Hatsumidori

Hatsumidori is an extremely early-budding sencha cultivar registered in 1954 as 茶農林20号 (Cha Norin No. 20). It began, unusually for a Kagoshima-bred cultivar, as a seedling population grown not from local zairai stock but from seed imported from Mie prefecture, and it was selected and fixed at the Kagoshima Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station from 1933. Its name is a plain description of that earliness — hatsu (初, “first”) plus midori (みどり, “green [tea]”) — and its own registration paper classes it 極早生, “extra-early,” a grade ahead of the merely 早生 (“early”) cultivars registered alongside it. That earliness was always the entire case for its existence: a controlled trial a quarter-century later found its finished-tea quality the weakest of every early cultivar tested against Yabukita. It should not be confused with Hatsumomiji (はつもみじ, 茶農林13号), a black tea cultivar bred at the same Kagoshima station and registered the year before, in 1953 — the shared hatsu prefix is the only thing the two names have in common.

Lineage

• Mie Zairai seedling population — imported as seed from Mie prefecture and raised at the Kagoshima station; not a controlled cross.

Hatsumidori is a landrace selection rather than a bred cross. Its pre-registration strain designation, 鹿緑原5号, follows the same prefecture-prefix-plus-number convention used across its 1954 registration cohort — 鹿 marking it as a Kagoshima station selection, the way 京研113号 and 京研172号 mark Kyoto-bred lines elsewhere in the same batch — but its seed stock came from outside the prefecture that developed it, a sourcing pattern none of its cohort-mates shares (Natsumidori, Yaeho, Asagiri and Kyomidori were all selected from zairai gardens local to the station that tested them). Selected in 1933, its pollen parent is unrecorded and unknowable, as with any seed-grown selection of its generation. No source consulted documents Hatsumidori as the seed or pollen parent of any later registered cultivar.

History

Hatsumidori’s own registration write-up is comparatively terse next to its 1954 cohort-mates. Where Asagiri’s paper describes a 106-tree survey across Uji-district gardens and Kyomidori’s a 20-strain shortlist drawn from that same survey, Hatsumidori’s account runs to two sentences: a seedling population grown from Mie-prefecture seed was selected, and the plant was developed at the Kagoshima Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station starting in Showa 8 (1933).

Registration followed 21 years later, in fiscal 1954, alongside five other new Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry cultivars — Natsumidori, Yaeho, Asagiri and Kyomidori for green tea, and Benikaori for black tea. All six were formally written up in “茶の新登録品種” (“The New Registered Tea Varieties”), published in 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal) No. 4 in October 1954. That paper credits Hatsumidori with an upright growth habit, strong vigour, high cold tolerance, medium resistance to anthracnose (タンソ病), and very strong regrowth after plucking; its leaf is short-oval, large and deep green, and its yield is described as abundant. A joint yield trial recorded in the same issue — under Benikaori’s own write-up, where Hatsumidori served as the local check variety — put Hatsumidori’s three-flush leaf total, on six-to-nine-year-old bushes, at 77.7 kan/10a (about 291 kg/10a, indexed to 100) at the Kagoshima station, against Benikaori’s 66.8 kan/10a (index 86); both figures are 1948–51 four-year averages.

A later trial found the limits of its earliness

The clearest account of what Hatsumidori is actually like in the cup comes from a field trial run in 1972 and published seven years later as “暖地におけるチャ早生品種の品質特性(第1報)” (“The Green Tea Quality of Early Varieties in the Warm Region, Part 1”) in 茶業研究報告 No. 49 (1979), by Kosei Wada, Norio Nakata and Yoshio Honjo of the Makurazaki Branch, National Research Institute of Tea. The authors picked six early cultivars — Kuritawase, Makinoharawase, Hatsumidori, Yutakamidori, Yaeho and Surugawase — from four-year-old farmer gardens around Makurazaki, Kagoshima, alongside Yabukita grown at the branch station itself, each at an early and an optimum picking date, and scored the finished tea out of 100 (five criteria, 20 points each).

Hatsumidori’s optimum first-flush date fell around 17 April, roughly in the middle of the field: nine days ahead of Yabukita’s 26 April in the same trial, but four days behind the earliest cultivar tested, Kuritawase, at 13 April. On quality it placed last of the seven — an average of 74.5 out of 100 across both picking dates, against Yabukita’s 86.9 — and Duncan’s multiple-range test on the combined score gave the overall ranking するがわせ = やぶきた > くりたわせ > ゆたかみどり > やえほ = まきのはらわせ > はつみどり, putting it plainly at the bottom. The authors linked the gap to leaf chemistry: total and soluble nitrogen ran comparatively low in Hatsumidori’s leaf, and appearance and interior-quality scores across the trial tracked nitrogen levels closely. Their practical recommendation for warm south-western production areas favoured Surugawase, Kuritawase and Yutakamidori for quality, and Kuritawase and Yutakamidori for the earliest market delivery — Hatsumidori appears in neither recommendation, a quarter-century after its own registration paper had praised its aroma and flavour in terms its later testers did not confirm.

Characteristics

Hatsumidori is an extremely early-budding cultivar — 極早生 in its own registration paper’s classification, a full grade ahead of the ordinary 早生 (“early”) tier. In the one controlled multi-cultivar trial that measured it directly against Yabukita, its optimum first-flush picking date came about nine days before Yabukita’s, at the Makurazaki branch of the National Research Institute of Tea in Kagoshima. Growth habit is upright with strong vigour; cold tolerance is rated strong and resistance to anthracnose medium. Its most distinctive registered trait is regrowth after plucking, described in 1954 as “extremely strong” (極めて大) — a useful property for a cultivar meant for repeated early harvests. The leaf is short-oval, large and deep green.

The cup is where the two primary sources for this record disagree, twenty-five years apart. The 1954 registration paper describes a green tea whose colour carries a slight yellow tinge at the shoot tip, but whose aroma and flavour are both “excellent.” The 1979 comparative trial, testing it directly against five other early cultivars and Yabukita in farmer gardens around Makurazaki, found the same yellowish tinge at the tip — worst when picked early — but not the excellence: thin liquor, little umami, and the lowest overall quality score of the seven cultivars tested, a result the authors tied to comparatively low nitrogen content in the leaf. Picked at the optimum date rather than early, the tea improved and lost the conspicuous pekoe that marked the early pick, but it did not close the gap with Yabukita or with the other early cultivars tested alongside it.

That leaves Hatsumidori with a narrow case: an unusually early harvest window suited to warm, frost-free districts of Kyushu and Shikoku, at the cost of a cup that more rigorous later testing rated behind its peers. No source consulted for this record documents it in current commercial cultivation, and it does not appear in any of the modern cultivar hubs or vendor catalogues checked; its documented life is almost entirely in the research record of the 1950s and the 1970s trial that quietly closed the case against it.