Honcha, the everyday leaf tea brewed as sencha, closed Kagoshima's 2026 first-flush season at Y5,228 a kilogram, the highest price since 1975, the Minami Nippon Shimbun reported.

The average more than doubled last year's Y2,564. The full ichibancha (first-flush) season at the Kagoshima prefectural tea market ran from early April through late May; total volume traded was 3,821 metric tons, up 12.5% from 2025. Tencha, the shaded leaf processed into matcha, averaged Y13,910 a kilogram, up 2.3 times year on year; organic tea averaged Y8,047, up 69.4%.

The season had opened on a strong note. At the first trading session on April 6, the top lot sold for Y30,000 a kilogram, the highest since 1989, on an opening average of Y6,573, according to the same paper's report on that session.

Yosuke Tashiro of the JA Kagoshima Economic Federation's tea division said demand had "far exceeded expectations." Ken Okamura, president of the Kagoshima Prefectural Tea Merchants Cooperative, said the price swings had left parts of the supply chain unsettled. The Kyushu Regional Agricultural Administration cautioned against relying too heavily on export demand to sustain the prices.

The price split points to the underlying cause. Growers have been converting sencha fields to tencha cultivation to capture matcha's higher prices, which has tightened the supply of leaf destined for brewing tea even as Kagoshima's overall harvest grew. Kagoshima has been Japan's largest raw-tea producer for two straight years.

Kagoshima is one of Japan's two largest tea-producing prefectures alongside Kyoto's Uji region, where tencha auction prices also climbed sharply in 2025. The pattern in both regions is the same: rising global demand for matcha is bidding up the price of land and labor across the whole leaf-tea sector it sits inside, not just the matcha grades themselves.

Sources: Minami Nippon Shimbun via 373news.com, 鹿児島県産一番茶が急騰 前年の2倍 抹茶ブームが追い風; Minami Nippon Shimbun via 373news.com, 2026年産新茶、最高値3万円 日本一早い鹿児島の初取引.