Shizu-7132

Shizu-7132 is an unregistered Shizuoka breeding line grown today mainly as a local speciality around Shimizu-ku, Shizuoka, where it is sold under the nickname “Machiko”. It began in the 1960s as one of an unrecorded number of open-pollinated Yabukita seedlings raised at the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station, and was set apart from its siblings by a genuinely unusual trait for a Japanese tea cultivar: its liquor carries a cherry-leaf aroma, attributed to coumarin, the same aromatic compound that gives salted sakura leaves their sakuramochi scent. It never went through the naming and registration process that turns a numbered strain into a cultivar such as Yabukita or Saemidori, and by most formal measures — MAFF registration, Plant Variety Protection Act registration, a prefectural recommended-cultivar listing — it still does not exist. It did, however, go on to become the seed parent of Tsuyuhikari, a cultivar that was named, trialled and registered in the normal way. Positioned against Yabukita, Shizu-7132 is grown for one distinctive characteristic rather than for balance or yield: growers describe it as “wilder” than Yabukita in habit, and its tea is sought out specifically for a note nothing else in this collection has.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ — an open-pollinated (自然交雑) seedling grown from Yabukita seed; every source found for this record names Yabukita as the only identified parent.
• Pollen parent — unrecorded. As with any open-pollinated seedling, Shizu-7132’s father tree is unknown and unknowable. It was one of a batch of seedlings raised in the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station’s trial fields in the 1960s and picked out for further propagation.

Shizu-7132 is a selection, not a controlled cross: nobody chose its pollen parent, and “7132” is simply the station’s internal accession number, assigned before — and in lieu of — a formal cultivar name. It was never registered under MAFF’s Cha Norin system or the Plant Variety Protection Act, and it has never appeared on Shizuoka prefecture’s recommended-cultivar list, so it has been known only by that number for more than half a century. It does have one clearly documented and consequential descendant: in 1970 the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station used it as the seed parent (静7132 ♀) in a deliberate cross with Asatsuyu (あさつゆ ♂, itself a Uji Zairai seedling), and the resulting seedling was later named Tsuyuhikari and registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act in 2003.

History

Selected, then left unnamed

Sometime in the 1960s, the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station raised a batch of seedlings grown from open-pollinated Yabukita seed — ordinary practice for a station running breeding trials in the Yabukita-dominated Shizuoka of the period. One seedling from that batch was picked out and given the trial number 7132, prefixed with 静 for Shizuoka. According to one grower account, the plant went largely unnoticed for years in part because its new shoots emerged reddish rather than the usual green, an unusual and not obviously desirable trait that may have kept it out of contention for formal naming. It was kept in cultivation and propagated by cuttings, but it was never carried through the process — naming, regional adaptability trials, MAFF or Plant Variety Protection Act registration — that would have given it a name of its own. In that sense it is permanently stuck at the breeding-line stage: not a landrace, and not quite a numbered strain awaiting registration so much as one that missed it.

Parent of Tsuyuhikari

Its one clearly documented institutional role came in 1970, when the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station used it as the seed parent in a cross with Asatsuyu. The resulting line, carried under the strain name 70-30-302, went through individual selection in 1978–79, nursery-bed selection in 1981, clonal comparison trials from 1982 to 1987, and regional adaptability and characteristics trials from 1991 to 1997 at the station’s main site in Kikugawa, its Fuji branch and the Nakagawane town agriculture and forestry centre. The line was named Tsuyuhikari and filed for Plant Variety Protection Act registration in 2000, adopted as a Shizuoka prefectural recommended cultivar in April 2001, and formally registered in March 2003. Its release paper credits it with strong resistance to tea anthracnose and a higher yield than Yabukita, but describes its aroma only as “refreshing” — none of Shizu-7132’s cherry-leaf character appears to have carried through to its offspring.

Becoming “Machiko”

Shizu-7132’s second life began in Ryōgōchi, a mountain district of Shimizu-ku in Shizuoka City, on a tea farm belonging to a grower named Mochizuki Tetsurō. Mochizuki had planted it in a field with poor sun exposure — not a promising site for most cultivars — and it grew there regardless, vigorously and with little disease trouble. Local tea farmers and retailers, organised as the “Shimizu Minna no Ocha wo Tsukuru Kai” (清水みんなのお茶を創る会, “the association for making everyone’s tea in Shimizu”), ran a local-resource discovery project under the slogan “enjoy farming, enjoy tea, tea-making that connects hearts,” and Shizu-7132’s aroma and body made it their find. By the growers’ own account — told, in a piece of marketing whimsy, from the tea bush’s point of view on JA Shimizu’s website — a tea-picker felt sorry for a plant with no proper name and gave it her own, Machiko, and the name stuck. Mochizuki became the first chairman of the “Machiko Kenkyūkai” (Machiko Research Association), and JA Shimizu has promoted and sold the tea under that name since, crediting the aroma to a compound also found in cherry leaves and in ashitaba. Tea grown from the same line outside Shimizu is generally still sold under its old number, Shizu-7132, rather than as Machiko; no source found here dates exactly when the Machiko brand name was adopted, only that it predates its wider recognition among specialist tea drinkers by the early 2020s.

Characteristics

No source found for this record gives Shizu-7132 a budding-time figure relative to Yabukita, or the kind of agronomic data — yield tables, disease-incidence rates, leaf morphology — that exists for its registered offspring Tsuyuhikari. What exists instead is a consistent, independently repeated account of one trait: the tea smells of cherry leaves.

Multiple retailers and a tea-focused news feature attribute this directly to coumarin (クマリン), the aromatic lactone that gives salted sakura leaves — as used to wrap sakuramochi — their characteristic sweet scent, and which several of these sources note is absent from Yabukita. This is a specific claim rather than a vague marketing one: coumarin is a well-characterised plant compound, and in cherry leaf (Cerasus lannesiana) it is known to be stored as an odourless, water-soluble glycoside precursor — a β-glucoside of 2’-hydroxycinnamic acid — that only becomes aromatic once the leaf tissue is damaged. Wounding triggers a β-glucosidase enzyme that hydrolyses the glucoside; the freed 2’-hydroxycinnamic acid then spontaneously lactonises into volatile coumarin. No source found here ran that specific chemistry on Shizu-7132 leaf itself, so this should be read as the general coumarin-release pathway documented in cherry leaf and offered as the most likely mechanism, not as a confirmed analysis of this cultivar. It is consistent, though, with growers’ own observations: the aroma is described as faint when the tea is drunk hot and more noticeable as it cools, and producers who deliberately wither (萎凋) the leaf before firing report a stronger fragrance — both point toward a bound precursor that needs tissue damage or time to release, rather than a free volatile compound present in quantity from the start. Several tasters also note the note is more delicate than an actual sakuramochi, not an overpowering flavouring.

Growers describe the bush as vigorous and comparatively disease-resistant, tolerant of the poor light and mountainous conditions that discouraged other cultivars on at least the one Shimizu farm this record traces its branding to, and “wilder” in growth habit than Yabukita. One account attributes its early neglect partly to reddish new shoots, an unusual colour trait for a Shizuoka seedling of its generation. Processing is reported as fussier than most: the leaf is thin but the stem comparatively hard, so drying it through to the stem core takes longer, and shaping it into the tight needle form typical of asamushi (lightly steamed) sencha is described by at least one producer as one of the more stubborn jobs in their lineup. It is nonetheless sold across several processing styles — asamushi and fukamushi (deep-steamed) sencha are both common, alongside kamairicha (pan-fired tea) and a black tea, the latter two presumably drawing on the stronger aroma that withering and oxidation are reported to release. Liquor colour is a pale yellow-green rather than the deep green of a shaded cultivar, consistent with unshaded sencha processing. Flavour is described as a balance of sweetness, mild bitterness and astringency, without the pronounced umami that shaded specialist cultivars are bred for — the aroma, not the taste, is what the tea is grown for.