Asahina Fujieda
The land and its history
ICHI was born in Asahina, Fujieda — a place where tea culture has endured for over seven centuries, within a city whose own story stretches back more than ten thousand years. This is the land we draw from, and the story we are entrusted to tell.
The landscape of Asahina, Fujieda
Tea Culture
Seven hundred years in Asahina
Since the Muromachi period (1336–1573), Asahina has been recognized as one of Japan's three greatest gyokuro regions. Morning fog rises through the hills, diffusing light and raising humidity to levels that cannot be engineered — only waited for.
Here, tea farmers weave straw into komo — traditional shading mats — and cover their plants for twenty days before the May first-flush harvest. It is a method too labor-intensive for industrial scale, yet essential to the depth of flavor that defines this terroir.
ICHI exists to carry this culture forward: not as nostalgia, but as a living practice — stone-milled, first-flush, single-origin matcha for those who understand that the land itself is the story.
Fujieda City
A thousand years of settlement
Prehistoric
The earliest inhabitants
People first settled in the Fujieda area over 10,000 years ago, at the close of the Paleolithic era. During the Jomon period, communities thrived on the hills overlooking the Seto and Oi rivers, drawn by abundant mountain and sea resources. In the Yayoi period, rice cultivation began on the plains — large settlements and paddies emerged in places such as Kamiyabuta.
Ancient
Kingdoms and burial mounds
By the 4th and 5th centuries, as the Yamato state took shape in the Kinai region, keyhole-shaped burial mounds appeared in Fujieda — including the Tokigaya Gokimen tumulus. In the 6th century, roughly a thousand burial mounds were built across the hills of Seto and Hara. During the Nara and Heian periods, the Shida Plain became home to the district offices of Shida and Mashizu counties — the political, economic, and cultural heart of the region.
Medieval
Warriors and the Tokaido
With the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, the highway connecting Kyoto and Kamakura grew in importance — and the name Fujieda began appearing in travel records. In the Muromachi period, the Imagawa clan briefly established a residence at Hazuma. During the Warring States era, Tanaka Castle became a stage for the struggle between the Imagawa, Takeda, and Tokugawa clans.
Edo
A post town on the Tokaido
Under the Edo shogunate, the Tanaka domain governed the villages of the Shida Plain, while Fujieda flourished as one of the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido — a post town alive with travelers moving between Kyoto and Edo. Commerce, craft, and culture passed through this land daily.
Modern
The tea capital of Shizuoka
In the Meiji era, Fujieda developed around agriculture and commerce. The opening of the Tokaido railway in 1889, followed by the Tosou Railway in 1913, transformed the city into a vital distribution hub for tea, shiitake mushrooms, and citrus. Fujieda was incorporated as a city in 1954 and merged with neighboring Okabe in 2008. Today it remains a central city in Shizuoka Prefecture — known across Japan for wisteria, football, and the Tokaido road.
The Region
A visual portrait of Asahina
Photography from the fields, hills, and workshops of Fujieda Asahina will appear here as our visual archive grows.
Morning mist over the tea fields
Tea plantations of Asahina
Traditional komo straw shading
May first-flush harvest
The landscape of Asahina, Fujieda
Fog rising through the hills
From this land, to your first cup
The Tokaido brought travelers. The railway brought trade. But Asahina's tea farmers remained — tending fields shaped by centuries of knowledge, refusing to trade tradition for volume.
Every tin of ICHI matcha carries this continuity: the same hills, the same mist, the same twenty days of straw shading, the same May harvest. We invite you not only to taste it, but to understand where it comes from.
Taste the land
Explore matcha grown in the fields you have just read about.