Horii Shichimeien

Horii Shichimeien's roots reach back to the Muromachi period, when the third shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu formally recognized seven tea gardens in Uji known as the Uji Shichimeien. The company's own documented history begins in 1879, when its second-generation owner, Fusakichi Horii, entered a tea called Matsukaze at Japan's first Tea Manufacturing Competitive Exhibition in Yokohama — the earliest public record of the business.

In the mid-Meiji period Horii Shichimeien acquired the Okunoyama Tea Garden atop the hill above Uji, the only one of the original seven shogunal gardens to survive intact, and has cultivated it ever since. In 1924 the third-generation owner, Horii Chojiro, developed a method for producing tencha — the shaded leaf ground into matcha — with consistent, high quality, and shared the technique freely rather than keeping it proprietary. Every tencha production machine used in Japan today is, in effect, a descendant of that 1924 design.

That combination — a surviving shogunal garden and an invention Horii chose to give away rather than patent — makes the house's influence on Japanese matcha production broader than its own storefront, even as it still sells matcha grown on the same Okunoyama slopes.