While hiking in the mountains recently I met an 80 year old man who invited me to visit his mountain top green tea farm. The man bought and cleared the land at the top of this mountain over 60 years ago and has been climbing the mountain ever since to tend and care for his fields. He is one of the last tea farmers in the area to harvest all of his tea by hand and he uses no machines to assist in bringing the tea down the mountain. The large basket he carries on this back will be filled with the day’s harvest before he returns home in the evening. This man was very proud of his tea fields and his family’s long history of farming the mountains of the Japan Southern Alps.
