Marishi

Marishi is a boutique Shizuoka sencha cultivar, registered in 1996 under the Plant Variety Protection Act as a natural seedling of Yaeho, itself a 1954 registration going back to Sugiyama Hikosaburo — the grower who selected Yabukita. It was never bred for scale: the entire first harvest came to 1.5 kg of finished tea, and it remains, seventy years after its parent line was first registered, a rarity grown by a handful of Shizuoka producers rather than a field crop. What earns it a place in the record is a combination of a documented, if tangled, line back to Yabukita’s own breeder, and a liquor colour distinctive enough that people seeing it for the first time have assumed it was dyed.

Lineage

• Yaeho (やえほ, 茶農林17号) — the seed parent named in Marishi’s own Plant Variety Protection registration record: an early Shizuoka cultivar registered in 1954, itself a Sugiyama Hikosaburo selection from Shizuoka Zairai stock.
• Unknown pollen parent — Marishi is described in its own registration as 自然交雑実生, a naturally cross-pollinated seedling; whichever tea plant supplied the pollen was never identified.

Marishi is a landrace-style seedling selection rather than a controlled cross: someone did not choose its pollen parent, a bee or the wind did, and only the mother tree is on record. That mother tree, however, carries real weight. Yaeho was selected by Sugiyama Hikosaburo from his own garden at Dampira, in what was then Udo village, Abe County — the same grower who, a few kilometres away and decades earlier, picked out the seedling that became Yabukita, and who also selected Koyanishi (Cha Norin No. 8) and Rokuro (Cha Norin No. 9). On the plain reading of Marishi’s registration record, then, Marishi is a second-generation descendant of a Sugiyama Hikosaburo selection — not from the Yabukita line itself, but from the same breeder’s other major find.

That plain reading is complicated by a separate strand of Shizuoka trade knowledge, set out in full under History below: some retailers distinguish the tree Sugiyama actually selected — sold today as “Sugiyama-Yaeho” (杉山八重穂) — from the nationally registered cultivar Yaeho, treating the latter as itself descended from the former. If that account is right, Marishi’s real connection to Sugiyama’s own planting may be closer than “grandchild of a Sugiyama selection,” or routed slightly differently through it. A sibling cultivar from the same Yamamori garden, Mizumishiro-kaori (水見色かおり, unregistered, from Sugiyama-Yaeho × Inzatsu 131), buds even earlier than Marishi and shares its paired-bud trait; it is not a descendant of Marishi, but a half-sibling raised alongside it.

History

A seedling found between the rows

The Yamamori family kept a tea garden at Mizumishiro, in the hills west of central Shizuoka City. Growing between the rows of an established Yaeho planting was a single tea bush that stood out for its looks; by Nishikien’s account, it was Yamamori Miyoshi’s mother who first noticed it. Miyoshi and Yamamori Risao propagated and trialled the plant. Its first harvest yielded only 1.5 kg of finished tea, and the liquor colour was reportedly so vivid that people seeing it for the first time wondered whether it had been artificially coloured — described on the shop’s page, in English, simply as “Perfect Green.” It was registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act on 18 March 1996 as Registration No. 4953, with Yamamori Miyoshi and Yamamori Risao both named as registrants. The official summary of the registered plant’s characteristics describes it as a natural cross-pollinated seedling selected from Yaeho, extra-early in both budding and harvest at its Shizuoka City breeding site, and distinguished from Yaeho by longer, more elliptical new leaves, a darker green colour, more gloss, and higher total nitrogen and amino acid content.

Two generations from Yabukita’s breeder — with a complication

Yaeho’s own registration record names Sugiyama Hikosaburo as the direct selector of the tree that became Cha Norin No. 17, tested from 1935 to 1946 and registered in 1954 with no intervening generation mentioned. Taken at face value, that makes Marishi a straightforward second-generation descendant of a Sugiyama planting.

A Shizuoka retailer’s account complicates this. Nishikien, a shop in Shizuoka City that has long sold a planting descended from Sugiyama’s own selection under the name “Sugiyama-Yaeho,” argues in a pair of dated 2005 blog posts that “八重穂” (Yaeho in kanji, i.e. Sugiyama-Yaeho) and “やえほ” (the registered kana cultivar) are not the same plant: the registered cultivar, the shop states, was itself selected from Sugiyama-Yaeho’s natural seedlings — “easiest to understand as its child.” Sugiyama-Yaeho, on this account, reliably throws two shoots from a single leaf axil (its Japanese nickname is “futame no Yaeho,” paired-bud Yaeho), a trait the shop says the registered cultivar does not reliably show. The same source states that Marishi and Mizumishiro-kaori both inherit that paired-bud trait — evidence, if the account holds, that points toward the Sugiyama-Yaeho individual specifically rather than the plain registered clone. This does not square with Yaeho’s own 1954 registration bulletin, which describes no such intervening generation. No source available for this record resolves the discrepancy; it may reflect two related but separately maintained Sugiyama gardens remembered differently seventy years on. What both accounts agree on is that Sugiyama Hikosaburo is the point of origin either way.

Name and reputation

Marishi takes its name from Marishiten (摩利支天), a Buddhist protective deva whose Sanskrit root, Marīci, means “ray of light” or “mirage” — a deity later adopted by samurai, including Kusunoki Masashige, for the intangibility that let it evade harm. No source consulted explains why the breeders chose it, but the specialist retailer Shinkoju, which stocks the cultivar across its full range of grades and processing styles, describes it as “人生一度は飲みたい品種” — “a cultivar worth drinking once in a lifetime” — citing its balance of colour, aroma and taste. When the Fuji branch of the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station, which had supported its cultivation, closed in March 2007, care of the Yamamori planting passed to Fuji Akiyama-en in Fuji City, which still grows and sells it as a signature tea. Yamamori Miyoshi has since died; Fuji Akiyama-en’s own page recalls him as “a pioneer of mountain-region tea farming.”

Characteristics

Marishi buds and is harvested extra-early (極早生) at its Shizuoka City breeding site — no source gives an exact day-count against Yabukita, though its parent line runs early throughout: Yaeho itself is classed early, Sugiyama-Yaeho is described by Nishikien as extra-early and several days ahead of Yabukita, and Marishi’s sibling Mizumishiro-kaori is reported to harvest earlier still. Compared with Yaeho, its registered leaf traits are longer, more elliptical new leaves, a darker green colour and a higher gloss, with higher total nitrogen and amino acid content in the registration trial’s chemical analysis.

In the cup, Marishi is worked into ordinary sencha, deep-steamed (fukamushi) sencha, pan-fired (kamairicha) tea and black tea, sold across the full run of grades at Shinkoju. Its highest grades are rated close to the top of the shop’s five-point scale for umami and body, with very low astringency; a pan-fired grade is described as having a standout natural sweetness. Growers and retailers consistently single out the liquor colour — thin, tightly twisted dry leaf with a dark, lustrous green, brewing to a green so saturated that people seeing it poured for the first time have suspected the tea was artificially coloured. Set against that distinction, Marishi has no real production history to speak of: its first harvest totalled 1.5 kg, and it remains, decades later, a specialty grown on a tiny scale by a small number of Shizuoka producers rather than a cultivar sold at any volume.