Asahi

Asahi is the cultivar Uji growers reach for when the target is competition-grade matcha. It was selected in 1954 from a native (zairai) tea garden in Uji City by the farmer Hirano Jin’nojō, then trialled from 1953 and named by the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute. It has never carried a national Cha Norin number — it is a prefectural recommended cultivar, grown almost nowhere outside Kyoto. Where Yabukita is the all-purpose workhorse behind three-quarters of Japan’s tea acreage, Asahi sits close to its opposite: a narrow-window, hand-picked specialist bred for one job — tencha destined for high-grade and competition matcha — and one with a standing reputation among growers as the hardest of Kyoto’s shade cultivars to farm well.

Lineage

• Uji zairai (landrace) tea tree, Hirano’s selection — an individual bush picked out of a seed-grown Uji tea garden, not a controlled cross. Its old strain name, Hirano No. 11 (平野11号), is the number the selecting farmer gave it in his own trial stock.

Because Asahi is a landrace selection rather than a bred cultivar, it has no recorded pollen parent — the tree was chosen for how it already grew, not bred toward a target. Kyoto’s tea trade body groups it today with two other cultivars finalised in the same year, 1954: Samidori (selected independently by the tea merchant Koyama Masajirō, old strain name Koyama No. 69) and Ujihikari (bred directly by the institute itself, old strain name Kyōken No. 170). Asahi is the odd one out among the three — Samidori came from a merchant’s own numbered trial series, Ujihikari from the institute’s breeding programme, but Asahi was found and numbered by a working farmer in his own field. No cultivars are recorded as having been bred from Asahi.

Uji’s tea research institute lists a fourth tencha cultivar alongside these three, 展茗 (Tenmyo, registered 2006), bred later specifically for machine harvesting; the institute’s own note on Tenmyo’s quality — “ほぼ同等で優れる” (“comparable to and as good as”) Samidori and Asahi — treats Asahi’s cup as the benchmark the newer, machine-pickable cultivar was measured against.

History

A trio finalised in 1954

Systematic selection of individual Uji zairai trees ran through the early-to-mid twentieth century, with different growers evaluating candidates in their own fields before the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute took the strongest of them in for formal trial. Asahi, Samidori and Ujihikari all reached that end point in the same year, 1954, and the institute’s own summary of the group is unambiguous about what they were for: “京都府では、‘あさひ、さみどり、うじひかり’が 主にてん茶用品種として栽培されています” — in Kyoto Prefecture, Asahi, Samidori and Ujihikari are the cultivars mainly grown as tencha, all under intensive, hand-picked management, and together they form the high-grade tencha that represents the Uji tea brand.

Found, not bred

What sets Asahi apart within that trio is who found it. Ujihikari was developed inside the institute; Samidori came from Koyama Masajirō, the head of a tea house running his own numbered trial series. Asahi came from Hirano Jin’nojō, an individual farmer, working his own tea garden in Uji City rather than an institutional programme. The institute’s records describe him simply as “平野（ひらの）甚之丞（じんのじょう）氏” — Mr Hirano Jin’nojō — with no title attached. The institute took his selection in for trial from 1953 and formally named and adopted it the following year. It was never carried onto a national registry: it holds no Cha Norin number and no Plant Variety Protection Act registration, and its formal standing is, and has only ever been, as one of Kyoto Prefecture’s recommended cultivars (茶奨励品種).

A competition standard

The institute’s own one-line verdict on Asahi’s quality is direct: 「てん茶として特に優秀、出品茶 用として多用される」 — “particularly excellent as tencha, widely used for exhibition [competition] tea.” That reputation has held for seventy years. Horii Shichimeien, a long-established Uji tencha producer, describes Asahi in its own words as “the best variety of tencha found in Uji” and “a high-quality tea that dominates the top ranks at tea competitions,” and named a stone-ground matcha after it — Mumon (無門) — replanting the cultivar in the first year of Reiwa (2019) for a first picking targeted five years later, in Reiwa 6 (2024), which is itself a measure of how long a new Asahi planting takes to become productive. Matcha Direct, a Uji tencha wholesaler, ranks Asahi fifth among Kyoto Prefecture’s tea cultivars by production volume — behind Yabukita, Okumidori, Samidori and Gokou — describing it as “a rare cultivar of Uji Tea that is traded at high prices… not widely distributed,” and quotes a farmer’s verdict that has the flavour of a proverb: “the more effort you put into this cultivar, the more it rewards you.”

Characteristics

Asahi buds at medium timing (中生), on par with Yabukita — not early, despite that claim circulating in some secondary write-ups (see conflicts). The tree grows upright with good early vigour, and under shade its new leaf is vivid green, thin and notably large. That leaf shape is exactly wrong for a rolled tea: Matcha Direct notes plainly that the leaves are “unsuitable for rolled tea like Gyokuro,” which is why Asahi is grown almost exclusively for tencha rather than for gyokuro or sencha.

Kyoto Prefecture’s own cultivation table is candid about where Asahi is hard work. Yield is rated やや少, “somewhat low,” among the lowest of the prefecture’s recommended cultivars, and cutting propagation is rated やや不良, “somewhat poor” — new plantings are harder to establish from cuttings than Yabukita, Ujihikari or Tenmyo — only Samidori is rated as poorly. Disease resistance is middling rather than strong: medium tolerance of anthracnose and only “somewhat weak” resistance to gray blight (輪斑病). The same table singles Asahi out with a caution not applied to most of its neighbours — its new buds are sensitive to late-spring frost and need watching for it — a specific vulnerability distinct from, and not necessarily contradicted by, the general “cold-hardy” reputation the cultivar otherwise carries in enthusiast sources. Add to that a picking window that is short even by Uji standards, and the crop is taken by hand rather than machine; the extra labour goes into quality rather than volume.

What that labour buys is the cup Uji growers compete on: concentrated colour that takes shading well (“染まりが良く”), a clear, strong aroma, and a mellow, rounded flavour with little bitterness, described elsewhere as showing sustained umami and a body that “fills the palate in a way that lighter cultivars cannot.” Properly shaded and stone-ground, it is the tea that other Uji cultivars — and at least one newer, easier-to-machine-pick cultivar bred specifically to match it — are still measured against.