Mineyutaka

Mineyutaka (みねゆたか) is a bud sport of Yabukita — a spontaneous branch mutation of Japan’s dominant cultivar, discovered and propagated by cuttings rather than bred from seed or crossed by hand. It was registered in 1996, credited to an individual grower, Matsushita Ei’ichi, rather than to any prefectural or national research station, and it is associated specifically with Tanegashima, the Kagoshima island off the southern tip of Kyushu, where it is grown as one of a handful of locally distinctive cultivars alongside Shoju and Kuritawase. Unlike most cultivars in this collection, Mineyutaka never passed through the collaborative national tea-breeding programme, and it is correspondingly under-documented: even the shinkoju.com cultivar reference, which covers roughly eighty cultivars individually, leaves its entry blank.

Lineage

• Yabukita (やぶきた, Cha Norin No. 6) — the source plant. Mineyutaka is not a descendant of Yabukita in the ordinary sense; it is Yabukita, carrying its genome unchanged except for whichever heritable trait let a grower tell the mutated branch apart from the rest of the bush.

A “sport” (枝変わり, literally “branch change”) is a somatic mutation: a random genetic change arising in a single growing point of an already-established plant, rather than a new combination of two parents’ genes formed at fertilisation. Because tea is propagated by cuttings, a grower who notices one branch behaving differently — budding earlier, colouring differently, whatever the tell was — can take cuttings from that branch alone and grow an entirely new clonal line from it. The result has no pollen parent to record, not because the parent is unknown (as with an open-pollinated landrace seedling such as Yabukita itself) but because there was no fertilisation event at all: every Mineyutaka bush alive today is a rooted cutting descending from one mutated branch of one Yabukita bush. It is the same kind of relationship a pink grapefruit has to the yellow-fleshed tree it sported from.

Mineyutaka is one of only a few registered sports in the wider Japanese tea cultivar registry. Kiraka (きらか), registered in 2006, is another Yabukita sport, selected independently by Takeuchi Kiyomi and Takeuchi Tadayoshi. Shoju (しょうじゅ, written 松寿) is a sport of a different cultivar, Kuritawase (くりたわせ), and was registered in the same year as Mineyutaka — 1996 — by the same breeder, Matsushita Ei’ichi, which suggests the two sports were noticed and propagated together as part of the same grower’s work on Tanegashima.

History

Mineyutaka’s documented history is short. It was registered in 1996 to an individual breeder, Matsushita Ei’ichi, rather than to a prefectural or national experiment station — unlike almost every other cultivar registered in that decade, which passed through the collaborative national tea-breeding programme (national and prefectural stations working from a shared trial protocol). NARO’s own 茶品種ハンドブック (第6版 Version 2), which catalogues cultivars bred under that national programme, does not include Mineyutaka at all, which is consistent with an origin as an individual grower’s field selection rather than a station’s breeding line.

The trail on where that grower worked leads to Tanegashima, the Kagoshima island off the coast of southern Kyushu. A 2018 sensory-evaluation study presented to the Japan Society of Home Economics, testing green teas made from cultivars grown specifically on Tanegashima, names Mineyutaka alongside Shoju (there called by its kanji name, 松寿) and Kuritawase as among the island’s own distinctive local cultivars — grown in a district the paper notes still processes some of its tea by the traditional light-steaming (asamushi) method. MAFF’s registration record is more precise still: it gives the breeding site (育成地) as Nishinoomote City, the town at the northern end of Tanegashima, and lists Matsushita’s address there as 古田 1101. No source names the orchard or the year the mutation was first noticed.

The 1996 date is the year of registration, not of selection: Matsushita filed the application on 9 August 1993 and the registration was granted on 19 January 1996, as No. 4835. The breeder’s right did not last — MAFF records it as lapsing on 20 January 1998, two years into a nominal eighteen-year term. What can be said with more confidence is which registration this was not: Mineyutaka does not carry a 茶農林 (Cha Norin) number. The official MAFF 茶農林登録品種一覧 runs directly from 茶農林44号 (Benifuuki, bred 1993) to 茶農林45号 (Ryofu, bred 1997), with nothing registered in between — the national Cha Norin numbering system issued nothing at all for 1994–1996, the exact window in which Mineyutaka, Shoju, Marishi, Asanoka, and several other individually-bred sports and selections were registered. The Japanese Wikipedia article on the tea plant lists Mineyutaka among cultivars registered under the Plant Variety Protection and Seed Act (種苗法) instead, which fits: by the mid-1990s, that Act had become the normal route for a cultivar bred outside the national programme.

Characteristics

Mineyutaka is an early-budding (早生) sencha cultivar — the one trait every source that mentions it agrees on — though no source gives a day-count relative to Yabukita, so none is stated here. MAFF’s registration characteristics fill in the rest of the bush: growth habit slightly upright (樹姿やや直), vigour strong, spread large, cuttings rooting well, and yield rated やや多 (somewhat high) on both young and mature bushes. The same record distinguishes it from Yabukita precisely by that larger spread, a greener new leaf, and the earlier budding and plucking. Nothing citable was found on its disease or cold resistance.

The clearest description of the cup comes from a Saitama-based specialist retailer selling single-cultivar Mineyutaka across several processing styles: regular sencha, deep-steamed (fukamushi) sencha, pan-fired kamairicha, and even black tea. Their mid-tier grade is described as having “an enveloping aroma reminiscent of cream stew, with a taste that is crisp and refreshing” (クリームシチューのような包み込む香り、味わいはスッキリ爽やか), and is marked moderate on astringency (3/5) and comparatively light on both umami (2/5) and body (2/5). That is a single vendor’s tasting note for a single commercial grade, not a cultivar-wide profile — but it is the only cupping description available, and a dairy-like note is distinctive enough, for a Japanese green tea, that it is worth recording as given rather than smoothed into generic tasting language.