitive urban lifestyle and sought a slower pace of life. Yet at the same time, this has created different problems. As I mentioned recently, Miyazaki has abundant myth-centered history and cultural capital, but the chances to inherit and savor it have thinned, and communication around it is broken. Ideally, newcomers would engage with this capital and create a synergistic effect, but since their focus is surfing and slow living, the places where Miyazaki’s true value could be touched are not open enough to locals or newcomers, a disappointing situation. The result is a closed state where everyone ends up doing similar things.

For instance, Aoshima is full of cafés. This is because surfers, who want to dedicate more time to surfing, generally avoid corporate employment and instead open cafés, which has become quite common. Yet from the locals’ point of view, despite the newcomers’ eagerness to try something new, many similar cafés line up without any chance to touch the land’s history or cultural capital, and they cannot quite become a strength for the community.

In other words, there are no ideas beyond this for either locals or newcomers. That, I felt this time, is the essence of the impasse Miyazaki faces: despite possessing mythology at its core, the region can only produce an ambiguous form of town-making. The excellent climate takes away the room to look at this problem, and the question seems buried in the comfort of surfing and slow living. As such, I cannot imagine Miyazaki offering any new model of cultural capital utilization in the future.

However, what is very interesting is that a movement has begun to challenge this long-standing coastal-centered image of Miyazaki. This is happening on the Osumi Peninsula in Kagoshima, which borders Miyazaki.

Although much attention has been given to the tea ceremony (sado, 茶道), upon reflection, it only exists because of tea leaf production. In Japan, unprocessed tea leaves before commercialization are called aracha, and here a major transformation is taking place. At the forefront of this quietly emerging movement is Kagoshima. For a long time, Shizuoka Prefecture dominated aracha production, but aging and a shortage of successors weakened its momentum, and Kagoshima seized the opportunity. In 2024, Kagoshima surpassed Shizuoka for the first time to become Japan’s top aracha producer.

Of course, Kagoshima and Kyushu as a whole have long been important in the origins of Japanese tea culture, with many regions producing tea in their own way. But tea’s image has always been strongly influenced by the tea ceremonies of major metropolitan areas like Kyoto and Tokyo, and with the coffee boom overshadowing it, the reality of tea production had long remained unseen. Shizuoka failed to present any new proposals in response to these changes, and that, I am convinced, is why it ceded its place to Kagoshima.

So the real question is: now that Kagoshima has taken the lead in tea production, are there companies offering the new proposals that Shizuoka could not? In fact, there is one company at the forefront. Horiguchi Seicha, a tea farming business based in Shibushi, Kagoshima, has opened “Osumi Chazen” not in Kagoshima but in Miyakonojo, Miyazaki, which is on the same Osumi Peninsula.

Through extensive exchanges with tea leaf and production experts, I have gained much knowledge, but above all I feel that their momentum is something missing from the coastal Miyazaki areas and southern Kagoshima. They may very well hold the potential to propose a new tea culture from Japan, independent of the traditional frameworks of Kyoto or Tokyo tea ceremonies.

Perhaps the coastal areas of Miyazaki, unable to escape their problems, are heading toward complete stagnation, while inland Miyakonojo may instead find resilience, aligning with culturally closer Kagoshima across the Osumi Peninsula, and thereby avoid the overall decline facing Miyazaki. It is still too early to know how this will develop, but recalling that Japan’s tea culture originally began in Kyushu, one cannot help but wonder whether once again a new cultural proposal might emerge here—this time from the southeast, from the Osumi Peninsula.