Skip to content
nerd tea

Cultivar

Ogura-midori

おぐらみどり　Ogura-midori

"Ogura" + "midori" (green). Kyoto Prefecture and its tea research institute write the name in kana only (おぐらみどり) and give no etymology. Ogura (小倉) is a tea-producing district in western Uji City; -midori is the standard cultivar-name suffix for fresh green colour, shared by siblings named in the same programme (Kyō-midori, and later Uji-midori). No source explains why this particular selection was tied to Ogura rather than another Uji locality, and none confirms that the district is what the name refers to.

A landrace selection from Kyoto/Uji indigenous tea trees, made by a private breeder and named by the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute; rated ◎ for tencha alone and medium in nearly every other respect, it remains one of the ten 宇治種 that Kyoto subsidises growers to replant, even though its origin — which garden, which grower — went unrecorded.

Lineage of Ogura-midori, drawn: 1 cultivar and 1 parent with no record here. Each cultivar is a link to its own page.Ogura-midori1954Uji zairai

Lineage of Ogura-midori

Ogura-midori is a tencha cultivar that came out of Kyoto Prefecture’s Uji landrace selection programme in the early 1950s and is still on the prefecture’s recommended list today. Unlike Ujihikari and Gokou, which the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute selected itself, Ogura-midori came in from outside: it is one of four private selections — with Samidori, Asahi and Komakage — that the institute took into its trials, raised and named. It is far less visible at retail than those siblings, and almost nothing has been published about where it came from, but Kyoto still counts it among the ten 宇治種 and still pays growers to plant it.

Lineage

  • Kyoto/Uji indigenous tea tree (zairai) — an individual selected from seed-grown native stock, not a controlled cross; the institute’s chronology records it only as a 民間選抜, a private breeder’s selection, without naming the grower or the stand, unlike Asahi and Komakage (Hirano Jinnojō) and Samidori (Koyama Masajirō), whose selecting growers are named in Kyoto Prefecture’s own records.

Because it is a landrace selection rather than a cross, Ogura-midori has no recorded pollen parent. It has no documented descendants, and no cultivar in this collection is recorded as bred from it.

History

The Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute began selecting from zairai stock in 1939, and from that same year also admitted selections made by private breeders into its cultivar trials. In 1953 it raised and named the results: its own selections Asagiri, Kyō-midori, Gokou and Ujihikari, and the private selections Samidori, Ogura-midori, Asahi and Komakage. The following year, 1954, the prefecture fixed ten cultivars as 京都府茶奨励品種, its recommended tea cultivars — a list Ogura-midori is still on, with a full row of published cultivation characteristics beside the better-known Uji names.

Nor is that list only a formality. Kyoto now groups its distinctive cultivars as the 宇治種 — Uji-midori, Kyō-midori, Samidori, Asahi, Ujihikari, Ogura-midori, Gokou, Komakage, Hōshun and Tenmyō — which together made up 22% of the prefecture’s tea plantings by 2023, against 16% in 2008, and since 2021 the prefecture has run a replanting subsidy (宇治種改植加速化支援事業) aimed at moving growers off Yabukita and onto them. O-CHA NET names Asahi and Ogura-midori together as the representative cultivars grown for tencha.

The name points to where the selection is tied: Ogura (小倉) is a district in the western part of Uji City, formerly the separate village of Ogura, merged into Uji in 1951. It sat on the shore of Ogura-ike (巨椋池), a large lake drained for farmland by 1941, and has been a tea-producing part of the Uji district since at least the Edo period — Marukyū Koyamaen, one of Uji’s principal matcha producers, was founded there in the Genroku era (1688–1704) and still operates its head office and factory at Ogura-chō, Terauchi 86. Whether Ogura-midori was selected from a planting in Ogura itself, or simply follows the naming pattern of siblings such as Kyō-midori and Uji-midori (place name plus -midori), is not stated in any source found.

What is thin is the origin story rather than the cultivar. No breeding paper, strain number or selection site for Ogura-midori was located in Kyoto Prefecture’s publications, the national MAFF variety-registration systems, or the Japanese cultivar literature: the institute’s chronology gives it a single line, and where its siblings carry strain numbers on the record — 京研166号 for Gokou, 京研170号 for Ujihikari, 平野11号 for Asahi, 小山69号 for Samidori — Ogura-midori has no published counterpart.

Characteristics

Kyoto Prefecture’s cultivation-characteristics table for its recommended cultivars gives the picture. Ogura-midori buds mid-season (中生), on par with Yabukita; its bush habit, spread, rooting from cuttings, early growth and yield are all rated 中 — medium — straight across, and its new leaves under cover are oval, medium in size, green, of medium gloss and soft. It carries medium resistance to anthracnose (炭疽病), while the ring-spot (輪斑病) cell is left blank where Gokou and Komakage beside it are both rated 強. It is rated 適, suitable, for the cold parts of the prefecture — a note the same table withholds from Uji-midori and Ujihikari, both of which it warns away from cold districts. Its one ◎ is for tencha, and the table’s verdict on the made tea is a single phrase: てん茶として優良, “excellent as tencha.”

Tencha, like gyokuro, is grown under cover in the final weeks before picking, which suppresses catechin formation and concentrates theanine, producing the characteristic umami, low astringency and deep green colour of Uji-style shaded tea. Kyoto rates several of its cultivars ◎ for gyokuro as well — Gokou and Komakage among them — but Ogura-midori is not one of them: on the prefecture’s own reckoning it is a tencha cultivar and nothing else.

Lineage

A landrace selection from Kyoto/Uji indigenous (zairai) stock, not a controlled cross — one of four private selections (with Samidori, Asahi and Komakage) that the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute took into its trials, raised and named alongside its own selections Asagiri, Kyō-midori, Gokou and Ujihikari.

Where the sources disagree

  • Naming year: two Kyoto sources date the naming differently. The tea research institute's own chronology puts the raising and naming of the private selections 「さみどり」「おぐらみどり」「あさひ」「こまかげ」 in 昭和28年 (1953) and the fixing of ten Kyoto recommended cultivars in 昭和29年 (1954), while the institute's Uji-cultivar page dates its siblings Asahi, Samidori, Ujihikari and Gokou to 昭和29年. This record follows 1954, the year the name is generally cited from, and treats 1953 as the year the naming work concluded.
  • Tea types: secondary Japanese cultivar lists (chakatsu.com) describe Ogura-midori as 玉露・碾茶用 — for gyokuro as well as tencha — but Kyoto Prefecture's own characteristics table marks it ◎ for てん茶 only and leaves the 玉露 row blank, so this record lists tencha alone.
  • Kanji: English-language cultivar lists sometimes give a kanji form 小倉みどり; every Japanese source found writes the cultivar in kana, so no kanji is recorded here.

Sources

Documentation: normal

  1. 京都府茶奨励品種の栽培特性一覧 (Cultivation characteristics table of Kyoto Prefecture's recommended tea cultivars, PDF)
  2. 茶業研究所リニューアル概要パンフレット (Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute overview pamphlet, with the institute chronology, PDF)
  3. 第１回「京都府茶業振興計画」策定に係る検討委員会 資料 (Kyoto Prefecture tea industry promotion plan committee papers, defining the ten 宇治種, PDF)
  4. 日本茶の品種／お茶を楽しむホームページ O-CHA NET
  5. The Japanese Tea Cultivars
  6. Japanese Tea Cultivar List
  7. 宇治品種について（京都府ホームページ）
  8. 小倉町 (宇治市) - Wikipedia
  9. 丸久小山園 本社工場・本店（お茶の京都）