Looking for Shizuoka Green Tea in the Supermarket

For the purpose of this campaign, I went out once again to look for more Shizuoka green tea at the local supermarket. This time, however, rather than picking up the first pack in sight with the words “from Shizuoka”, I thought I would look through the entire section slowly. I am curious, how many of the green tea here are from Shizuoka?

I went to a new supermarket this time, one that is more of the average price-range, as I thought the shops importing only the cheapest things (i.e. where I usually go) focus more on quantity over quality, so their available options might be tilted.

So there I was, standing in front of an entire rack of green tea leaves. To be honest, for someone who is not so educated in green tea, it was quite intimidating. If I was to pick buy some green tea as souvenir, I would not know which ones are the “good stuff” to get and resort to my standard “get the most cost-effective option”. Not to mention all the Japanese on the packages.

My mission began. I started picking up each package and turning them around to see what they say on the back. I wanted to figure out how much of the green tea in this supermarket in Tokyo are from Shizuoka and how easy is it to identify them. I picked up package after package, bag after bag, and… honestly, I was a bit surprised.

The majority of the green tea packages just simply said “made in Japan” without specifying which part of Japan they are from. Given how much prefectural pride Japan usually has, I did not think that the packages would just write in huge characters “made in Japan” without mentioning which part. In fact, if the green tea sold in Japan aren’t from Japan, where else would they be from?

The next discovery was not as much of a surprise, with many many bags of green tea from Uji, Kyoto. Uji is famous for their green tea production, so I see why the name of the place is written on the packages to attract people. So wait… where are the Shizuoka tea?

I started to go through each row to pick up every single bag for answers. Japan, Uji, Uji, Japan, Japan, Japan, Uji….

Finally, at the top left corner of the entire rack, I found a brand that says “tea from Shizuoka”! Out of something like 30 plus brands, there was only one. But it also hit me, these Shizuoka teas were the only tea other than the Uji tea that wrote its origin on the bag! Meanwhile, all the other ones simply say made in Japan. Although the supermarket didn’t stock a lot of them, this shows me that Shizuoka takes pride in their tea, enough to tell us about it in a market dominated by Uji tea.

This post is supported by Shizuoka Green Tea Guide, one of City-Cost's Supporters helping City-Cost bloggers to enjoy life in Japan and engage in new experiences.