Kanayamidori

Kanayamidori is a 1970-registered Shizuoka cultivar bred by crossing Yabukita with a local zairai seedling the station itself had kept and numbered — S6. It exists for one trait above all others: a sencha whose aroma reads unmistakably as sweet and milky, closer to fresh dairy or vanilla than to anything else in the standard vocabulary of green tea. Where Yabukita is the balanced, legible default this collection is described against, Kanayamidori is the opposite kind of reference point — the cultivar Yabukita is said to lack the creaminess of. It is also, unusually for a mid-century Norin registration, a cultivar with documented children of its own: Fushun, Harumidori and Koshun all name it as a parent.

Lineage

• S6 ♀ (静岡県在来6号, “Shizuoka Zairai No. 6”) — a zairai (seed-grown) selection kept at the Kanaya station under its own in-house number, distinct from the separate “Zairai No. 16” selection later used as a parent of Okumidori. S6’s own characteristics are not independently documented; it survives in the record mainly as a parent.
• Yabukita ♂ — contributes reliability and background vigour. The cross was made in 1949, four years before Yabukita itself received its 1953 Norin registration, though cuttings of the original 1908 plant were already under formal trial at the Shizuoka Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station by then.

This is a controlled cross, not a landrace selection or a sport. S6 was evidently treated as a resource in its own right rather than raw material used once: it reappears as one grandparent (via the intermediate hybrid F1NN8, itself Tamamidori × S6) of Okuyutaka, registered at the same station in 1983. Kanayamidori itself went on to be used as a parent three times over:

• Harumidori (はるみどり, 茶農林48号, 2000) — Kanayamidori × Yabukita, with Kanayamidori as the seed parent. Bred at the Makurazaki station in Kagoshima (old strain name 枕崎19号).
• Fushun (ふうしゅん, 茶農林41号, 1991) — Z1 × Kanayamidori, with Kanayamidori as the pollen parent. Bred back at Kanaya (old strain name 金谷12号).
• Koshun (香駿, registered in 2000 under the Plant Variety Protection Act rather than as a Norin cultivar; the application was filed in 1996) — Kurasawa × Kanayamidori, crossed in 1970, the same year Kanayamidori itself was registered.

History

The cross was made in 1949 at the national Tea Experiment Station in Kanaya, in what was then Kanaya town and is now part of Shimada city, Shizuoka. The selected individual carried the trial designation F1NN13 through the station’s evaluation programme before being registered nationally in 1970 as 茶農林30号 (Cha Norin No. 30) — a 21-year span from cross to registration, similar in scale to other mid-century Japanese tea cultivars. It was named, as many Kanaya-bred cultivars were, for the station’s own location.

Its registration sits inside a documented wave: a review of Shizuoka’s cultivar-selection history (prepared around the breeding of the later cultivar Koshun) places the mid-1960s to mid-1970s as a period driven by surging domestic demand and the mechanisation of tea processing, with breeding aimed at higher-yielding, differently-timed, higher-quality cultivars. Kurasawa and Ooiwase were selected from the same station in the same era.

A polarising reputation

Kanayamidori’s aroma is also its commercial complication. Because it departs so far from the grassy, vegetal profile Yabukita has trained Japanese buyers to expect, growers report it traded at depressed prices for long stretches of its history — a tea that announces itself as different reads, to a market calibrated on sameness, as a defect rather than a feature. That has been changing: demand has picked up in recent years, including from overseas buyers drawn to exactly the distinctiveness that once worked against it, and it now anchors single-cultivar lots at specialist Shizuoka and Kagoshima producers rather than disappearing into blends.

Characteristics

Kanayamidori buds medium-late (中晩生), about eight days after Yabukita, and is plucked about four days after it. The tree has a moderate, fairly vigorous form; its leaves are oval, dark and glossy, and slightly smaller than Yabukita’s, yet the bush still out-yields Yabukita at harvest. Regrowth after pruning is strong, which along with its broad disease and pest resistance has made it a repeated choice for organic and reduced-input gardens. The release paper rates cold tolerance the same as Yabukita’s in its characteristics table while calling it strong in its summary, and pairs it with the late budding to argue the cultivar suits frost-prone mountain districts; resistance to specific pathogens such as anthracnose or ring spot does not appear to have been published separately from this general reputation.

The cup is the reason the cultivar exists. Tasters describe the aroma as sweet and milky — sometimes narrowed to porridge oats, vanilla, brown sugar or honeyed steamed greens, sometimes to a green, mugwort-like herbal note instead — with astringency kept low against a soft, rounded sweetness, and umami present but not the point. Deep-steamed (fukamushi) processing is reported to deepen the liquor toward a rich green and bring the honeyed sweetness forward; growers have also experimented with it as wakocha (a Japanese-grown black tea), reportedly producing a honey-scented cup, though this remains a minor use next to sencha and, less commonly, gyokuro. Descriptions consistently note that it suits Western-style desserts better than traditional Japanese wagashi. Experienced tasters can reportedly identify Kanayamidori from its fragrance alone — which is both the cultivar’s appeal and, as noted above, the reason it took decades to be rewarded for it.