Samidori

Samidori is one of the small group of “Uji cultivars” — Asahi, Ujihikari and Samidori chief among them — selected directly from Uji’s own zairai (landrace) tea stock rather than bred by crossing, and grown almost exclusively for the shaded, hand-picked styles that built Uji’s reputation: tencha (the leaf that becomes matcha) and gyokuro. It was never submitted for national cultivar registration, but it has spread further than its unregistered siblings, and Kyoto Prefecture’s own production data puts it third by volume among every cultivar grown in the prefecture — behind only Yabukita and Okumidori, and ahead of every other Uji-native cultivar. It is also, quietly, a parent: two of the prefecture’s more recent registered cultivars, Houshun and Tenmyo, both grew from open-pollinated seed of Samidori bushes.

Lineage

• Uji zairai seedling — an individual plant selected out of a seed-grown Uji landrace stand, not a controlled cross; its pollen parent was never recorded, and by the nature of a zairai field never could be.

Samidori is a landrace selection, the same category of breeding as Yabukita: a single bush picked out of a seed-propagated population for traits that looked worth keeping, then multiplied onward by cuttings so that every Samidori bush today is a clone of Koyama Masajirō’s original plant. Its documented descendants run the other direction — as a seed parent rather than a bred one. The Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute grew out open-pollinated seed collected from Samidori bushes from 1977, and two lines from that programme were eventually registered in 2006: Houshun (鳳春), an ultra-early cultivar bred for gyokuro, and Tenmyo (展茗), a mid-season cultivar bred for machine-harvested tencha. Both are natural-cross seedlings — Samidori is their recorded seed parent, but, as with Samidori itself, no pollen parent was ever identified.

History

Samidori’s old strain name, Koyama No. 69 (小山69号), records what it actually was before it had a proper name: the 69th selection candidate belonging to a grower named Koyama. Koyama Masajirō worked a zairai planting in the Uji area and, as growers across Uji had done for generations, watched his seed-grown bushes for individuals worth propagating on their own. One of them — pale green, glossy, upright enough to make hand-picking easy — became Samidori. The Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute records its 育成年 (development year) as 1954, the year the selection was finalised and the cultivar was designated a Kyoto Prefecture recommended variety (京都府奨励品種); the Research Institute and other Uji growers selected Gokou, Ujihikari, Asahi and several other Uji cultivars in the same year, from the same pool of zairai material. Several retail sources state that Koyama had been working with the plant since 1939, fifteen years before its formal promotion — a plausible enough shape for a landrace selection, where an individual is often identified and multiplied by cuttings long before any institution formally endorses it, as with Yabukita’s own gap between an 1908 selection and 1953 registration. That earlier date does not appear on the Research Institute’s own page, however, and could not be corroborated in any Japanese-language source, so it is not asserted here (see conflicts).

Unlike Yabukita, Samidori was never put forward for MAFF’s national Cha Norin registration or listed in the Plant Variety Protection Act register — it remains, formally, unregistered. That did not stop it becoming one of the most widely planted Uji-native cultivars: the growers’ association that represents it lists it as one of the core tencha cultivars alongside Asahi and Ujihikari, and the Uji tea house Yamamasa Koyamaen — whose founder shares Koyama Masajirō’s name — sells a matcha called simply “Samidori” as one of its standard lines.

Samidori’s own genetic material went on to found two later, formally registered cultivars. From 1977, the Research Institute grew out natural-cross seedlings collected from Samidori bushes — open pollination, so the pollen parent of each seedling is unknown — and selected two lines for further trial: strain 53-7, which became Houshun, and strain 53-38, which became Tenmyo. Both were registered in February 2006, more than fifty years after Samidori’s own promotion.

Characteristics

The Research Institute describes Samidori’s picking period as 中生 (mid-season) but unusually wide — its harvest window runs longer than most Uji cultivars, which is part of why growers value it: a longer window on a single field spreads out labour rather than concentrating it into a few frantic days. Quite how it sits relative to Yabukita is not consistently stated: the Institute’s own comparisons for its descendants imply two different offsets (roughly three days earlier than Yabukita by one reading, one to two days later by another), so this record reports only the mid-season designation rather than a specific day count.

Growth habit is markedly upright (極直立型) with a strong, well-formed stem, which is the trait most sources single out — it makes hand-picking distinctly easier than on cultivars with a sprawling habit, a real consideration for a cultivar grown almost entirely for hand-harvested tencha. New leaves are pale green, glossy and described as moist or fresh-looking (みずみずしい) rather than dark or leathery. Yield is somewhat above average for the category. Cold tolerance is reported as good; disease resistance is more mixed, with slightly weak resistance to grey blight (輪斑病), weak resistance to white peach scale and only medium resistance to anthracnose — Samidori is not a cultivar chosen for its disease package so much as for what it does in the cup.

That cup is the point of it. Processed as tencha, the Research Institute credits it with particularly vivid colour and superior aroma and flavour among Uji cultivars; retailers and drinkers consistently describe a deep, well-balanced umami with natural sweetness, low astringency, and a green, sometimes citrus- or leafy-vegetable-toned aroma. It is used for matcha and gyokuro as well as tencha, and by most accounts is closer to an all-rounder within the shaded-tea category than a specialist the way Gokou (aromatic, gyokuro-first) or Asahi (scarce, exhibition-grade) are — which is consistent with it being, among the Uji-native cultivars, the one growers reach for most often.