Sayamamidori

Sayamamidori is a sencha cultivar selected from Uji zairai (native, seed-grown) seedlings and registered in 1953 as 茶農林5号 — the same registration year, and the same original Uji seed stock, as Yabukita’s Shizuoka rival Asatsuyu. It was the first cultivar to come out of Saitama Prefecture’s tea breeding programme, and it gave the prefecture’s Sayama tea district a cold-hardy, good-quality plant of its own at a time when tea cultivation was expanding out of its traditional Shizuoka and Uji heartlands into the cooler Kanto and Tohoku fringe. Its lasting importance, though, is less as a tea grown for its own sake than as a parent: it is a documented, direct seed or pollen parent of at least four later registered cultivars, and a grandparent of at least two more.

Lineage

• Uji zairai seedling — an individual selection from native, seed-grown tea gardens, grown out in Saitama; not a controlled cross.

Like Yabukita, Sayamamidori was pulled from an existing seed-grown population rather than bred to order, so it has no recorded pollen parent. Unlike most landrace selections, though, it went on to found a small dynasty of its own. It is documented as the direct seed parent of Okumusashi (1962) and Toyoka (1976), the direct seed parent of Hokumei (crossed 1965, registered 1995), and the direct pollen parent of the Miyazaki-bred cultivar Miyamakaori (crossed 1981, registered 2006) — in that last cross Sayamamidori appears under its old strain name, Saitama No. 1 (埼玉1号). Two further cultivars carry it as a grandparent through intermediate breeding strains: Fukumidori (1986/88), bred from Yabukita crossed with the strain 23F1107, itself a Sayamamidori x Yabukita seedling; and Musashikaori (crossed 1967, registered 2001), bred from Yabukita crossed with the strain Saitama 27F1-73, itself a Sayamamidori x Koushi-koushin (a Taiwanese cultivar) seedling. A further, unregistered descendant, the black-tea selection Beniibara, is attributed directly to Sayamamidori seed by an individual breeder, Kimura Noboru.

One further claimed descendant does not hold up against the primary breeding record. Sainomidori (2006) is sometimes described as a Sayamamidori seedling, and the resemblance of the two names invites the mix-up, but the NARO tea cultivar handbook’s own pedigree chart gives its parent as Sayamakaori — a separate, Yabukita-derived Saitama cultivar — by open pollination, with no Sayamamidori in the tree. This record follows that chart and does not count Sainomidori among Sayamamidori’s documented descendants; see the frontmatter conflicts note for the sourcing on both this and a similar mix-up in Musashikaori’s older parentage records.

History

Sayamamidori was selected in 1935 (Showa 10) from among Uji zairai seedlings grown out at a Saitama prefectural experiment station, as part of the MAFF’s nationwide programme of collecting and trialling regional zairai selections. In 1939, when the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry established a designated original-strain plot for the programme, the plant was judged cold-hardy and good enough in quality to be named as a candidate strain, Saitama A-1-go (埼玉A1号). It was carried forward under that designation until the programme’s first-ever round of cultivar registrations, in 1953, when it was formally registered as 茶農林5号 alongside fourteen other cultivars — including Yabukita (茶農林6号) and, from the same Uji zairai stock, Asatsuyu, Miyoshi and Tamamidori. The 1953 registration paper records its recommended growing area as Saitama, the wider Kanto region, Hokuriku, and the colder parts of Tohoku, and gives the origin of the name as simply recording where it was bred and where it was expected to spread: Sayama, the tea district within Saitama.

A parent almost from the start

Saitama’s breeding programme put Sayamamidori to work quickly. In 1947, at the MAFF’s Kumagaya Agricultural Improvement Experiment Station, researchers crossed it as the seed parent with Yamatomidori as the pollen parent; the resulting F1 seed was sown in 1948, and individual selection ran through the 1950s under the strain name 22-131, surviving the 1951 closure of the Kumagaya station and the transfer of the trial to the newly established Saitama Prefectural Tea Research Institute. The selected individual was registered in 1962 as Okumusashi (茶農林26号) — named, like several of Sayamamidori’s other descendants, for Musashi, the old province that covered Saitama. The release paper for Okumusashi, published in the 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal), describes the new cultivar’s purpose plainly: it was bred to be later-budding and more cold-resistant than either Yabukita or Sayamamidori, letting Saitama growers stagger their harvest across early, medium and late cultivars rather than relying on Sayamamidori and Yabukita alone.

The same breeding station repeated the cross with Yabukita as the pollen parent instead of Yamatomidori, registering the result in 1976 as Toyoka (茶農林33号), and crossed Sayamamidori with a natural Yabukita seedling (field number 5507, later fixed as the strain Saitama No. 13) to produce Hokumei, crossed in 1965 and registered in 1995 — by which point the general-variety registration under the old Cha Norin system had been supplemented by registration under the Plant Variety Protection Act (Hokumei’s own PVP number is 4775, filed as a general, unprotected variety). Decades later, in 1981, Miyazaki Prefecture’s tea research station used Sayamamidori — by then usually cited under its old strain name, Saitama No. 1 — as the pollen parent for a cross with the Kyoto zairai-derived strain Kyoken 283, registering the result in 2006 as Miyamakaori.

Characteristics

Sayamamidori is a medium to medium-late budding cultivar. In the trial data recorded for the 1962 Okumusashi release paper, its first-flush picking date fell around 17 May against Yabukita’s 12 May at the same site — about five days later — while a separate year’s comparison in the same paper put the gap at four days; both are markedly earlier than Okumusashi’s own picking date, which the paper describes as running seven to ten days behind Yabukita and a few days behind Sayamamidori itself.

Growth habit is upright and vigorous, with somewhat thicker branches than Yabukita and an internode length of around 3.4cm. The leaf is oval, medium-to-large, deep green, and notably glossy, described in the Okumusashi paper’s comparison trial as rounder in outline than Yabukita’s. The 1953 registration paper records Sayamamidori as high-yielding, with especially strong cold resistance, and strong disease resistance and drought resistance generally — though it gives no yield figure in kg/10a, and no later source consulted here supplies one either.

Processed as sencha, it produces a dark, deep-green dry leaf and a tea the 1953 paper rates as good quality, with a distinct aroma noted by later vendor descriptions. In the tasting panel run for the 1962 Okumusashi comparison trial, Sayamamidori’s first-flush cup scored 59.5 out of a possible 100 across colour, aroma and taste — close behind Okumusashi’s own 60.0 and clearly ahead of Yabukita’s 56.0 at the same tasting, a result that supports its historical reputation as a genuine step up on Yabukita in cup quality rather than merely a regional substitute for it.

That reputation has not translated into a lasting place in the fields. No source consulted here documents Sayamamidori being processed into fukamushi sencha, tencha, gyokuro or any tea style beyond ordinary sencha, and the Japanese Wikipedia article on Sayama tea names Yabukita and the Yabukita-derived Sayamakaori, not Sayamamidori itself, as the district’s leading cultivars today. Seventy years after its registration, Sayamamidori survives less as a tea people drink and more as a name several generations back in the pedigree of the cultivars that replaced it.