Minamikaori

Minamikaori is a sencha cultivar bred at the Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station and registered in 1988 as Cha Norin No. 39 (茶農林39号). It is a controlled cross of Yabukita with Miya A11 (宮A11), an internal breeding line of the station’s own numbered programme rather than a named cultivar. It was one of three Miyazaki releases in the space of a few years — alongside Minekaori (1988), which shares its Yabukita seed parent, and Minamisayaka (1991), which does not — and it is the least documented of the three: outside the registry entry itself, almost nothing about its cup or its cultivation has survived into the secondary literature this project could reach.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ — the seed parent, as in the great majority of Miyazaki’s crosses from this period.
• Miya A11 (宮A11) ♂ — an internal numbered line from the Miyazaki station’s own “宮A” breeding series, not itself a named or separately registered cultivar. Its own parentage was not found in the sources consulted. By analogy with its sibling line Miya A6 (宮A6) — documented in NARO’s pedigree chart for Minamisayaka as Takachiho × Miya F1-9-4-48 — Miya A11 was very likely itself a cross made within the station’s programme rather than a wild or landrace selection, but that is an inference from a related line, not a sourced fact about A11 specifically.

Minamikaori is a controlled cross, not an open-pollinated seedling: the selected individual was carried through trials as line 宮崎5号 (Miyazaki No. 5) before being named and registered. No descendants of Minamikaori were found in the sources consulted, and it does not appear in NARO’s own pedigree handbook (茶品種ハンドブック), which covers only cultivars bred with national funding — Minamikaori, bred and funded through the Miyazaki prefectural programme alone, falls outside that scope, unlike its stablemate Minamisayaka, which was folded into the nationally-funded trial series and does appear there.

One caution worth flagging: Minamikaori is easy to confuse with two other Miyazaki cultivars from the same station and the same narrow span of years. Minekaori (みねかおり, 茶農林38号, also 1988) shares the Yabukita parent but crosses it with Unkai rather than Miya A11, and is bred for kamairicha (pan-fired tea) rather than sencha. Minamisayaka (みなみさやか, 茶農林42号, 1991) is unrelated in its parentage, descending instead from Miya A6 × Cha-hon F1NN27 — it shares no parent with Minamikaori at all, despite the near-identical name.

History

By the 1980s Miyazaki had run a national-government-designated tea breeding trial since 1958, alongside its own prefectural programme, and had already registered Takachiho (茶農林11号, 1953), Unkai (茶農林29号, 1970) and other cultivars through it. Minamikaori was selected within that programme as an individual from a Yabukita × Miya A11 cross, tracked under the trial designation 宮崎5号 before being named. A note announcing it, “煎茶用新品種「みなみかおり」について” (“On the new sencha cultivar ‘Minamikaori’”), was published under the Miyazaki station researcher Ueno’s name in 九州農業研究 (Kyushu Agricultural Research), issue 51, in 1989 — the year after its Cha Norin registration, which is the usual pattern for these prefectural release notes. The same researcher’s name appears on an earlier 1983 paper on tea cultivar characteristic assessment criteria from the Miyazaki Agricultural Experiment Station, consistent with a station tea breeder publishing on the cultivars that passed through the programme across that decade.

Cha Norin No. 39 was registered in 1988, the same year as its Miyazaki stablemate Minekaori (Cha Norin No. 38), and a separate Seed and Seedling Act (種苗法) registration followed in 1990. Beyond that sequence of dates, no fuller chronology — crossing year, number of seedlings screened, trial locations, or the reasoning behind the name — was found in the sources consulted; the original 1989 release note in Kyushu Agricultural Research would be the place to look next, but its full text was not reachable for this record.

Characteristics

Minamikaori is classified as 中生 (chūsei), mid-season — the same budding category as Yabukita itself — both in MAFF’s own characteristic filing and in the one general-reference source that mentions it at all. That filing (品種登録第2158号) also records strong resistance to akagare (赤枯れ, winter red-wither) and to anthracnose (炭疽病), a tree of medium habit with strong vigour and wide spread, and gives the difference from Yabukita as mature-leaf colour and anthracnose resistance. Beyond that, no source consulted gives a day-count relative to Yabukita, a yield figure, or a flavour description specific to Minamikaori, and none of the current cultivar guides, tea-shop references or vendor listings checked for this record carry it at all — a contrast with Minamisayaka from the same station, and with Saemidori, which is widely grown in Miyazaki though it was bred at the national station at Makurazaki, both of which are widely stocked and described today. That silence is itself informative: whatever commercial footing Minamikaori had after its 1988 registration does not appear to have lasted, or at least did not leave a trace in the sources this project could reach. Nothing here should be read as a claim about its cup — only as an honest gap.