Benihomare

Benihomare is a black tea (紅茶) cultivar registered in 1953 as Cha Norin No. 1 — 茶農林1号 — the very first entry in the first year Japan ever ran a national tea cultivar registration system. It was selected from Meiji-era Assam-type seedlings descended from tea seed that the former shogunate retainer Tada Motokichi brought back from Assam and Darjeeling in 1877, and it went on to become the backbone of Japan’s attempt to build a black tea export industry to compete with Ceylon, India and China. That industry collapsed within two decades of the cultivar’s registration, after Japan liberalised black tea imports in 1971, and Benihomare survives today mainly in small revival plantings on the ground it once dominated.

Lineage

• Tada-line Assam-type seedling (多田系印度雑種) — an individual selected from an open-pollinated planting of Indian-type (Assam) seedlings at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce’s experiment station at Nishigahara, Tokyo; not a named cultivar or a single traceable parent tree.
• Pollen parent — unrecorded. NARO’s own published pedigree chart for Benifuki marks Benihomare’s own male parent simply “?”, and no other source names it either.

Benihomare is a landrace-style selection from an introduced seed population, rather than either a Zairai selection or a controlled cross: the seed stock itself was Assam germplasm imported from India in the 1870s, but the individual plant that became Benihomare was picked out of an uncontrolled, open-pollinated planting of that seed’s descendants, decades later, in Japan. It is documented — in NARO’s own pedigree chart — as the seed parent of Benifuki (べにふうき), crossed in 1965 with 枕Cd86 (a Darjeeling-derived selection bred at Makurazaki) and registered thirty years later, in 1995. It is also listed, in the standard cultivar registry compiled by the Japan Tea Sommelier project, as the origin of Izumi (いずみ, 1960), a kamairicha cultivar — though that descent rests on a single secondary source and is not corroborated by a published pedigree chart the way Benifuki’s is.

History

The Tada line

Japan’s attempt to grow its own black tea traces back to Tada Motokichi (多田元吉, 1829–1896), a former Edo-period bakufu retainer born in Futtsu, in Kazusa Province (now Chiba Prefecture). In 1875 the new Meiji government’s Bureau of Industrial Promotion (勧業寮) recruited him for his tea expertise, and the following year sent him to inspect tea cultivation in China, then in India — Assam and Darjeeling — and Ceylon. He and two companions are usually credited as the first Japanese to reach the interior of Assam and Darjeeling. Tada returned in 1877 with Assam tea seed and manufacturing know-how, and raised some of the seedlings himself at Mariko, near Shizuoka, where he later died in 1896. The rest of the seed was distributed to trial grounds around the country, and the individuals that survived Japan’s colder winters became known collectively as the Tada-line Indian hybrid (多田系印度雑種) — Assam-type tea naturalised to Japan by cold selection rather than by breeding.

From seedling to Cha Norin No. 1

Among the plantings of Tada-line seed was one at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce’s Agricultural Experiment Station, Tea Manufacturing Department, at Nishigahara in Tokyo. A secondary source (customtea.jp) places the first selection of promising individual mother trees there in 1905–1907; this detail is not corroborated in the primary registration paper, which instead documents the next two milestones. The chosen line, known at that stage only by the working designation Kokucha C8 (国茶C8), was transplanted to the national Tea Experiment Station at Kanaya, Shizuoka, in 1921 (Taisho 10), and established there as a stable line by 1935 (Showa 10). Along the way, according to customtea.jp, it won recognition in domestic tea competitions and, reportedly, from overseas tasters as well.

Formal registration of Japanese tea cultivars did not exist before 1953. The paper that announced it, 茶の品種登録と命名 (Registered Tea Varieties), published in 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal) No. 2 that October, opens by stating explicitly that cultivar registration for tea was being carried out for the first time that fiscal year, covering fifteen cultivars in total: ten for green tea (eight for sencha, one each for tamaryokucha and kamairicha) and five for black tea. Kokucha C8 was renamed Benihomare and issued registration number one — 茶農林1号 — ahead of Yabukita, which received number six later on the same list. The paper’s own stated reason for the name is terse: “excellent as a black tea” (紅茶として優れている). The registered form is hiragana only; the cultivar has no official kanji spelling, though it is often seen written 紅誉 or 紅芳.

Rise and fall of a black tea industry

Registration gave the cultivar an official identity, but the industry around it was already the point. Postwar Japan wanted to export black tea, and Benihomare — good quality, and unusually cold-hardy for a Japanese black tea cultivar — was the closest thing the country had to a proven one. It spread through Shizuoka and the warmer regions further west, its recommended range per the 1953 registration entry, and became the dominant cultivar in several minor black tea districts, of which Kameyama, in Mie Prefecture, is the best documented today. At its Showa 30s peak (roughly the mid-1950s to mid-1960s), Kameyama’s Benihomare gardens covered around 50 hectares and produced about 97 tonnes a year, exported abroad on a reputation strong enough that local accounts still describe it as the first Japanese-grown black tea to match imported teas in quality. A Kameyama grower, Kawado Tsutomu, won Japan’s top domestic tea-competition prize — the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Award — eleven times across twenty-three competitions.

It did not last. Japan liberalised black tea imports in 1971, and, according to the Japanese Wikipedia history of the crop, domestic black tea production — which had exceeded 1,500 tonnes a year nationally until around the middle of the Showa 30s, about 1960 — collapsed afterward. Kameyama’s black tea gardens were steadily replanted to green tea, and black tea production there, as elsewhere in Japan, nearly disappeared. A revival effort, the Kameyama Benihomare Black Tea Revival Project (亀山べにほまれ紅茶復活プロジェクト), began in 2011 with support from Mie Prefecture’s agricultural extension and research services, working from gardens that had reportedly survived more than forty years of neglect. Smaller-scale revival interest has also been reported in Nara Prefecture, another former production area.

Characteristics

The 1953 registration paper describes Benihomare as late-budding (晩生種), with an upright growth habit (樹姿直立) and strong vigour. Its leaves are elliptical, large and dark green, and it carries strong general disease resistance and vigorous regrowth after plucking (再生力大) — but the paper is candid about a real weakness: the bud count per bush is low (芽数が少い), which limits how much a bush yields at each picking. No numeric yield figure survives in any source found for this record, and no disease-resistance breakdown by specific pathogen was found either, unlike the fuller profiles available for some later cultivars.

As a black tea, the 1953 paper rates its quality as superior (品質優良), singling out a particularly rich liquor colour and strong taste (水色, 味が濃厚である). More recent trade sources describe a bold body with a deep red liquor and a floral, almost heady aroma — workable either as a straight cup, where a thick, umami-forward astringency comes through, or as a base for milk tea. It is also noted for rooting well from cuttings, a practical trait for propagating a clonal cultivar at scale, and for being comparatively cold-hardy among Japan’s black tea cultivars, which is part of why it was able to spread beyond Shizuoka’s mild climate into places like Kameyama. It has never been grown for green tea at any scale that this research found — every source treats it strictly as a black tea cultivar, the type it was named and bred for.