Kyomidori

Kyomidori is a gyokuro and tencha cultivar registered in 1954, drawn not from one farmer’s chance seedling but from a systematic postwar survey of Uji-region tea gardens looking specifically for strains suited to shaded cultivation. It was bred and evaluated alongside a sibling cultivar, Asagiri, as part of the same programme, and registered a year name-number apart from it. Where Yabukita was selected for doing every job passably, Kyomidori was selected for one job — the dense, sweet, low-astringency cup that shading produces — and it has stayed narrow ever since: it was never planted widely even within Kyoto, and today it survives on a handful of Uji-area farms rather than as a commercial-scale crop.

Lineage

• Uji zairai (native seedling) tea tree — the source population. The mother tree was a roughly century-old, seed-grown bush in the garden of a Uji grower recorded as Nakamura Tokichi, one of 106 strains surveyed across Uji-region tea gardens between 1935 and 1941 in a designated trial for gyokuro and tencha strain selection.

Kyomidori is a landrace selection, not a controlled cross: it has no recorded pollen parent, and the mother tree was already an old zairai bush of unknown ancestry when researchers found it. Its closest relative in the historical record is Asagiri (Cha Norin No. 18), drawn from the same 106-strain, then 20-strain, shortlist under the same programme, though from a different mother tree entirely — the two are documented siblings of one breeding effort rather than parent and offspring. No cultivar bred using Kyomidori as a parent turned up in the sources consulted for this record.

History

Between 1935 and 1941 (Showa 10–16), what would become the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Industry Research Institute ran a designated trial into new tea-manufacturing methods, one strand of which aimed squarely at finding superior strains for gyokuro and tencha. Researchers surveyed tea gardens across the Uji region and brought back 106 candidate strains; from these, 20 were judged good enough in tencha quality to carry forward. Kyomidori was one of the 20. Its mother tree, by then roughly a century old, stood in the garden of a Uji grower recorded as Nakamura Tokichi.

In 1940 (Showa 15) it was propagated by cuttings to the institute’s Maruyama trial site, and in 1946 (Showa 21) part of the planting was put under shade cultivation so its characteristics and quality could be judged under the conditions it would actually be grown in. The results were favourable: strong, healthy growth, high yield relative to the zairai stock it came from, and tencha quality — particularly colour and flavour — good enough that it became a candidate for recommendation to shaded-garden growers. It was registered in 1954 as Cha Norin No. 19, under the old strain designation Kyoken 172 (京研172号). The naming reason recorded at registration is unadorned: a green tea bred in Kyoto.

Kyomidori never became a large planting, even in Kyoto. It won prizes in the hands of individual growers — Yamashita Toshikazu is the name specifically associated with it in later accounts — but by around 2020 specialist buyers were describing it as extremely rare, kept going by a small number of Uji-area farms. The Yamashita Shinjuen estate in Kyotanabe, now run by Toshikazu’s grandson Shinki, continues to produce a Kyomidori gyokuro that has drawn attention from specialist importers outside Japan.

Characteristics

The current official Kyoto Prefecture cultivar table classes Kyomidori’s budding as medium-early (中早生) — one class ahead of Yabukita’s medium (中生) — though the 1954 registration bulletin itself described the budding simply as medium; no source found gives a day-count relative to Yabukita. Its tree form is in the most upright class that same table uses (極直, “extremely upright”, shared only with Samidori), with a narrower-than-average canopy and only medium vigour by current standards, even though the 1954 bulletin praised it as very vigorous against the zairai fields it replaced. That gap is probably the plainest evidence of seventy years of further breeding elsewhere in Kyoto: cultivars registered since (Okumidori, Samidori, Ogura-midori and others) have simply overtaken it on vigour and yield. Cold hardiness is recorded as strong, though the current cultivar table separately flags Kyomidori for caution around split-bark frost injury in Kyoto’s colder districts. Disease resistance is uneven: medium against ring spot disease, only slightly weak against anthracnose.

Kyomidori is, and always has been, a shaded-tea cultivar. It was registered for gyokuro and tencha, and the official Kyoto table today marks it with the top recommendation for gyokuro alone, with no mark for tencha or sencha — a narrower official role than its own 1954 registration description, which was explicit that it also made excellent tencha. In the cup it is known for colour and depth of flavour — the two qualities the 1954 bulletin singles out (色沢滋味) — and the trial data behind that bulletin scored it 196 points against Yabukita’s 190, the six-point margin coming evenly from appearance, aroma and flavour. Modern tasting notes describe an unusually strong, sweet fragrance — compared variously to fruit candy, popcorn or sweet corn — with concentrated umami and sweetness and a long finish, set against a narrower aromatic range than a good sencha cultivar offers. At least one specialist single-cultivar retailer processes Kyomidori as ordinary and deep-steamed sencha, pan-fired (kamairi) tea and even black tea alongside its gyokuro, which shows the plant can be pushed outside its traditional shaded role; no source found corroborates a documented kabusecha production of it, despite that use being plausible for a gyokuro-type cultivar.