Komakage

Komakage is a 1954 selection from Uji Zairai — seed-grown, genetically individual tea bushes — made by the Uji farmer Hirano Jin’nojō and trialled by the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute. It was one of three cultivars pulled from the same round of selection, alongside Asahi and Samidori, and all three were intended for the same purpose: shade-grown gyokuro and tencha for Uji matcha. Asahi and Samidori went on to become named, planted, and eventually prefecture-recognised cultivars that still appear on Kyoto’s cultivar lists today. Komakage did not. It carries no MAFF or Plant Variety Protection Act registration, does not appear on Kyoto Prefecture’s current list of recommended tencha and gyokuro cultivars, and today survives mostly as a curiosity grown in isolated plots well outside Uji.

Lineage

• Uji Zairai seedling — an individual tea bush selected, not bred, from a seed-grown stand near Manpuku-ji in Uji; its old strain number was Hirano No. 55 (平野55号), a designation from the same numbered series as Hirano’s other selection, Asahi (Hirano No. 11).

Because Komakage is a landrace selection rather than a controlled cross, it has no recorded pollen parent — the tree was chosen for its qualities as it stood, not bred toward them. It is best understood as a sibling selection to Asahi and Samidori rather than a parent or descendant of either: all three came out of the same 1930s–40s Uji Zairai evaluation work, but from different individual trees and, in Samidori’s case, a different selector (Koyama Masajirō, working his own numbered series in Ogura; Samidori’s old strain name was Koyama No. 69). No cultivars are recorded as bred from Komakage.

History

The Uji selection programme

Systematic cultivar selection in the Uji tea district began in 1931, when Hirano Jin’nojō started evaluating candidate trees in Higashi-Uji. Koyama Masajirō, third-generation head of the Ogura tea house Yamamasa Koyamaen, took up the same work in his own fields from 1934. The Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute formalised the effort from 1939 onward, running strain-comparison trials on the candidates the two men had put forward. Komakage, Asahi and Samidori all emerged from this overlapping work, and their naming and finalisation are dated to 1954 across the sources that treat the question in any detail.

The name

The selected Komakage tea garden stood closest to a stone monument at Manpuku-ji, Uji — the 駒蹄影園碑 (Komano-Ashikage-en-ato-hi), erected in 1926 by the Uji County Tea Industry Association. The monument commemorates a founding legend of Uji tea: that in the early Kamakura period, local farmers did not know how to space their tea seed, and the priest Myōe rode his horse across the field and told them to plant in the hoofprints it left. A verse associated with the story — “駒の足影” (the shadow, or trace, of the horse’s hoof) — gives the cultivar its name. This etymology is corroborated independently by more than one source; a garbled secondary gloss occasionally offered elsewhere, reading 駒 as “small sprout” and 影 as “shaded tea,” does not hold up against the primary legend and is not used here.

A selection that did not take

Asahi and Samidori were subsequently recognised as Kyoto Prefecture cultivars and remain on the prefecture’s own cultivar page today; Samidori in particular became the most widely planted of the trio, on account of its wide harvesting window and high yield. Komakage was not carried forward the same way. It never received MAFF or Plant Variety Protection Act registration, and Kyoto Prefecture’s current tencha and gyokuro cultivar listing — which does cover Asahi, Samidori, Ujihikari, Gokou, Ujimidori and the newer Tenmyo and Hoshun — omits it entirely. By one specialist estimate it now accounts for roughly 1% of Kyoto’s first-flush tencha production, on a par with Asahi but a fraction of Samidori’s share, and what plantings remain are scattered: a farm called Techno Green grows a single-origin Komakage in Mizuma, Nara Prefecture, and the Yoshino family has grown it on trial plots in Sayama, Saitama, where it has been locally recommended precisely for the cold hardiness that also marks it out agronomically.

Characteristics

Komakage buds medium-late: about three days later than Yabukita at germination and around five days later at plucking, which puts it slightly behind both Asahi (close to Yabukita) and Samidori (mid-season, with an unusually wide picking window). The tree carries a slightly upright form with medium vigour; picked shoots are small, well-aligned, and numerous per bush, giving a bud-number-type yield rather than a bud-weight one. Young leaves are small, elliptical, slightly thick and glossy; mature leaves stay small and elliptical, are medium-thick, deep green with little gloss, lightly wrinkled, and finely serrated. Cuttings root readily and nursery survival is good, but early growth is slow, so young fields take longer than most to establish, and growers are advised against hard pruning in the early years to avoid setting that establishment back further.

Cold resistance is strong overall — somewhat strong against the red-wither and laceration-type forms of freeze injury, and strong against blue-wither — which is what has kept it viable in places like Sayama despite its obscurity elsewhere. Resistance to anthracnose is only medium, but resistance to gray blight (輪斑病) is strong. Yield is medium and undocumented in absolute figures.

In the cup, Komakage was bred for gyokuro and carries that intent through into tencha: descriptions converge on a soft, gentle umami, sometimes likened to the broth of dried shiitake, with a vivid green matcha colour and a flavour some tasters find leans toward “hard” or savoury rather than sweet. Worked as sencha instead, it is reported as more refreshing and rounded, with a delicate sweetness. Set against its two siblings, it sits closer to Samidori’s soft, approachable roundness than to Asahi’s more intense, exhibition-grade character — but it never matched Samidori’s yield or spread, and it is the plainly weaker-documented and less commercially successful of the three. That is the honest shape of the record: a tea that by most contemporaneous accounts was good enough to name and trial alongside Asahi and Samidori, but not good enough, or not lucky enough, to be registered or replanted at any scale once they were.