Minamisayaka

Minamisayaka is a Miyazaki sencha cultivar bred from a 1970 cross and registered in 1991. It sits a little outside the normal Yabukita-descended family tree that dominates this collection: through its seed-parent line it carries a measured share of Assam (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) and Caucasus-origin tea material, inherited from a breeding programme’s use of exotic germplasm two breeding generations before Minamisayaka’s own 1970 cross. That ancestry shows up directly in the cup — tasters and the cultivar’s own release material describe a milky, floral aroma unlike almost anything else in the Yabukita lineage — and it is a large part of why growers reach for Minamisayaka specifically for pan-roasted (kamairicha) and black tea rather than treating it as a general-purpose sencha cultivar.

Lineage

• Miya A-6 (宮A6) ♀ — bred by Miyazaki Prefecture; itself a cross of Takachiho (たかちほ, a selection from Miyazaki Zairai seedlings) and Miya F1-9-4-48 (宮F1-9-4-48), a Miyazaki breeding-line F1 hybrid.
• Chamoto F1 NN27 (茶本F1NN27) ♂ — bred at the National Tea Research Station (国立茶業試験場) from Yabukita and Shizuoka Zairai 16 (静在16), a Shizuoka landrace seedling. The same clonal line was later used, the other way round, as the seed parent of Sakimidori.

The unusual part of the pedigree sits one generation further back, on Miya A-6’s paternal side. Miya F1-9-4-48 was itself bred from MAi23 (an Assam-variety selection) as seed parent and MC3 (a Caucasus-origin selection) as pollen parent — both documented by name in NARO’s own pedigree chart. That makes Minamisayaka’s great-grandparents, on its mother’s father’s side, an Assam tea plant and a Caucasus tea plant respectively: unusual company for a cultivar that is otherwise raised and sold as an ordinary Japanese sencha. No source consulted explains why a Caucasus-origin parent specifically was used in this cross, and the author of the most detailed English-language account of it says plainly that they could not find out either. The Assam connection is less mysterious in context: Japan ran several mid-twentieth-century breeding programmes that imported Assam and other foreign material for black tea development, and the same NARO chart shows an unrelated Assam-descended parent behind Benifuuki.

Minamisayaka is a controlled cross, not a landrace selection, and every plant of it is a clone of the individual selected from that 1970 cross. The same pair of grandparents (Takachiho × Miya F1-9-4-48) also produced the Unkai (雲海) cultivar, Cha Norin No. 29, selected at the same station as strain A15 — a different seedling out of that cross, so Unkai and Minamisayaka’s female parent are full siblings rather than the same plant. No descendants of Minamisayaka itself are recorded in the sources consulted.

History

Miya A-6 and Chamoto F1 NN27 were crossed in 1970. The resulting seedlings were raised and evaluated for roughly two decades at the Tea Research Branch of the Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station (宮崎県総合農業試験場茶業支場) at Kawaminami — the station NARO’s handbook still lists as the contact for the cultivar. English-language sources render its name inconsistently (“Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station” and “Miyazaki Agricultural Research Institute” both appear).

The best individual from that trial, strain 宮崎9号, was named and registered in 1991 under MAFF’s national tea-cultivar naming system as Cha Norin No. 42 — the row the 茶農林登録品種一覧 registry table gives it, listing it as a Miyazaki sencha cultivar of that year. NARO’s own handbook separately records a later, different kind of registration: applied for on 1 June 1991 and granted on 14 March 1994, Minamisayaka was registered under the Plant Variety Registration Act (種苗法) as variety No. 3932, to Miyazaki Prefecture, a scheme that assigns sequential numbers across all registered crops rather than tea specifically (compare Benifuuki’s unrelated No. 4591 in the same table). That breeder’s right ran its eighteen years and lapsed on 15 March 2012, which is why the handbook now marks the cultivar 一般品種 rather than 登録品種. The two registrations are easy to conflate, and are recorded separately in the frontmatter of this record; see the conflicts note there.

NARO’s handbook gives the naming rationale directly: bred in Miyazaki, suited to warm regions, and carrying a refreshing aroma, it was named Minamisayaka — written 南爽, “south” and “clear/fresh” — though the registered name itself is kana only.

Minamisayaka has stayed a minor cultivar outside Miyazaki. It is one of the roughly eighty cultivars Shinkoju, a Japanese specialist single-cultivar tea shop, stocks and sells separately by processing style; one of their own lots is grown not in Miyazaki at all but in Sayama, Saitama, which the shop calls out explicitly as a point of interest — a Miyazaki-bred cultivar producing tea more than a thousand kilometres from where it was raised.

Characteristics

Budding is medium to slightly late: NARO’s handbook puts first picking one to three days after Yabukita, and 日本茶備忘録 classes it as 中生 (mid-season) and specifically suited to low-pesticide and organic cultivation. Growth habit is a strongly upright (直立型) form, with vigour similar to Yabukita. Leaves are elliptical, slightly larger than Yabukita’s and similar in thickness, dark green with a visible lustre. Cuttings root and establish well.

Yield runs ahead of Yabukita at both flushes — 10 to 20% more at first flush (ichibancha) and 30 to 40% more at second flush (nibancha) — though no absolute kg/10a figure was found in the sources consulted. It carries strong resistance to anthracnose, ring spot disease and white peach scale, needing no routine control for any of the three. Set against that, it is susceptible to red blight and to mochi disease (blister blight), both of which need active management in areas where they occur, and growers have reported cases of aokugare (青枯れ, a cold-related dieback) in cold districts, so the cultivar’s “can be grown nationwide” billing comes with a caveat for the coldest sites. Processing notes from NARO flag that its buds are soft relative to their apparent maturity — rough-rolling (粗揉) with too little leaf in the drum can cause the leaf to pool at the bottom of the machine — that lighter steaming brings out its distinctive aroma more than deep steaming does, and that it is a “bud-weight” type that punishes late picking.

The cup is where the unusual ancestry shows. NARO’s own characterisation is a floral aroma “reminiscent of milk tea” (ミルクティーを想起させる) over a clean, light taste. Shinkoju’s tasting notes track the same theme across processing styles: its standard sencha is described as having “the multilayered aroma and flavour of a Southeast Asian tea”; its fukamushi sencha as unusually “juicy” for a green tea; its kamairicha (pan-roasted) as having “a transparent floral aroma and balanced flavour”; and its black tea as “flowery and clear, with a sweet, coconut-milk-like aftertaste.” That aroma profile is also, by most accounts, a point of genuine disagreement rather than universal praise — myjapanesegreentea.com notes that Minamisayaka’s flavour is different enough from Yabukita that Japanese tea professionals’ opinions of it are divided. It is not, on this evidence, a cultivar aiming to be a better all-purpose sencha; it is a cultivar built around one distinctive, polarising aroma, and it is put to its best use where that aroma is the point — pan-roasted tea and, especially, black tea.