Bean by bean, coffee cultivation in Okinawa defies the odds

At Nakayama Coffee Farm, Tatsumi Kishimoto (far right) and his team run a cafe and conduct tours of the grounds for visitors. Kishimoto says Okinawan coffee farmers cannot rely on coffee-farming alone as their sole source of income. | KIMBERLY HUGHES PHOTO

BY KIMBERLY HUGHS
February 20, 2026

NAGO, OKINAWA PREF. – Tadaaki Miyagi runs Burikina, an organic coffee farm in Nago, a city on the Motobu Peninsula that juts out from the northwest corner of Okinawa Prefecture’s main island. After he registered his lot with the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) two years ago, he realized his was the smallest farm in the world to receive the institute's coveted Q Grade, a specialty certification for coffee beans.

Miyagi, who hails from the prefectural capital of Naha, grows around 300 coffee trees in a field dotted with shikuwasa citrus trees, shade-giving banana trees and wind-buffering dracaena plants. He is one of only a handful of coffee producers in Japan whose beans have earned the Q Grade.

“Ada Farm in the town of Kunigami achieved the first Q Grade, followed by myself and Shirase Coffee Farm in Kumejima,” he says. “Nobody had expected that specialty grade coffee could be produced in Okinawa because of our region’s low elevation and high latitude, but we proved it was possible.”