Kuritawase

Kuritawase is an extremely early-budding sencha cultivar selected on Tanegashima, the Kagoshima island that ships Japan’s earliest new tea each spring. It exists because a family who migrated from Shizuoka in 1909 spent nearly two decades hand-selecting the single best plant out of a seedling field grown from the native Shizuoka seed they had brought with them — work finished, in its final step, under the guidance of Sugiyama Hikosaburo, the same grower who, two decades earlier and on the other side of Japan, had selected Yabukita. Where Yabukita became the mid-season benchmark the rest of the industry is measured against, Kuritawase went the opposite direction: it buds and is picked roughly ten to thirteen days before Yabukita, and its entire commercial purpose is to be first to market.

Lineage

• Shizuoka zairai (native) seedling — an individual selection from a seed-grown stand, not a controlled cross; it contributes an unknowable pollen parent, and a loose historical link to the same wave of Shizuoka native-seed stock that, selected by other hands, also produced Yabukita, Koyanishi, Rokuro and Yaeho on the other side of the country.

Because Kuritawase was selected rather than bred, it has no recorded pollen parent, in the same way Yabukita does not. What is unusual is how well documented its own onward descendants are for a cultivar this obscure: it is the parent bush of Shoju, a bud sport found on a Kuritawase plant at Furuta, Tanegashima, and registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act in 1996; and it is the pollen parent — not the seed parent — of Shizukaori, a controlled cross made in 1989 at the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station using Okuhikari as the seed parent, registered in 2015. That a Tanegashima cultivar ended up supplying pollen to a Shizuoka breeding programme sixty years after its own founding seed made the opposite journey is one of the odder loops in this collection’s lineage.

History

A family migration and a decade of selection

According to a commemorative stone inscription at Furuta Banyamine in Nishinoomote City, Tanegashima — erected by the Kurita family in November 1984 to mark 75 years since their move to the island, and transcribed on the local history site furusato-tanegashima.net — the grower Kurita Mosaburo ordered Shizuoka zairai seed in Meiji 42 (1909) and sowed it in a seedling tea garden at Furuta. His son, Kurita Seiichi, selected 60 promising individual stocks from that field in Taisho 10 (1921) and carried out further individual surveys of the best of them in 1926. In Showa 2 (1927), Sugiyama Hikosaburo — the tea-cultivar-improvement pioneer who, in 1908 in Shizuoka, had already selected the plant that became Yabukita — visited Tanegashima, and under his guidance the family selected a single outstanding stock from among the survivors. Cuttings from that one plant were propagated, and several dozen were planted at the Kagoshima Prefectural Tea Experiment Station in 1931. myjapanesegreentea.com’s independent account of the same history broadly agrees, though it credits the 1927 selection to Mosaburo himself rather than to his son Seiichi — see conflicts for how this record resolves that discrepancy.

Trials and prefectural recognition

Recommended-cultivar trials at the prefectural experiment station ran for eight years, from Showa 27 to Showa 34 (1952–1959), and a comparative sencha-quality trial pitting Kuritawase against other early cultivars followed in Showa 40 (1965). On the strength of those results, Kuritawase was designated Kagoshima Prefecture’s recommended cultivar (県奨励品種) in Showa 41 (1966) and spread through the island’s early-harvest districts. By the end of fiscal 1983 the monument records 75 hectares under cultivation. Separate research-journal trials from the 1970s corroborate this local picture from the outside: a two-part varietal comparison run at Makurazaki, on the Kagoshima mainland, in 1972, 1973 and 1975 tested Kuritawase’s first-crop quality against Yabukita and several other early cultivars (Yutakamidori, Surugawase, Makinoharawase, Hatsumidori, Yaeho) and concluded that Kuritawase was “the most suitable variety from the viewpoints of both better quality of the made tea and the earliest production among the early varieties in the warm region of southern Kyushu” — a national research-station verdict arriving six years after the prefecture’s own 1966 decision. Kuritawase has never held a national Cha Norin registration; myjapanesegreentea.com’s cultivar list places it explicitly among Japan’s unregistered tea cultivars.

Sugiyama Hikosaburo’s second island

The 1927 visit is worth placing in context. Sugiyama Hikosaburo spent most of his working life in Shizuoka, where — beyond Yabukita itself — he went on to select the individual trees that became Koyanishi (Cha Norin No. 8), Rokuro (Cha Norin No. 9) and Yaeho (Cha Norin No. 17), all from his own or nearby Shizuoka gardens and all registered decades after his death in 1941. Kuritawase is not related to any of these by descent — it is a wholly separate Shizuoka-zairai seedling, sown and selected a thousand kilometres away on Tanegashima — but it shares the same breeder’s eye at its founding moment: the one occasion sourced in which Sugiyama is recorded travelling outside Shizuoka to guide a selection was this 1927 trip to Kagoshima.

Later spread and descendants

Kuritawase’s most visible legacy runs through its own mutations and crosses rather than through further national registration. Decades after the 1931 planting at the prefectural station, Matsushita Eiichi — a Tanegashima grower whose family had also migrated from Shizuoka in 1909 — noticed and propagated a branch mutation on a Kuritawase bush at Furuta that became Shoju, registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act in 1996. Independently, breeders at the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station crossed Okuhikari with Kuritawase in 1989; the resulting seedling was selected in 1997, carried the strain name 89-2-7 through clonal and regional-adaptability trials into the 2010s, and was registered and adopted as a Shizuoka Prefecture recommended cultivar in 2015 under the name Shizukaori. More recently, local reporting shows the cultivar reaching beyond Tanegashima: Hachimanju Chaen, a grower on neighbouring Yakushima, describes Kuritawase — which it calls “a rare cultivar said to originate on Tanegashima” — as the first of its seven cultivars picked each season, opening its shipping year with it every April.

Characteristics

Kuritawase’s defining trait is speed. myjapanesegreentea.com states it can be harvested at least 10 days before Yabukita; a controlled 1972 trial at Makurazaki recorded its optimum plucking date as 13 April against Yabukita’s 26 April in the same trial — 13 days earlier, and the earliest of every cultivar tested that year, ahead of Makinoharawase, Hatsumidori, Yutakamidori, Yaeho and Surugawase in that order. That earliness comes at a cost: myjapanesegreentea.com notes Kuritawase is weak against cold weather, and a 1986 research-journal trial recorded a Kuritawase field suffering total (“V”-grade, 100%) frost damage at the 1.3-leaf stage during a 1985 frost event — an occupational hazard of budding before winter has fully released its grip. A related 2001 study found that in unusually warm autumn–winters, young Kuritawase fields can re-sprout from winter buds altogether, which risks weakening the following spring’s first crop if not managed with timed re-skiffing. Against this, Kuritawase is comparatively unbothered by two other pressures: myjapanesegreentea.com describes it as somewhat resistant to anthracnose, and a 2002 laboratory comparison of eight Japanese cultivars found it supported the fewest tea rust mite eggs of any cultivar tested — evidence of below-average palatability to the mite. Yield at harvest is described as low despite good cup quality; no kg/10a figure was located in the sources consulted.

The cup is distinctive for an early cultivar. myjapanesegreentea.com describes a yellow liquor with a milky aroma and low astringency when made into sencha — a trait that resurfaces even more strongly in Shoju, its own bud sport, whose milky, vanilla-like sweetness is one of the more memorable descriptions in this whole collection. A Yakushima grower’s regular-steamed batch is described as pale in colour but firm and aromatic in the cup, made simply to let the natural flavour show. Shinkoju, a single-cultivar tea specialist, sells Kuritawase across three processing styles with tasting notes that keep returning to the same register: the regular sencha is likened to potage soup, the deep-steamed (fukamushi) version to clam chowder with a warming aroma and a darker green liquor, and a black-tea processing to sweet potato and milk soup, each rated low to moderate on astringency and moderate on body. Whatever the exact chemistry behind it, a soup-like, milky character runs through Kuritawase across sencha, fukamushi and black tea alike, and is inherited wholesale by its most famous descendant.