Sato-wase

Sato-wase is an early-budding sencha cultivar selected by an independent grower, Satō Mitsuteru, from a seedling of a strain called Abe No. 1, and registered in 1986 under Japan’s Seed and Seedling Law. It never went through the national or prefectural breeding-station pipeline that produced most of the cultivars in this collection: it carries no MAFF Cha Norin number, and its own parent, Abe No. 1, is named in its registration text but documented nowhere else found. What can be said with more confidence, from that registration and a single agronomic survey, is that it buds early and carries an unusually upright (“tachiba”) leaf blade angle — the trait that survey found correlates with higher yield through better light interception. Outside those two documents it is almost invisible in the literature: absent from every major cultivar reference site and retailer checked, and known today mainly through a handful of specialty-tea blog posts describing small-batch, single-cultivar teas.

Lineage

• Abe No. 1 (安倍1号) — an unregistered strain. It carries no MAFF Cha Norin number and no Plant Variety Protection Act registration of its own — a name search of the MAFF registry returns nothing — and beyond its name and the Shizuoka city seedling garden that Sato-wase’s registration places it in, nothing survives in the sources consulted for this record: not who selected it, or from what stock.

Sato-wase is therefore a single-plant selection, not a controlled cross. The naming pattern — a name plus a serial number, standing for an informally distinguished individual tree or line that was never itself registered — matches other unregistered “feeder” strains used as seed sources for later-registered cultivars, such as the “Sugiyama-Yaeho” seed that gave rise to Marishi. No descendants of Sato-wase are documented in any source found.

History

Sato-wase was registered on 11 July 1986 under the Seed and Seedling Law (品種登録) as registration No. 1025, on an application filed 22 March 1985, credited to the grower Satō Mitsuteru (佐藤光輝) of Morokozawa, Shizuoka city; the breeder’s right lapsed on 12 July 1996. The MAFF registry entry states this directly, and three further sources agree: My Japanese Green Tea’s cultivar list places it in its “Seed and Seedling Law Registered Cultivars” table; the Ichikawaen Tea Museum’s own registry page lists さとう早生 under 種苗法登録品種 rather than under 農林水産省 命名登録品種 (the MAFF-named category that carries a Cha Norin number); and Minorien’s compiled list of all Cha Norin registrations — a continuous run from 茶農林1号 (Beni-homare, 1953) to 茶農林52号 (Miyama-kaori, 2003) — has no entry for it at all. Unlike a station-bred cultivar such as Meiryoku, which was registered in two stages (a 1986 MAFF name registration followed by a 1987 Cha Norin number), Sato-wase’s only public registration is the 1986 Seed and Seedling Law entry. This places it alongside contemporaries such as Takane-wase and Inaguchi — individually named selections registered by private growers in the 1980s, rather than cultivars developed through the national or prefectural designated-trial programme.

The name follows a pattern common to that group: 早生 (wase) is the plain word for an early-budding cultivar, and “Sato” is the breeder’s own surname, 佐藤, rather than a place. A 2014 tea-shop blog post about a pouchong-style tea made from Sato-wase, sold under the name 翡翠 (Hisui, “jade”) for the jade-like colour of its new leaf, credits the same producer with 黄金みどり (Kogane-midori, “Golden Green”), another small-production cultivar-based tea — a pairing that reads as one grower’s own introductions being sold under their own names, in keeping with the cultivar’s likely origin as a private selection. That post associates the tea with 諸子沢, a place name in Shizuoka — the same hamlet the registration gives as the breeder’s own address (静岡県静岡市諸子沢), which puts the cultivar’s origin in Shizuoka city on the registration record itself rather than leaving it to inference. A separate blog, from a tea shop in Tanba, mentions tasting a Sato-wase processed as an oolong and rates it warmly, describing it as a non-commercial (非売品) tea — evidence that it survives today mainly as raw material for small, experimental single-cultivar teas rather than as a commodity sencha.

No release paper or prefectural recommended-cultivar listing for Sato-wase was found in the sources searched, including J-STAGE’s 茶業研究報告. Its only official characteristics description is the summary attached to its MAFF variety registration (see Characteristics, below); the only measured field data located comes from a single agronomic survey run for an unrelated purpose.

Characteristics

Sato-wase’s own name states its most reliable characteristic: 早生 (wase) means early-budding, and its registration rates budding somewhat early (萌芽期やや早) and picking early (摘採期早). The only measured confirmation of this comes from a 2011 paper by Tanaka Junichi, comparing leaf morphology and yield across roughly 70 Japanese tea cultivars and breeding lines held at NARO’s Makurazaki tea research station in Kagoshima. In a 2009 sub-trial of eight cultivars selected for a yield comparison, Sato-wase was picked on 11 April — earlier than all seven other cultivars in that trial, including Izumi (23 April) and Sayamakaori (21 April). No source gives an exact figure for how many days ahead of Yabukita it buds.

The same paper measured Sato-wase’s leaf blade inclination angle at 48.2° (n = 74 leaves), well above the survey-wide average of 39.1° across all ~70 cultivars and strains, and the seventh largest angle recorded (sixth among green-tea entries, since the one ahead of it, Beni-homare, is a black-tea cultivar). A large leaf angle means an upright, “tachiba” growth habit rather than a sprawling one, and the paper’s central finding was that this trait correlates with greater visible leaf area and, in turn, higher yield — a relationship it also held for Sato-wase specifically: in the same eight-cultivar yield trial, its spring-flush yield of 989 kg/10a was third-highest, behind only Izumi (1,353 kg/10a) and Sayamakaori (1,067 kg/10a), and comfortably ahead of every cultivar in the trial’s “small leaf-angle” group. That figure comes from one field in one season at a research station outside Sato-wase’s home region, so it should be read as an indication of agronomic potential rather than a settled yield figure — and the registration, which rates mature-tree yield as somewhat low (成木の収量性はやや少), reads it the other way. The registration also describes the plant’s overall form as spreading (樹姿は開張型), citing that as one of the traits distinguishing it from Yabukita and Surugawase, so the upright trait Tanaka measured is the inclination of the leaf blade rather than the habit of the bush.

Its registered use is sencha (緑茶・煎茶). The registration does rate it: blister blight resistance strong (もち病 強), with anthracnose, net blister blight, ring spot, red blight and split-bark freeze injury all medium; and for the made tea, shape, colour, liquor colour and taste all upper grade (上), aroma upper-middle (中の上), amino acids high (多), tannin low (少). Beyond that filing, the only flavour information found concerns processing choices outside the mainstream: a Shizuoka tea shop makes a lightly oxidised, pouchong-style tea from it, sold as 翡翠 for the jade colour of its new growth, and a separate retailer has tasted a Sato-wase oolong and described it approvingly. Whether it performs comparably well processed as ordinary sencha is not documented anywhere found for this record.