Sayamakaori

Sayamakaori is a seedling of Yabukita, selected in Saitama Prefecture and registered in 1971 as Cha Norin No. 31 (茶農林31号). It exists because Yabukita’s spread out of Shizuoka exposed a limit: Sayama, well north of Japan’s main tea belt, has colder winters and harsher spring frosts than the conditions Yabukita was chosen under, and growers there needed a sencha cultivar that could take it. Sayamakaori buds slightly earlier than Yabukita rather than later — an unusual outcome for a cold-district selection — and it carries markedly more astringency and a stronger, often floral aroma than its parent. It remains one of the most widely planted cultivars in the country, commonly cited as the fifth most common nationally, and its name is nothing more than a description: Sayama’s kaori, its fragrance.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ — the seed parent. Sayamakaori is an open-pollinated (natural-cross) seedling raised from Yabukita seed, not a controlled cross, so its pollen parent was never recorded.

Because it comes from open pollination rather than a deliberate cross, Sayamakaori’s lineage sits one step removed from a landrace selection: one parent is documented, the other is not, in the same way Yabukita’s own zairai origin left its pollen parent unknowable. What is unusually well documented is Sayamakaori’s own use as a parent since. Saitama’s breeding programme used it directly to raise Sainomidori (さいのみどり, Cha Norin No. 50, 2003) as a further open-pollinated seedling. In Miyazaki, it was crossed with a Miyazaki-bred line to produce Yumekaori (ゆめかおり, 2009) and, via a different Makurazaki cross, Nanmei (なんめい, Sayamakaori ♀ × Makurazaki 13 ♂, bred at NARO’s Makurazaki tea research station and registered in February 2014) — notable as the first Japanese tree or tea cultivar selected using DNA markers, used specifically to track the scale-insect resistance gene it inherited from Sayamakaori. Independently in Shizuoka, the grower-breeder Mizuno Shonan of the Ōigawa Agricultural Cooperative’s Kanaya tea centre crossed Sayamakaori with the rare cultivar Marishi (摩利支) and, after growing out roughly 6,000 seedlings over three years and tasting the results for close to three decades, registered two of them as Kanaya Homare (金谷ほまれ, Plant Variety Protection No. 17961) and Kanaya Ibuki (金谷いぶき, Plant Variety Protection No. 17960), both registered 19 March 2009.

One caution worth flagging: Sayamakaori is easily confused with Sayamamidori (さやまみどり, Cha Norin No. 5) — an unrelated, earlier Saitama cultivar selected from Uji Zairai seed in 1953. Older tabulated sources credit Sayamakaori as the ancestor of Musashikaori and Miyamakaori, but NARO’s more detailed published pedigree charts trace both of those instead through Sayamamidori. The more detailed source is preferred here, so those two are left off the descendant list above.

History

Sayama sits well north of the tea belt running through Shizuoka and Uji, and its winters are colder and its springs more frost-prone than either. By the time Yabukita had spread out of Shizuoka in the mid twentieth century, it was clear that a cultivar bred for one region’s climate did not transplant everywhere without cost, and Saitama’s growers needed something bred for their own conditions rather than borrowed from the south.

At the Saitama Prefectural Tea Experiment Station (埼玉県茶業試験場), breeders grew out seedlings from open-pollinated Yabukita seed — plants whose mother was Yabukita and whose father was whatever pollen happened to reach the flower. One seedling, tracked through trials under the line number G15613, stood out for combining Yabukita’s productivity and yield with noticeably better cold tolerance. It was registered in 1971 as 茶農林31号 under the name Sayamakaori.

It has since become Sayama tea’s signature cultivar and one of the most widely grown in Japan outside Yabukita itself — commonly cited as the fifth most planted nationally — with meaningful acreage as far away as Shizuoka and Mie. It has also proved a useful parent: Saitama used it to raise Sainomidori in 2003; Miyazaki crossed it into Yumekaori (2009), and NARO’s Makurazaki station, using DNA-marker selection to confirm the scale-insect resistance carried over from Sayamakaori, raised Nanmei (2014) — the first Japanese tree or tea cultivar bred with that technique. In Shizuoka, an individual grower, Mizuno Shonan, spent roughly thirty years crossing Sayamakaori with the rare cultivar Marishi and selecting among the seedlings, eventually registering Kanaya Homare and Kanaya Ibuki in 2009.

Characteristics

Sayamakaori buds two to three days before Yabukita — an early-ish rather than late budding time, which is the opposite of what breeding for a colder district usually produces. Growers manage the resulting frost exposure with protection measures rather than by relying on late budding to dodge the frost window. Its cold hardiness itself is well attested independently of its own release literature: it is repeatedly cited, alongside Kanayamidori, as one of the benchmark cold-tolerant cultivars other releases are measured against — Kirari 31’s own trial reports, for instance, note that Kirari 31 out- performed “the already cold-tolerant cultivars like Sayamakaori and Kanayamidori” on frost injury rates. Yield and ease of cultivation are both described as good, on a par with or ahead of Yabukita, though no kg/10a figure for it turned up in the sources consulted, and its leaves are noted as larger and thicker than Yabukita’s. No sourced ratings for anthracnose, ring spot or red blight resistance specifically were found, so nothing further is claimed on that front.

The cup is where Sayamakaori earns its reputation. It carries markedly more catechins than Yabukita, which shows up as a concentrated, sharper astringency and a fuller, darker liquor, alongside a distinctly strong aroma that several independent sources describe as floral — strong enough, by more than one account, that the tea gardens themselves smell of flowers at harvest. That profile suits its primary use as sencha, and it is also reported to take lightly withered or partially oxidised processing well, which draws the floral note out further. It is not a subtle tea: set beside Yabukita it reads as the more powerful, more astringent option rather than the better-balanced one, and that is precisely the character Sayama tea has built its reputation on.