Why Japan Is Calling This a Matcha Shortage, Not a Boom

For a few years, the story around matcha was simple. Global demand was rising, and Japan was happy to supply it. That framing no longer holds. Industry groups, including the Global Japanese Tea Association, are now describing 2026 as the first genuine matcha shortage in the history of Japan's tea trade.

The spring 2026 auction season made the point in hard numbers. At the Kagoshima Prefectural Tea Market, average first flush (ichibancha) prices more than doubled year on year, the highest level recorded since 1975, according to data compiled by the JA Kagoshima Economic Federation Tea Division. Tencha, the shade grown leaf that gets stone milled into matcha, averaged roughly 13,910 yen per kilogram in that season, up 2.3 times from the year before. Even bancha, traditionally the cheapest grade used for bottled tea, rose close to three times over.

Other regions told the same story. Kyoto's opening tencha auctions ran from around 8,235 yen per kilogram up toward 14,000 yen at JA Zen Noh, with the national ministry aggregate landing near 14,541 yen. In Shizuoka, the top lot at the season's first auction, a Ryogochi Tea Producers' Association batch called Takane no Hana, sold for 1.18 million yen per kilogram, beating the previous year's record of 880,000 yen. Kagoshima's own opening auction hit its highest price since 1989.

This did not come out of nowhere. Japan's fiscal 2025 green tea exports rose 42 percent by volume to 13,125 metric tons, with export value roughly doubling to 84.7 billion yen, according to Japan Times reporting on Ministry of Finance trade data. To backfill domestic shelves emptied by that export pull, Japan's own imports of foreign green tea jumped 82 percent in the same period. That is an unusual position for a country known for growing and exporting its own tea.

The supply side cannot move quickly enough to catch up. Tencha still makes up a small share of total Japanese tea output, and new tea fields take roughly five to seven years to reach full matcha grade production. Japan also lost close to 53,000 tea farmers to retirement between 2000 and 2020, and the workforce that remains skews older. Farmland is shrinking too, partly to urbanization and land conversion, losses that do not reverse on any short timeline.

The early warning for all this actually showed up in late 2025, before the 2026 auctions confirmed it. In Kagoshima, shuto bancha, the last and traditionally cheapest harvest of the year, briefly traded above 2024 prices for gyokuro, one of Japan's most prestigious teas. Industry representatives at the time called the reversal unprecedented. It was the first visible sign that the entire pricing hierarchy of Japanese tea was breaking down, not just matcha at the top end.

On the ground, the shift is reshaping how farmers work. In Shizuoka's Ashikubo district, the Ashikubo Teaworks cooperative converted one of its two sencha production lines to tencha in late 2025, investing 200 million yen in new equipment. The math justified it. Sencha from the cooperative had been selling for around 300 yen per kilogram in 2024. The tencha it produced in 2025 sold for roughly 3,800 yen per kilogram, more than ten times as much. Cooperative head Tetsuya Matsunaga, whose farmers had long earned the equivalent of about 100 yen an hour and relied on side work to get by, said simply, "now everyone is delighted."

What makes 2026 different from a typical price cycle is that even good news is not bringing relief. Reports from Uji describe 2026 as one of the strongest harvests in decades, with generous spring rainfall producing deep, well developed leaves. Quality is not the constraint. Scarcity is, and scarcity built on farmland loss and an aging workforce does not resolve itself in a single good season. Most trade forecasts expect the tightest conditions to persist through August 2026, when the current harvest sets the available pool for the following year, with prices stabilizing at their new, higher level rather than falling back. In a market where origin is getting harder to verify, it helps to know exactly what you are drinking, check out our retail products and our wholesale page. 

Sources: Asahi Shimbun (Sho Ito, February 2026); Minami Nippon Shimbun via Yahoo News Japan (June 2026); JA Kagoshima Prefectural Economic Federation Tea Division; Japan Times reporting on Ministry of Finance trade statistics; Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries; Shizuoka Tea Market and Kagoshima Tea Market auction data, spring 2026.