The Family

In 1891, Fujiwara Ichiro built a single-room teahouse on the eastern slope of Yoshino Mountain, not far from the old cherry groves. He had worked for fifteen years as a carpenter in Nara city, and one autumn he simply stopped, cleared a plot among the cedars, and started over. He planted fifty tea plants that first year. He described the location in a letter to his brother as "halfway between the town and the sky." That description has not improved with age.

The great Kanto earthquake of 1923 reached Yoshino as a long, low trembling. The teahouse cracked along the north wall but did not fall. Ichiro's son Kenji repaired it over the following winter using cedar from the adjacent grove — the same grove that still stands. Kenji added a second room and a proper hearth. He also expanded the tea garden to nearly two hundred plants, which remains roughly its size today.

Kenji's son Takao came of age during the lean years of postwar Japan and made the garden earn its place. In 1952 he introduced a shade-growing practice for a portion of the garden, producing the family's first gyokuro. He also began making wagashi — originally to give guests something to do while the tea cooled, eventually because he was good at it and enjoyed the work. The combination of house-grown tea and house-made sweets became what the teahouse is known for.

Haruki, the fourth generation, took over from his father Takao in 2003. He spent his twenties in Kyoto studying formal tea ceremony under a Urasenke master, returned to Yoshino with a dozen notebooks and a deep suspicion of ceremony for its own sake. His teas are prepared with precision, but there is no ritual theater about it. He once told a visitor who asked about his technique: "I have been making this particular tea for thirty years. The technique has become the same as breathing. You don't think about how to breathe." He was not being modest.

His daughter Mei studied traditional confectionery in Kyoto and returned to Yoshino in 2021. She handles the wagashi now — the nerikiri shapes, the seasonal fillings, the decision about what the week's small obsession will be. She and Haruki disagree, productively, about almost everything except the temperature of the water. Between the two of them, the teahouse has never been in better hands.