Asagiri

Asagiri is a gyokuro cultivar selected from indigenous Uji tea-tree seed and registered in 1954 as Cha Norin No. 18 (茶農林18号), one of the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute’s outputs from a seven-year survey of Uji’s old seed-grown gardens. Its name is also, confusingly, in wide unrelated use: it is a common place name, and at least three commercial products — an unshaded sencha from Uji, a karigane (stem) gyokuro blend, and a gyokuro blend of Ujihikari, Samidori and Goko — are sold under “Asagiri” without containing a single leaf of this cultivar. What follows concerns only the registered plant, Cha Norin No. 18.

Lineage

• Uji zairai (indigenous) seedling — an open-pollinated individual drawn from Uji’s old seed-grown gardens, not a controlled cross.

Asagiri was one of 106 individual trees selected during a designated trial (指定試験) run from 1935 to 1941, which surveyed tea gardens across the Uji district for strains suited to gyokuro and tencha. Its mother tree stood in the north No. 5 plot of the Tea Research Institute’s Kohata trial site and was already about 80 years old when surveyed — meaning it had been growing, unrecorded, since roughly the 1850s. Because it is a landrace selection rather than a cross, it has no documented pollen parent, and no descendants bred from it have been traced in any source consulted. Its closest relative in the historical record is not a descendant but a sibling: Kyomidori (きょうみどり, Cha Norin No. 19), selected from the same batch of 106 trees and registered in the same year, though designated for both gyokuro and tencha where Asagiri was registered for gyokuro alone.

History

The selection programme that produced Asagiri ran through the difficult years of 1935 to 1941, aimed explicitly at finding superior strains for gyokuro and tencha among Uji’s zairai gardens. Of the 106 trees chosen, Asagiri — carried through the programme under the working name Kyoken No. 113 (京研113号) — was propagated by cuttings at the Institute’s Maruyama trial site in 1940. In 1946 part of the planting was brought under overhead shade (覆架) so its behaviour and quality under shaded cultivation could be assessed directly, since that is the cultivation method gyokuro and tencha both depend on.

The trial found the tree vigorous, high-yielding and, most importantly, superior in quality, and it was carried forward as a candidate recommended cultivar for shaded gardens. It was formally registered in 1954 as Cha Norin No. 18, alongside five other sencha and gyokuro cultivars that year — Natsumidori, Yaeho, Kyomidori, Hatsumidori and Benikaori — as reported in the Japan Tea Industry Technical Association’s October 1954 bulletin announcing that year’s newly registered varieties. It was named, the same bulletin records, “in likening it to the morning mist of the Uji region” (宇治地方の朝霧になぞらえる).

Asagiri and Kyomidori are, in one respect, the more official siblings of a well-known family. The same Uji gardens, worked across the same years, also yielded Asahi, Samidori, Gokou, Ujihikari, Komakage and Ogura-midori — cultivars now far better known than Asagiri and still grown across Uji today. Those, however, never received a Cha Norin number; they were adopted instead as Kyoto Prefecture recommended cultivars (京都府奨励品種), a prefectural rather than national designation. Asagiri and Kyomidori are the two from that generation of Uji selections that carry formal national registration — a distinction of paperwork, not of subsequent success, since it is Samidori and Gokou that went on to dominate Uji’s shaded gardens while Asagiri all but disappeared from cultivation.

Characteristics

Asagiri is a mid-season (中生) cultivar; the 1954 registration report records a budding date of 7 April in its trial data, but no source found states its budding time as a day-count against Yabukita, so none is given here. Its growth habit is open and spreading (開張形) with strong tree vigour and medium regrowth vigour after picking. Cold hardiness is strong, and its most specifically noted trait is disease resistance: the registration report calls out particularly strong resistance to anthracnose (タンソ病). Its mature leaf is a long oval, medium in size and about 0.3 mm thick, and the young shoot is described as soft-textured with low anthocyanin content. Its recommended range was the flat lowland areas of the Kinki region generally, not Uji specifically.

The leaf’s fresh, vivid green colour (鮮緑) was what earned it its “excellent for gyokuro” rating in the original trial. In blind tasting comparisons run from 1948 to 1950, judges scored processed Asagiri tea above Yabukita on the same panel — 198 points against 193 out of a 250-point scale across shape, colour, liquor colour, aroma and taste — with its edge concentrated in shape and leaf colour, offset by a slightly weaker liquor colour. Leaf yield from a shaded garden planted in 1940 averaged around 115 kan (roughly 430 kg) per 10 a for the first flush over those same three years, a respectable but not exceptional figure; the record frames Asagiri throughout as a quality candidate for shaded cultivation rather than a yield play.

Despite that promising trial record, Asagiri does not appear to have gone anywhere. It is absent from current lists of Uji’s actively grown cultivars, and it is not tracked as its own line in Kyoto Prefecture’s 2023 cultivar-area survey; its registration-mate Kyomidori, which is tracked, totals only 1.3 ha across the whole prefecture. Whatever quality the 1954 trial found in it, Asagiri appears to have lost out commercially to the un-numbered siblings from the same programme — Samidori and Gokou above all — and today survives mainly as a historical entry in the Cha Norin registry rather than as a tea anyone is likely to drink.