Fukumidori

Fukumidori is a sencha cultivar bred at the Saitama Prefectural Tea Experiment Station and registered in 1986 as Cha Norin No. 36. It exists to fix a specific weakness in Yabukita: north of Tokyo, in the Kanto and Tosan tea districts that sit at the cold edge of where tea can be grown at all, Yabukita’s middling cold hardiness costs growers a fraction of their crop to frost most years, and yet Yabukita still covered around 90% of the plantings there for lack of a better regional option. Fukumidori is Saitama’s answer: a cultivar built from Yabukita’s own genetics, made more frost-resistant and considerably higher-yielding, while keeping Yabukita’s mid-season timing and matching or slightly bettering its cup quality.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ — the seed parent in the cross that produced Fukumidori, and also, one generation further back, a parent of the pollen line it was crossed with.
• 23F1-107 ♂ — the pollen parent, itself a cross of Sayamamidori (♀) × Yabukita (♂) made in 1948 at the same station. It was never released as a cultivar in its own right: the release paper describes it as a promising line for disease resistance, yield and quality, dropped because its new shoots grew too large to process well into tea.

Fukumidori is therefore not a fresh cross but a backcross: in 1957, breeders crossed Yabukita against 23F1-107, a line that was already three-quarters Yabukita’s own relative — Yabukita is the seed parent of the final cross and the pollen grandparent via 23F1-107. The aim was to concentrate Yabukita’s yield and quality while pulling in whatever cold-hardiness genetics Sayamamidori and the 1948 cross had contributed to 23F1-107, without carrying over 23F1-107’s oversized, hard-to-process shoots. No descendants bred from Fukumidori itself turned up in the sources consulted.

History

Saitama’s tea experiment station had run a continuous cross-breeding programme since 1947, aiming at cold-hardy, high-quality, high-yielding cultivars specifically because Yabukita — excellent almost everywhere else it grows — struggles at the cold northern limit of Japan’s tea belt. North of Tokyo, in the region’s more severe winters, Yabukita suffers both freeze damage (赤枯れ) and dry-cold damage (青枯れ) in bad years, which shortens the economic life of a planting and makes yields unreliable year to year; the station’s own account of the problem notes that unsuitable Yabukita still made up roughly 90% of the plantings in these districts regardless.

In autumn 1957, at what was then called the Saitama Prefectural Tea Research Institute (founded 1928, renamed the Tea Experiment Station in November 1971, and back to the Tea Research Institute today), breeders backcrossed Yabukita against 23F1-107; the MAFF-designated tea breeding trial site that carried the work had been set up at the institute in 1951. Seed was collected in October 1958 and raised in a glasshouse nursery bed, then moved to an open-air nursery bed in April 1960, where individual selection began. A first-stage selection was made in 1962, the seedling was planted out to the main field the following April for further study, and a second-stage selection followed in 1966. Nursery-bed selection continued from June 1967 to March 1969; the line was planted to the main field again in April 1970 and, for the following eight years, ran as a clonal comparison and characteristics trial at the home station under the strain number 57F1-17, with particular attention to cold hardiness, yield and quality.

From 1978 to 1985, renamed Saitama No. 4 (埼玉4号), it went through wider clonal adaptability trials at four MAFF-designated sites (Ibaraki, Mie, Kyoto, Kochi) and four prefecture-only sites (Shizuoka, Shiga, Fukuoka, Kagoshima), plus a dedicated split-bark frost-resistance trial at the Kagoshima Prefectural Tea Experiment Station from 1979 to 1983. In March 1986 the Tea Research Council selected it as a candidate for MAFF new-cultivar registration, it was deliberated within the ministry on 13 May 1986, and the official gazette of 6 June 1986 published it as the newly bred cultivar Fukumidori, Cha Norin No. 36. At the time the release paper was written (dated 24 June 1987), a separate registration under the Seed and Seedling Act was still pending, filed by the Saitama prefectural governor; Saitama’s own Seedling Council had already added Fukumidori to the prefecture’s recommended-cultivar list on 18 March 1987. Saitama set a target of 508 ha planted by 2000, and the paper names Nagano, Mie, Nara and Kumamoto as other prefectures planning to adopt it.

The named breeders across the programme’s three decades were led throughout by Yasumoto Fuchinoue, joined at different stages by Jiro Hanawa, Tadashi Yonemaru, Mankichi Tanaka and Takeo Matsumoto in the earlier crossing and selection years, and by Shoji Funakoshi, Nobuo Okano and Kaichi Kitada in the later trial years; Fuchinoue, Okano and Kitada are the release paper’s authors.

Characteristics

Fukumidori is a medium-season cultivar, budding about two days later than Yabukita on average and reaching first-flush plucking about a day later; second-flush plucking runs slightly earlier than Yabukita’s. Growth habit is upright, with thicker branches and a larger canopy spread than Yabukita, and mature leaves that resemble Yabukita’s but run somewhat larger and thicker. It roots very readily from cuttings — the home-station trial recorded 100% rooting at six months against roughly 98% for Yabukita — and young plants establish and spread faster, with canopy spread from the seventh year onward clearly ahead of Yabukita’s.

Yield is the cultivar’s clearest advantage at its home station: a multi-year clonal trial there recorded a first-flush average of 241 kg/10a against Yabukita’s 174 kg/10a (139%), and a second-flush average of 386 kg/10a against 227 kg/10a (170%). The wider multi-prefecture trials found first-flush yield closer to level with Yabukita elsewhere, so the home-station figures likely flatter it somewhat, though the underlying trend held.

Cold hardiness was the entire point of the breeding programme, and the trial record backs it up on the specific threat it was bred against: freeze damage (赤枯れ) came in reliably lighter than Yabukita’s, both in the field (grade 1.7 against 2.7, on a five-point damage scale) and in an indoor cut-branch cold-shock test (1.33 against 2.17, a statistically significant difference). Dry-cold damage (青枯れ) was also lighter than Yabukita’s (1.8 against 2.5), though the release paper is candid that it still falls short of the reference cultivar Sayamakaori on this specific front. A separate, dedicated trial for split-bark-type frost injury at Kagoshima over five years found next to no consistent difference from Yabukita (31.9% average damage against 37.4%). No notable disease was recorded at the home station over nine years of trial, and the ring-spot-type leaf blight that regularly affects Yabukita there was not seen on Fukumidori — but anthracnose is a real limitation: its incidence tracked Yabukita’s own susceptibility both at the home site and in warmer trial prefectures, so the paper advises against introducing it to warm, anthracnose-prone districts.

In the cup, Fukumidori runs level with or slightly ahead of Yabukita. A 1986 tasting panel of 24 tea-trade professionals rated it significantly better than Yabukita on liquor colour and on taste, with no significant difference in aroma; laboratory scoring across six seasons of first-flush tea similarly placed it ahead of Yabukita on liquor colour, taste and overall score, though slightly behind on leaf colour and lustre. Second-flush quality came out essentially level with Yabukita’s. A 1984 chemical analysis found total nitrogen, tannin, caffeine, water-soluble nitrogen and soluble-solids content all close to Yabukita’s, with no marked difference in the principal taste-related compounds; a later, unrelated multi-cultivar survey of quercetin glycosides lists Fukumidori among the comparatively good sources of that flavonoid, without giving a cultivar-specific figure. For processing, its plucked shoots have comparatively thin leaves and slender stems, so the standard Yabukita-style steaming is reported to be sufficient — it needs no special adjustment.

Fukumidori is, in short, a workhorse regional sencha cultivar rather than a boutique one, built to solve a specific agronomic problem for Kanto and Tosan growers rather than to chase a distinctive cup profile. That practical purpose is likely why it is almost entirely absent from the specialty tea and vendor literature that covers cultivars like Saemidori or Gokou: its documentation lives in the agricultural trial record, not in tasting notes.