MINAMI-YAMASHIRO, Kyoto Prefecture—The only village in Kyoto Prefecture is an increasingly depopulated municipality nestled in a forested, mountainside area.
Although home to just 2,300 residents, Minami-Yamashiro village features a roadside station that attracts a staggering 620,000 visitors annually.
They come for the village’s tea.
“The sense of resignation that ‘all we have is tea’ has successfully transformed into a feeling of pride that ‘what we have is tea,’” said Kenji Morimoto, 59, a native of Minami-Yamashiro and president of the company that operates Roadside Rest Area Ocha-no-Kyoto Minami-Yamashiro Village.
A 90-minute drive from the city centers of Kyoto and Osaka takes one to the pride of Minami-Yamashiro, which shares borders with Shiga, Mie and Nara prefectures.
On the mountainside along a national road surrounded by fresh greenery, glistening new tea buds swayed in the balmy breeze in May, the start of the tea-picking season.
Seventy percent of the village area is forest. Its climate, with significant temperature fluctuations, is considered ideal for tea cultivation.
Ocha-no-Kyoto opened in April 2017 with a mission to deliver high-quality locally produced tea directly to consumers within the region.
Annual tea output in Minami-Yamashiro was 425 tons in fiscal 2025, making the village the second-largest tea-producing area across Kyoto Prefecture after the town of Wazuka.
Tea harvested in Minami-Yamashiro is marketed under the umbrella brand of Uji tea.
For this reason, the village had long remained relatively unknown among consumers, overshadowed by the global reputation associated with exceptional green tea from Kyoto Prefecture’s Uji and surrounding areas.
Ocha-no-Kyoto, therefore, sells mid-grade “sencha” green tea from Minami-Yamashiro, alongside the “kabusecha” hybrid containing sencha and top-quality “gyokuro” tea, under its own Muracha (village tea) label.
The flagship product at Ocha-no-Kyoto is matcha, and a wide variety of matcha-relevant items are available there.
The most popular is the matcha-flavored soft-serve ice cream made from the first spring harvest of the premium Okumidori tea variety. This deep-green ice cream sells up to 1,400 servings a day.
Another popular item is Muracha Pudding, which is slow-cooked at low temperatures and comes in two variations: pure matcha taste and “hojicha” roasted flavor.
The cafeteria at the roadside rest area offers an “all-tea set meal” featuring tempura coated in matcha-utilized batter and various other delicacies.
More than 50 products have been newly developed for sale at the roadside station. They were created by employees of the Ocha-no-Kyoto operator that shares its name with the village.
The company, wholly owned by the municipal government, produces most of the delicacies by hand at a dedicated processing facility on the grounds of the rest area.
Ocha-no-Kyoto earned such a strong reputation that it won first place nationwide in a magazine’s “best roadside station ranking” in spring of both 2024 and 2026.
In February this year, Ocha-no-Kyoto opened a directly-run shop within Kintetsu Department Store Main Store Abeno Harukas in Osaka.
This marked the station’s entry into the world of “depachika” (department store basement), a term referring to high-end food halls in underground levels of department stores.
Annual sales at Ocha-no-Kyoto have already reached 700 million yen ($4.3 million), far exceeding the village’s tax revenue of 370 million yen.
With up to 70 staff members, Ocha-no-Kyoto also serves as a vital source of employment in the small village.
Morimoto stressed that Ocha-no-Kyoto will continue to “focus exclusively on tea for achieving a breakthrough.”
SCENERY AN ADDITIONAL SELLING POINT
A foreign-affiliated hotel lies north of Ocha-no-Kyoto and offers guests breathtaking views of the tea fields.
But some advance research is recommended for outdoor photography of the vast green expanses of tea leaves.
Tea fields are sometimes covered with black sheets, while brown branches from harvested tea are occasionally prominent.
Those seeking a tea field carpeted with vivid new shoots are encouraged to visit spots where “the tea leaves and the farmer become one,” with a private home sitting modestly amid the agricultural area.
Photographers often emphasize the tea field’s sloping, undulating design. But they are urged not to accidentally step onto the farmland.
(This article was written by Kazuyuki Hiraoka and Yoshiaki Arai.)
AloJapan.com