Kamikatsu
A mountain town in Tokushima on Shikoku, and the home of Awa bancha — one of the few genuinely fermented teas made in Japan, and nothing like the rest of the country’s output. Mature summer leaf is stripped from the branch, boiled, rubbed to break the surface, then packed into wooden barrels with the boiling liquor, held under a stone and left for weeks while lactic-acid bacteria work on it; the leaf is then shredded and dried in the sun. The result is sour, cider-like and almost free of bitterness or astringency, closer to a pickle than to sencha, and it is drunk locally as an everyday tea rather than a curiosity.
Elevation
Recorded at 200–800 metres.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
When it is picked
A summer harvest, which inverts everything else in Japanese tea. Awa bancha is made from mature leaf stripped from the bush in mid-summer, boiled, rubbed, and packed into barrels to ferment under weight for weeks — a lactic fermentation by microorganisms, not the oxidation that the word fermentation usually means in tea. Picking early would ruin it: the process needs tough mature leaf, so the calendar runs opposite to the shincha rush.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How production is organised
A small number of ageing households in a mountain village, making a tea for local consumption by a method that has no commercial scale and no successor industry. It is recorded because it is a surviving instance of a fermented-tea practice that once ran across upland East and South-East Asia, not because anyone can buy much of it.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How the name is written
Also transliterated as kamikatsu, awa bancha. Romanisations of a district name vary by system and by vendor, and a packet spelling one way is not describing a different place.
Other teas recorded from here
Other growing regions in Japan
The neighbouring districts are the useful comparison: they share a country, a grading convention and often a cultivar, so what differs between them is closer to terroir than anything a cross-border comparison can isolate.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No external document stands behind the elevation band, the climate note or the character described above, which is why each carries its confidence in the open.