Harumidori

Harumidori is a 2003-registered sencha cultivar bred by crossing Kanayamidori with Yabukita at the National Tea Experiment Station’s Makurazaki branch in Kagoshima. It exists for one trait above nearly everything else: umami. First-flush leaf runs amino acids above 4% against tannins of only 10–11%, a combination that reads in the cup as intensely savoury with little of the astringency that usually offsets it — a profile good enough that a specialist single-cultivar retailer, Shinkoju, markets it as a rare speciality and reports its deep-steamed version as their single best-selling tea. That quality comes at a price. Harumidori establishes slowly, tolerates heavy clay soil poorly, and carries no resistance at all to tea scale insect, which is very likely why, decades after release, it remains a minor cultivar grown only in small quantity.

Lineage

• Kanayamidori ♀ (かなやみどり) — contributes the strong cold tolerance NARO’s handbook rates as equal to Kanayamidori’s own, the spreading (開帳型) growth habit Harumidori is described as taking after its mother in, and by reputation some of the milky, aromatic character Kanayamidori is itself known for.
• Yabukita ♂ (やぶきた) — contributes background vigour and wide adaptability, but also the ring spot susceptibility that Yabukita itself carries.

Harumidori is a controlled cross, not a landrace selection: both parents are themselves named, MAFF-registered cultivars. It is a half-sibling, through Kanayamidori, of Fushun (ふうしゅん, 茶農林41号, 1993) — where Kanayamidori sits on the opposite side of the cross, as pollen parent to Fushun’s seed parent Z1 — and, per this collection’s own Kanayamidori record, of Koshun (香駿), a Kurasawa × Kanayamidori cross registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act in 1996; that second claim was not independently re-verified for this record. No cultivar bred from Harumidori itself was found documented in the sources consulted here.

History

The cross was made in 1972 at the National Tea Experiment Station’s Makurazaki branch in Kagoshima — the station NARO’s own handbook credits as its institutional predecessor, reorganised more than once in the decades since. The selected line carried the trial designation Makurazaki No. 19 (枕崎19号) through the station’s evaluation programme. It takes its name from its own leaf colour: the first spring flush’s new shoots are a distinctively vivid green, and 「はるみどり」 — “spring green” — was chosen to describe them.

That evaluation ran for 28 years before formal registration. NARO’s handbook dates the Plant Variety Protection Act registration precisely to 17 March 2003 (registration No. 11102); the MAFF registry table separately carries it as 茶農林48号 (Cha Norin No. 48), the older national naming system that its parent Kanayamidori (No. 30) and half-sibling Fushun (No. 41) also hold. The Norin registration itself is dated 24 August 2000 by the release paper, two and a half years ahead of the PVP registration — see the conflicts note.

The fullest technical account located for this record is a characteristics write-up by the researcher Takeda Yoshiyuki, published in the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Industry Council’s journal Cha and reprinted by the World Green Tea Association’s O-Cha Net. It reads as a release note aimed at growers rather than at retail buyers, and its warnings about slow establishment and clay soils read as first-hand field observation rather than generic cultivar copy.

Characteristics

Harumidori buds late. NARO’s own handbook puts picking 3–5 days after Yabukita; Takeda’s article gives a more specific 6 days after Yabukita and 2–4 days after its own mother, Kanayamidori, and classifies it outright as a 晩生種 (late-maturing type). One secondary reference, 日本茶備忘録, instead describes it as early-budding (早生) — that claim is not corroborated by either primary source and is treated here as most likely an error.

The tree takes after Kanayamidori in form: a somewhat spreading (開帳型) habit that fills out a garden without needing hard pruning while young. Autumn shoot growth stops early, which is a genuine convenience — autumn pruning can be brought forward by one to two weeks relative to Yabukita — and growers are advised to stop picking after the third flush and concentrate management on the first. Cold hardiness is a clear strength: resistance to split-bark frost injury is rated strong by NARO and, more emphatically, as needing “no worry at all” by Takeda. Anthracnose resistance is rated やや強 (moderately strong) in the release paper — better than Yabukita’s — though NARO’s handbook lists it as weak. Set against that is a real list of weaknesses: no resistance to tea scale insect, weak resistance to ring spot disease, only medium resistance to mochi disease, slow growth at the young-tree stage that calls for two-year-old seedlings and careful early feeding, and poor performance in heavy clay soil without prior improvement. Yield is good once a garden matures — NARO puts it 10–20% ahead of Yabukita — but young trees lag, and the whole profile is a cultivar that rewards patience and punishes neglect.

The cup is why growers put up with the agronomy. Leaf colour is a vivid, bright green, and the young leaf is notably soft, which keeps quality from falling away as fast as it does in some cultivars when picking runs late. Chemically, amino acids above 4% against tannins of only 10–11% in the first flush produce a tea that reads as strongly umami and lightly astringent. Both sources describe the aroma only as “different from Yabukita’s” without naming a specific note, and they frame its picking-sensitivity differently: NARO’s handbook treats early picking as a way to bring the characteristic aroma out, while Takeda’s older release notes instead warn that leaf picked too young can throw a peculiar (特異) aroma worth watching. Shinkoju’s retail range processes the cultivar as ordinary sencha, deep-steamed (fukamushi) sencha, pan-roasted (kamairicha) and black tea, and singles out the deep-steamed version as its own best-seller — a level of retail interest that sits oddly next to how rarely the cultivar is actually planted.