Kyoken 283

Kyoken 283 is not a tea cultivar in the usual sense of this collection — it is a Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute breeding-line number that was never named, never registered, and never sold under any designation. It is included here for the same reason it survives in the record at all: it is a parent. In 1983 the institute’s line 京研283号 was sent to the Tea Branch of the Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station, on the other side of Japan, and crossed with Saitama No. 1 to produce Miyamakaori, a sencha cultivar registered twenty years later as Cha Norin No. 52. Everything documented about Kyoken 283 comes from that single release paper.

Lineage

• Kyoto zairai (native, seed-grown) population — Miyamakaori’s release paper describes Kyoken 283 as “selected from Kyoto zairai” (京都在来種から選抜), which is the only statement anywhere in the sourced record about where it came from. No seed stand, district, or selection date is given.
• Crossed as the seed parent with Saitama No. 1 (pollen parent, itself Yabukita G1 × Sayamamidori) in 1983, to produce Miyamakaori.

This is a landrace-selection lineage at one remove: Kyoken 283 itself was drawn from seed-grown Kyoto stock rather than bred from known parents, in the same way Yabukita or the other Kyoken-series lines were. What is unusual is that it never went through the step that turned its neighbours into cultivars. The institute’s own published lists of Kyoto’s recommended tea varieties name three other lines from the same 京研 numbering series — Kyoken 166 (→ Gokou), Kyoken 170 (→ Ujihikari) and Kyoken 307 (→ Ujimidori) — as Uji zairai selections (宇治在来種選抜) that were registered as Kyoto prefectural recommended cultivars in 1954 and 1983 respectively. Kyoken 283 sits numerically between 170 and 307, consistent with having passed through the institute’s evaluation programme sometime in that same window, but it is not named in the institute’s own pages, in the Uji Tea Trade Association’s history page, or in the prefecture’s cultivar characteristics table — all of which list only the lines that were eventually released. Whether it was judged and rejected, or simply left untested past an early stage, is not recorded anywhere found. Its only documented afterlife is as germplasm that reached a breeding station outside Kyoto.

A claim that Kyoken 283 is also a parent of the Miyazaki cultivar Nagomiyutaka circulates in at least one secondary registry of Japanese cultivars. Nagomiyutaka’s own release paper does not support this — see History and Conflicts.

History

What the Kyoken series was

By the mid-1950s the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute was running a numbered internal breeding-line system, prefixed 京研 (Kyoken), for candidate selections out of Uji-area zairai fields. This replaced an earlier practice of crediting individual selecting growers directly — the institute’s oldest recommended cultivars, Asahi and Samidori, both dated to 1954, carry the selectors’ own names instead: 平野11号 (Hirano 11, selected by Hirano Jinnojō) and 小山69号 (Koyama 69, selected by Koyama Masajirō). From the same year, lines selected and evaluated by the institute itself carried the 京研 prefix: Kyoken 166 became Gokou and Kyoken 170 became Ujihikari, both in 1954; Kyoken 307 became Ujimidori in 1983. Gokou and Ujimidori are recorded as Uji zairai selections (宇治在来種選抜) — the institute’s page gives no origin for Ujihikari — and all three carry the institute itself, rather than a named individual, as breeder (育成者：京都府茶業研究所).

Kyoken 283 belongs to the same numbering series, sitting between 170 and 307, but it does not appear in any of the institute’s or the Uji trade association’s own published cultivar lists. Those lists only cover lines that were eventually registered; an unreleased line has no reason to appear in them even if it existed and was evaluated for years. That absence is expected, not a contradiction — but it also means nothing beyond the one description below is documented about Kyoken 283 on its home ground.

Leaving Kyoto: the Miyamakaori cross

In 1983 the Tea Branch of the Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station crossed Kyoken 283, as seed parent, with Saitama No. 1, as pollen parent. Saitama No. 1 was itself bred from Yabukita G1 and Sayamamidori. Seed was collected in September 1984 and roughly 1,400 seedlings were sown that November; three years of individual selection (1985–1987) narrowed the field to eight lines chosen for leaf colour and disease resistance, which were propagated by cuttings from June 1987 and planted out in 1988. The surviving line was carried through six years of clonal comparison trials under the working name Mi88-86, then through national regional-adaptation trials from 1994 as Miyazaki No. 20, tested across five prefectures including Kyoto itself. It was registered by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries as Cha Norin No. 52, “Miyamakaori,” on 5 September 2003 — a twenty-year span from cross to registration, involving nine researchers at the station.

That release paper is the only place Kyoken 283’s origin is stated in print: “selected from Kyoto zairai.” Nothing else about the line — its selection date, the individual or trial it came through, or why the institute shared it with a Miyazaki programme working on a different variety network entirely — is explained there or anywhere else found. Miyazaki’s breeding programme drew on outside germplasm as a matter of course during this period: its other parent in this cross, Saitama No. 1, came from Saitama’s own prefectural breeding line, over a thousand kilometres northeast; the regional-trial network these cultivars were run through was itself a shared national programme (the tea-breeding designated trial system) that routinely exchanged breeding material between prefectural stations. Kyoken 283 travelling from Kyoto to Miyazaki fits that pattern rather than being exceptional, but no source explains this specific exchange.

The Nagomiyutaka pairing does not hold up

A widely used secondary registry of Japanese cultivars lists a second Kyoken 283 cross — “Saitama No. 1 × Kyoken 283” — as the origin of Nagomiyutaka, another sencha and kamairicha cultivar released in 2010 from the same Miyazaki station. Nagomiyutaka’s own release paper (Yoshidome et al. 2014) gives a different pedigree entirely: it was selected from seedlings crossed between Saitama No. 16 and Fuku 8 in 1988, and neither Kyoken 283 nor Saitama No. 1 is mentioned anywhere in the paper. The two accounts agree only on the release year. Given that both cultivars came out of the same station in the same period, and that both pedigrees involve a numbered “Saitama” line, this looks like a mix-up in the secondary source rather than a second real cross — but it cannot be ruled out from the sources checked here that some other, unpublished connection exists. This record treats Miyamakaori as Kyoken 283’s only documented descendant.

Characteristics

Almost none are published for Kyoken 283 itself. Miyamakaori’s release paper describes it in a single clause, as the late-budding, good-quality (晩生で良質) line chosen as seed parent for that cross. Beyond that it has no recorded plucking date, growth habit, leaf description, yield figure, disease-resistance rating, or cup-quality note anywhere found — it was never carried far enough through any trial programme, in Kyoto or elsewhere, to generate one. The only characteristics on record anywhere near it belong to its offspring, Miyamakaori, and are not safe to attribute to Kyoken 283 specifically since Saitama No. 1 contributed the other half of that cultivar’s genetics. For reference, Miyamakaori is late-budding (its first-flush plucking runs two days later than Okumidori), intermediate in growth habit with light-green immature leaf, higher yielding than Yabukita, middling susceptible to tea anthracnose and slightly resistant to grey blight, and produces a mild-tasting tea with an aroma compared to boiled chestnuts — traits that could as easily trace to Saitama No. 1 as to Kyoken 283. Kyoken 283’s own contribution is not separable from that record.