Okumidori

Okumidori was bred to solve a scheduling problem. A district planted almost entirely to Yabukita has one picking season, and it is short: every bush comes ready at once, the factory runs flat out for a fortnight, and the quality of what comes off the later fields suffers because they were picked late rather than because they were meant to be. Okumidori buds about eleven days after Yabukita and is plucked about nine days after it, which lets a grower plant both and turn one frantic window into two manageable ones. That is what the national station at Kanaya crossed it for in 1953, and what MAFF registered it for in 1974 — as a sencha cultivar, high-yielding and late.

What it became is somewhat different. Okumidori’s leaf turned out sweet, thick with theanine and notably low in bitterness and astringency, and to give a deep, even green when shaded and ground. It is now one of the principal cultivars for tencha and gyokuro outside Uji, and the reason a great deal of Kagoshima and Kyoto matcha tastes the way it does.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ — the seed parent, supplying yield, vigour and cold tolerance.
• Shizuoka Zairai No. 16 ♂ (静在16) — a numbered seedling selection out of the Shizuoka landrace, held by the station and never released as a cultivar in its own right.

The same combination, made at the same station, produced 茶本F1NN27 — another unreleased line, which went on to become the seed parent of Sakimidori and the pollen parent of Minamisayaka. So Okumidori has two full siblings in effect, and through them a set of nephews in this collection that none of the four records mention: Kirari 31 descends from Sakimidori, and Kirari 31’s own release-paper pedigree runs back through 静在16 by that route.

Nothing in this collection descends from Okumidori itself. That is a real absence rather than a gap in the sourcing — it has been planted for fifty years without being used much as a parent, which is the opposite of Yabukita’s record and probably says something about breeders wanting its timing more than its genetics.

History

The cross was made in 1953 at the national tea experiment station at Kanaya in Shizuoka — the same year Yabukita itself was registered, and the same institution that produced Kanayamidori, Meiryoku, Sofu and Ryofu. The line carried the strain name F1NN29 through two decades of clonal comparison and regional adaptation trials across several prefectures, and was put forward in February 1974 as a candidate high-yielding late sencha. It was registered as 茶農林32号 in June of that year.

Its subsequent history is a slow, unglamorous success. Where most cultivars of its generation have lost ground to Yabukita or to newer early cultivars, Okumidori’s planted area has grown: 956 ha in 2008, 1,225 ha in 2019, 1,249 ha in 2023. On MAFF’s own accounting it is the only late-season cultivar large enough to be listed separately at all, and fourth overall by area behind Yabukita, Yutakamidori and Saemidori. It is frequently described as Japan’s second-most-planted cultivar; MAFF’s figures do not support that, and the claim seems to come from its rank among tencha cultivars rather than among all of them.

Characteristics

The bush is vigorous with an upright habit. Its distinguishing agronomic trait beyond lateness is that the new shoots harden slowly — they stay tender for longer after budding, which widens the window in which the leaf is worth picking and is a large part of why the yield is high. Cold tolerance is strong, so it plants well in mountain districts and on frost-prone ground where an early cultivar would be caught by a late frost. Anthracnose is its weak point and wants managing where the disease is already established; nothing else is reported as causing notable damage.

As sencha the leaf rolls to a fine, tight needle with a deep green colour, and the cup is clean and fresh with, by the Ito En description, no distinctive character and no notable defect — an easy cultivar to work with rather than an expressive one. That neutrality reads differently once the field is shaded. Grown under cover for tencha or gyokuro, the high theanine and low astringency that made it unremarkable as a sencha become exactly the point: a sweet, umami-heavy, almost bitterness-free liquor and a deep even green in the powder. Kagoshima and Kyoto are its two main production centres, and in Kyoto it is second only to Yabukita by volume across all cultivars grown in the prefecture — ahead of Samidori and every other Uji-native cultivar, despite not being an Uji cultivar at all.