Nishio is not Japan's second matcha region. I want to say that first, because a lot of the English writing about Nishio says otherwise, and the truth turns out to be more interesting than the ranking. Nishio, in Aichi Prefecture, produces about 334 tonnes of tencha (碾茶) a year against a national total of 6,278 tonnes. That's roughly 5%. What Nishio holds isn't volume. It's concentration: more than 96% of the city's tea is grown to become matcha, and Japan's agriculture ministry calls that a matcha-specialised tea district that is rare nationwide.
Key Takeaways
- Japan's top three tencha producers are Kagoshima, Kyoto and Shizuoka, in that order. Aichi is not among them, and Kyoto is second in tencha rather than first, contrary to the common English claim (MAFF, July 2026).
- Nishio City grows about 334 tonnes of tencha a year, which its agricultural cooperative describes as top class among Japanese municipalities. That's roughly 5% of Japan's 6,278 tonnes.
- The widely repeated "about 20% of national production" figure is stale rather than wrong. National tencha output has grown about 3.2 times since 2014, so a share quoted against the old, much smaller national total reads far too high today.
- Over 96% of Nishio's tea is tencha, and about 70% of the whole prefecture's rough tea output is tencha. MAFF calls it a matcha-specialised tea district that is rare nationwide.
- Nishio is the only tea region ever struck from Japan's geographical indication register, one of just three cancellations out of 179 registrations.
Where Nishio Sits, and Why the River Matters
Nishio sits on a river delta in the southwest of Aichi Prefecture, on the left bank of the Yahagi River (矢作川). The tea grows on a band of low hills called Inariyama (稲荷山), northwest of the city centre, about 100 hectares of it. Add the other gardens, including those in the former town of Kira, and the city works about 200 hectares in total. That's small. Shizuoka alone farms 11,600 hectares.
Two things about this ground do the work. Nishio City describes the soil under Inariyama as a layer of red earth mixed with sand, well drained, suited to producing the glossy leaf that tencha needs. And the river keeps the air damp: the city's own words are that appropriate humidity constantly covers the tea fields along the flow of the Yahagi.
Photographs of Inariyama outside the covering season show something that looks like scaffolding for a building nobody finished. Rows of posts and beams stand over every field, waiting. That frame is the whole technique, and I'll come back to it. For the wider picture, we mapped where Japan's matcha actually grows.
Is Nishio Japan's Second Matcha Region?
No. Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries names the main tencha producing prefectures as Kagoshima, Kyoto and Shizuoka. Its prefecture table is explicit about the order: Kagoshima first in tencha, Kyoto second, Shizuoka third (MAFF, Situation Surrounding Tea, July 2026). Aichi doesn't appear in that top three.
It doesn't appear in MAFF's table of the eight leading tea prefectures either, which runs Shizuoka, Kagoshima, Mie, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Miyazaki, Kumamoto and Saitama. That table is ordered by cultivated area, which is worth naming: it's why Kagoshima sits second in it while leading the country in both tencha and total rough tea. Kagoshima took the national rough tea crown for the first time in the history of the statistics in 2024, and held it in 2025.
So the common claim gets two things wrong at once. Uji isn't first, and Nishio isn't second.
What Nishio does hold is the municipal distinction. JA Nishimikawa, the agricultural cooperative for the area, puts Nishio City's tencha production at 334 tonnes a year and describes it as top class among municipalities. That's the honest unit, and it's a real achievement. Prefectures are large. Nishio is one city.
Read it alongside the Kagoshima tea region, which now leads the country, and Japan tea production by region for 2026.
The 20% figure is stale, not invented
Nishio's own tourism association still states that the region accounts for about 20% of national production, and you'll find that number repeated across the English-language internet. It can't hold today. The arithmetic gives about 5%.
The number didn't come from nowhere, though, and calling it a fabrication would be unfair. MAFF reports that tencha production in 2025 was about 3.2 times the 2014 level. Tencha's share of all Japanese rough tea rose from roughly 3% in 2015 to roughly 7% in 2024, per the Norinchukin Research Institute, and stands at 8.6% for 2025 in MAFF's table. Run the ministry's own multiple backwards and the 2014 national total lands near 1,960 tonnes. Nishio's 334 tonnes would be about 17% of that, close enough to a fifth that the claim was once fair. That last step assumes Nishio was making roughly what it makes now, which none of my sources confirm. What is on the record is the national side: the denominator has more than tripled since 2014, and nobody updated the sentence.
What Nishio Actually Holds: Concentration, Not Volume
Over 96% of the tea grown in Nishio City is tencha, the shade-grown leaf that becomes matcha. MAFF's own survey of Japanese tea regions describes Nishio as a place where almost all the tea produced is tencha, a matcha-specialised tea district that is rare nationwide. The city's tourism association goes further and calls Nishio the only production area in Japan specialised in matcha, which is its own claim rather than the ministry's.
Zoom out one level and the pattern holds. MAFF reports that tencha accounts for about 70% of Aichi Prefecture's entire rough tea output. No other prefecture is built like that. Kagoshima makes more tencha than anyone and it's still a minority of what Kagoshima grows.
This is why I think the ranking framing does Nishio a disservice. A prefecture that makes a lot of tencha alongside a lot of sencha has hedged. A city where 96% of the crop only makes sense if it becomes matcha hasn't. Everything downstream follows from that commitment: the permanent shade frames standing in the fields year round, the ovens built for one product, the mills.
The cooperative structure reflects it too. The Nishio City Tea Industry Association has 112 members. About 20% of them own a processing plant; the rest take the leaf to rough tea and let a wholesaler finish it. Inagaki (稲垣拓康) chaired the association at the time of a 2017 grower profile and farms four hectares of tencha himself. He put his own position simply: he takes the leaf to rough tea, and finishing is the wholesaler's job.
If tencha itself is new to you, start with what tencha is and how it differs from sencha.
The Tea That Came Over From Uji in 1872
Nishio's matcha industry is a transplant, and the date is on the record. Around 1872, the head priest of Kōju-in, Adachi (足立順道), brought tea seed and processing technique from Uji, and local farmers began planting. If you want the parent, read the Uji matcha region.
The story before that is older and thinner. Nishio City dates its first tea seed to 1271, when Shōichi Kokushi, the founder of the temple Jissō-ji, sowed it in the temple grounds. The oldest written record of tea growing inside the city is from 1601, in a document to the villages called the Shioki no Oboe, which encouraged growing tea to drink. Between 1271 and 1872 there isn't much of an industry to describe, and I'd rather say that than pad it.
Kōju-in itself was founded between 1521 and 1528, to memorialise an aunt of Tokugawa Ieyasu. It's known locally now as the temple of the tea ancestor. A monument to the priest's work stands at its approach, raised in 1913. The temple still keeps what it calls the original tea tree of Nishio tea.
From there it moved quickly. Tencha became the centre of production in the late Taishō period, and by around 1935 Nishio had reached the top level in the prefecture. The technique it settled on is called tana-shiki oishita saibai (棚式覆下栽培), shelf-style covered cultivation. A permanent frame stands over the whole garden, and the shading material is spread across the top rather than draped directly on the bushes. JA Nishimikawa explains what the shade does. It cuts light for roughly 20 days before the first harvest, which reduces the tannins behind astringency and pushes the plant to make more theanine.
The culture around it runs deep enough to be written into municipal law: Nishio has a matcha hospitality ordinance. Schoolchildren hand-pick tea in May as work experience, and schools hold all-school tea gatherings. On 1 May the young growers' club runs a ceremony at the Inariyama garden park. In 2024, 44 third-year pupils from the local primary school tried hand-rolling, stone-milling and whisking. First harvest picking runs from around 10 May into early June.
What Does Culinary Grade Matcha Actually Mean?
Under Japan's own industry definition, most of what the West sells as culinary or cooking grade matcha is not matcha. It is food-processing tencha (食品加工用碾茶), and the distinction is the mill.
The Japan Tea Central Association defines matcha as tencha, meaning shade-grown leaf dried without rolling in a tencha oven, ground to a fine powder on a chausu (茶臼), a stone mill. Its definition table walks through thirteen production routes. Six of those routes finish on a stone mill, and those six are matcha. The other seven finish on a pulverizer instead, and the association's note on that lower block reads that under its definition they are called food-processing tencha. The Norinchukin Research Institute, which reproduced the table in May 2026, adds the part that matters most: the definition has no binding force. That's why the word travels anyway.
Which makes "Nishio is the source of most cooking grade matcha" backwards in an interesting way. The registered scope of Nishio's regional trademark is stone-milled matcha, in those words. A pulverizer can't produce something that qualifies to carry the name.
Nishio does sell matcha graded for cooking, and it's refreshingly open about it. At the 1 May 2024 ceremony, as a first for the club that year, the growers ran a blind tasting with three cups: premium matcha, mid-grade matcha and processing-grade matcha. Visitors were asked to tell them apart by colour, aroma and taste. That's a grade of stone-milled matcha, chosen for baking rather than for a bowl. It isn't the same product as bulk pulverized tencha, even though both end up labelled culinary.
The two are judged on different things, which is the useful part for anyone buying. Drinking matcha is judged on umami and bitterness, a vivid deep green, and powder that doesn't clump. Matcha for food is judged on resistance, meaning flavour and aroma that survive heat, and on consistency, meaning no batch-to-batch variation. A great bowl matcha can be a poor ice cream matcha, which is why we sell a latte grade separately from the ceremonial tins rather than pretending one powder does both jobs. We go deeper on the mill in stone ground versus machine ground matcha, and on the heat in cooking with matcha.
The GI Nishio Gave Back
Nishio no Matcha was registered as geographical indication number 27 in March 2017, and struck off in February 2020 at the producers' own request. MAFF's notice gives one reason, the administrative one: the registered producer group filed notification of lapse, so the registration was cancelled. Nothing else is on the record, and it's the only tea ever removed from that register.
The notice is short and worth reading in its own terms. Registration number 27, product name Nishio no Matcha, class 32, registered producer group the Nishio Tea Cooperative Association of Kamimachi Shitayashiki 2-3, Nishio City, Aichi. Lapse date 3 February 2020, reason given as discontinuation of production process management operations under Article 20, paragraph 1, item 2. Struck from the register on 14 February 2020.
I checked the live register myself rather than trusting the press coverage. All 179 registration numbers are present; number 27 now appears with the single word 消除, struck, and no product name. Only three numbers sit in the cancelled section: 15, 27 and 33. Neither Nishio no Matcha nor a replacement name appears anywhere in the register today.
What the GI demanded explains a good deal about why a working region might walk away from it. Set the specification against normal local practice and the gap is the story.
| Stage | GI specification (2017 to 2020) | Normal Nishio practice |
|---|---|---|
| First flush shading | At least 25 days under shade | Roughly 20 days before harvest |
| Second flush shading | At least 12 days under shade | Not specified by my sources |
| Steaming | No separate requirement recoverable from public sources | High-temperature steaming, to stop the enzymes before the leaf browns, per the cooperative |
| Drying | No separate requirement recoverable from public sources | Mikawa-style tencha oven: brick-built five-tier mesh, far infrared, per the cooperative |
| Grinding | No separate requirement recoverable from public sources | Granite stone mill turning at no more than 60 revolutions per minute, per the cooperative |
Sources: the GI's shading requirements as reported by Minna no Nōgyō Hiroba in 2017, while the registration was live; JA Nishimikawa on normal shading; the Nishio Tea Cooperative Association on its own steaming, drying and grinding method. The registration was cancelled in 2020 and MAFF's register no longer carries the specification, so the GI column is reconstructed from contemporaneous reporting rather than read off the original document.
The GI wasn't describing what Nishio does. It was describing the top of what Nishio does, and binding the name to it. I won't guess at the cooperative's commercial reasoning, since the only reason on the record is the administrative one MAFF printed. But the shape is clear enough: a name covering everything from a competition bowl to a batch for ice cream is hard to pin to the strictest version of itself.
What Survived, and How Nishio Sells
The older protection survived, and it's the one that still governs the name. The Japan Patent Office registered Nishio no Matcha as a regional collective trademark on 20 February 2009, the first regional brand in Japan restricted to matcha within the tea category. The scope is specific: leaf grown in Nishio City and Anjo City, processed into tencha and finished in the same area, then stone-milled. The growers started the application in 2005, formed the cooperative in 2007, filed in July 2008, and set the brand mark in 2009. It now appears on more than 400 products.
The region also exports. The cooperative reports around 100 tonnes of matcha shipped to 40 countries, with the NISHIO MATCHA name or its mark registered in ten countries and territories. In MAFF's current national tea report, Aichi appears exactly once, and not in a production table: a single Aichi company sits among the twelve designated flagship export operations for tea. Japan's tea exports reached 72.1 billion yen in 2025 against a target of 31.2 billion set in December 2020, with a new goal of 81 billion by 2030.
That fits a region selling a finished powder rather than a commodity leaf, and it fits the scale of the thing being fought over. The House of Councillors research bureau put Japan's entire 2024 tencha output at 5,336 tonnes, roughly 7.3% of all Japanese tea. Every café latte, every tub of ice cream and every ceremonial bowl in the world draws on that. For the price side of the market, see the 2026 Kyoto tencha auction opening prices.
What This Means If You're Buying
Nishio is a lesson in reading labels. A region can be genuinely excellent and genuinely small. A national share quoted on a website can be years out of date without anyone lying. And culinary can mean a stone-milled grade chosen for heat, or pulverized tencha that no Japanese definition calls matcha. Ask which mill, which harvest, and how many days of shade. Those three questions separate most of what matters.
There's one thing in the Nishio story I keep returning to, and it isn't the statistics. A city decided, more than a century ago, to grow one thing properly. Then it built everything else around that choice. The frames standing in the fields all year. The ovens made for a single product. An ordinance that writes hospitality into local law. Third-years learning to turn a stone mill. You taste that kind of commitment in the bowl, in the thickness of the foam and the way the bitterness arrives late and then softens. It's slower than scale and it doesn't rank well, and it's the reason we work grower by grower rather than through a broker.
If you're deciding what to serve, start with the best matcha for cafés and restaurants in 2026. If you're working out what it should cost, we published Japanese matcha wholesale pricing for cafés with real numbers rather than ranges.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Nishio matcha better than Uji matcha?
Neither region has a monopoly on quality, and the comparison means less than it sounds. Nishio's technique came from Uji in 1872, so the two share the same fundamentals: shade-grown tencha, unrolled, stone-milled. Nishio's distinction is concentration rather than volume or a separate tradition. Judge the lot, not the prefecture.
How much matcha does Nishio produce?
About 334 tonnes of tencha a year, according to JA Nishimikawa, which describes that as top class among Japanese municipalities. Against MAFF's national tencha production of 6,278 tonnes for 2025, that is roughly 5%. The Inariyama gardens run about 100 hectares, with roughly 200 hectares across the city.
Does Nishio matcha still have a GI?
No. Nishio no Matcha was registered as GI number 27 in March 2017 and struck from the register on 14 February 2020 after the producer group filed notification of lapse. It remains a registered regional collective trademark with the Japan Patent Office, granted on 20 February 2009, which requires stone-milling.
Sources
- MAFF, Public notice of cancellation of registration (registration number 27), 14 February 2020. The lapse date, the reason, and the registered producer group.
- MAFF, List of registered GI products, retrieved 26 September 2026. All 179 registrations; number 27 shown as struck; three cancellations in total.
- MAFF, Situation Surrounding Tea (茶をめぐる情勢), July 2026. Tencha's leading prefectures and their order, the eight-prefecture table ordered by cultivated area, 2025 rough tea prices by type, tencha's 8.6% share, the 3.2 times growth since 2014, and export figures with the twelve flagship export operations.
- MAFF, Introduction to Tea Producing Areas Across Japan, August 2023. Aichi's roughly 70% tencha share of prefectural rough tea, and the description of Nishio as a matcha-specialised district rare nationwide.
- Nishio City, Nishio no Matcha and Tea. Inariyama's 100 hectares and the city's 200, the soil and humidity, Jissō-ji in 1271, the 1601 Shioki no Oboe, the Kōju-in priest, around 1935, the 2009 trademark and its timeline, and the matcha hospitality ordinance.
- Nishio Tea Cooperative Association, About Nishio no Matcha. Shelf-style covered cultivation, the Mikawa-style tencha oven, granite mill at 60 rpm or less, the brand mark on 400 products, and about 100 tonnes exported to 40 countries.
- JA Nishimikawa, Tea picking season arrives: a Hachijūhachiya ceremony in Nishio. The 334 tonne figure and the top-class-by-municipality wording, roughly 20 days of shading and what it does to tannin and theanine, the 1 May ceremony with 44 schoolchildren, and the three-grade blind tasting including processing-grade matcha.
- Nishio Tourism Association, Nishio no Matcha. Over 96% tencha, the association's own claim that Nishio is Japan's only matcha-specialised area, the Kōju-in priest bringing seed and technique from Uji around 1872, Kōju-in's founding and 1913 monument, and the 20% national share figure discussed above.
- Norinchukin Research Institute, The Matcha Boom and Soaring Sencha Prices, May 2026. The Japan Tea Central Association definition table and its thirteen routes, food-processing tencha, the note that the definition has no binding force, the uses table, and tencha's share moving from about 3% to about 7%.
- House of Councillors Research Bureau, Expanding Tea Exports: the state of matcha supply, December 2025. National tencha production of 5,336 tonnes for 2024 and tencha as roughly 7.3% of all Japanese tea.
- Minna no Nōgyō Hiroba, Nishio's historic tea growing, specialised in tencha, 2017. The 112 cooperative members, Inagaki's chairmanship and his four hectares of tencha, the 20% with their own processing plants, first harvest from around 10 May, and the GI's 25 and 12 day shading requirements.
Where this article quotes a Japanese source, the claim was checked against a locally saved copy of that page rather than a search summary. Figures from Japanese fiscal years are given as calendar years: Reiwa 7 is 2025, Reiwa 6 is 2024.
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