Makinoharawase

Makinoharawase is a sencha cultivar selected from a Zairai (native, seed-grown) tea garden in Shizuoka’s Haibara District and registered in 1953 as 茶農林7号 (Cha Norin No. 7) — the same founding registration round, at the same prefectural station, that produced Yabukita one number before it. Where Yabukita was picked out for balance and reliability, Makinoharawase was picked out for speed: its registration paper classifies it 極早生種, extremely early-budding, ahead of everything else in its own release cohort and, in a later trial, twelve days ahead of Yabukita itself. It takes its name directly from Makinohara, the tea plateau its home district gave its name to. That speed never translated into a market foothold — wherever its tea quality has been tested it has come out plain to poor, and it never spread the way its stablemate did.

Lineage

• Shizuoka Zairai seedling — an individual selection from a native, seed-grown tea garden, not a controlled cross.

Makinoharawase was pulled from a single named garden — belonging to a grower the registration paper records as Kosugi, in Yokooka, then part of Goka village, Haibara District — by Matsumoto Nakakichi, and carried forward under a working name identical to the one it was eventually registered under: 牧之原早生. Like Yabukita, it therefore has no recorded pollen parent. Unlike Yabukita, it is also a spontaneous triploid, reported sterile at the time of registration — a genetic dead end that rules out breeding on from its own seed. No cultivar is documented as descending from it.

History

Registration followed the same nationwide process as Yabukita’s. Individual trees selected out of Zairai gardens across Japan through the 1930s and 40s were brought under evaluation at prefectural and national tea experiment stations, and in 1953 the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry issued its first tea cultivar registration list, naming 15 varieties at once: eight for sencha, one each for tamaryokucha and kamairicha, and five for black tea. Makinoharawase was the seventh of those fifteen, registered immediately after Yabukita (sixth) out of the same Shizuoka station.

Matsumoto Nakakichi selected the parent tree from a Zairai garden belonging to a grower recorded as Kosugi, in Yokooka, in what was then Goka village, Haibara District — the district that gives the Makinohara plateau its name. The Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station developed it at its Ministry-designated seed orchard from 1935 to 1946 (Showa 10–21), on almost exactly the same institutional track and timeline as Yabukita’s own evaluation at the same station. The registration paper’s explanation for the name is unusually direct: 牧之原で育成された早生種である — “an early-budding cultivar bred in Makinohara.”

Makinohara, the plateau it is named for

Until the Edo period the Makinohara plateau was undeveloped common grazing land — 牧 (maki) means pasture, and the name is literally “pasture moor.” After the Meiji Restoration, former shogunate retainers (旧幕臣) who had relocated to Shizuoka were granted roughly 1,455 hectares of the plateau to settle. Water was scarce and the early years were difficult, but the settlers turned to tea, and the plateau’s reddish, well-drained soil and warm exposure proved suited to it. It became — and remains — one of Japan’s most important single tea-growing landscapes, today spanning parts of Shimada, Makinohara and Kikugawa cities. It is that plateau, not any one cultivar, that gave Makinoharawase its name.

Overtaken almost immediately

Nothing in the record suggests Makinoharawase was ever seriously positioned to rival Yabukita, and a 1979 trial at the Makurazaki branch of the National Research Institute of Tea shows why. Researchers there tested six early cultivars — Kuritawase, Makinoharawase, Hatsumidori, Yutakamidori, Yaeho and Surugawase — against Yabukita as the control, over the 1972 first flush at farms around Makurazaki, Kagoshima. Makinoharawase’s finished tea came out inferior on both appearance and internal quality, tied at the bottom of the ranking with Yaeho and only narrowly ahead of Hatsumidori. When the same team extended the work into a second, multi-year trial covering 1973 and 1975, they narrowed the field to the three cultivars that had performed best — Kuritawase, Yutakamidori and Surugawase — and dropped Makinoharawase, along with Yaeho and Hatsumidori, entirely. That 1979 report is the last substantial mention of the cultivar found in the tea-research literature searched for this record, and it is absent from every general cultivar guide or hub surveyed alongside it.

It has not vanished from cultivation altogether, though. Shinkoju, a specialist retailer in Tokorozawa, Saitama that deals exclusively in single-cultivar Japanese teas, currently lists Makinoharawase across four processing styles — regular sencha, fukamushi (deep-steamed) sencha, kamairicha and kocha (black tea) — of which the sencha and black tea listings had both sold out at the time of research. That a cultivar rejected as a sencha in 1979 for being thin and pale has found a niche as black tea nearly half a century later is consistent with a broader pattern in Japanese tea: cultivars judged mediocre against sencha’s demand for deep green colour and high nitrogen sometimes turn out well suited to fermentation, which asks different things of the leaf.

Characteristics

Makinoharawase’s defining trait is speed. Its own registration paper calls it 極早生種 — extremely early-budding — ahead of medium-season Yabukita and ahead of the other sencha cultivars registered alongside it in 1953. The 1979 Makurazaki trial put a number on the gap under Kagoshima’s warmer growing conditions: across a 1972 first flush, its optimum picking date fell on 14 April, twelve days before Yabukita’s 26 April in the same trial, and second only to Kuritawase (13 April) among the seven cultivars tested. Growth habit is spreading (樹姿開張) rather than upright, vigour is medium, and both cold resistance and general disease resistance are described as strong. It is also a spontaneous triploid and, per the registration paper, sterile — a trait with no bearing on tea quality but one that rules it out as a future breeding parent.

The cup does not match the speed. The Makurazaki trials found its finished sencha thin: picked early, the leaf shape was good and the buds prominent, but the aroma lacked crispness and the taste was pale; picked at the fuller optimum date it developed a cultivar-typical aroma but stayed thin in the mouth with a pale liquor colour. Researchers attributed the weakness chiefly to lower total nitrogen and water-soluble nitrogen than the better-performing early cultivars in the same trial. The leaf itself runs yellowish-green rather than the deep green favoured in modern sencha. Set against Yabukita’s balance or Kuritawase’s aromatic distinctiveness, Makinoharawase reads as a cultivar whose only real asset was how early it could be picked — and that alone was not enough to keep it as a sencha once faster, better-quality early cultivars existed.

Processed as kocha, the profile reads differently. Shinkoju’s listing describes its black tea as having a mild, perfume-like, refined aroma with a faint sweetness and acidity, and rates it moderate on sweetness, low on astringency and firm on body — a different balance from the pale, thin sencha the 1979 trial recorded, and the reason the cultivar still has any commercial presence at all.