Takachiho

Takachiho is a kamairicha (釜炒り茶, pan-fired) cultivar selected from an indigenous seedling stand in Miyazaki Prefecture and registered in 1953 as Cha Norin No. 11. For most of the following two decades it functioned as the reference cultivar against which candidate kamairicha varieties were measured across Kyushu, filling something like the role Yabukita plays for steamed tea, but within the much smaller kamairicha tradition. It is one of a handful of Japanese cultivars bred specifically for pan-firing rather than steaming, and it is the direct seed parent of Unkai, itself the parent of Minekaori — so its influence runs through two further generations of Miyazaki’s kamairicha breeding programme. It takes its name from Takachiho, a mountainous district of Miyazaki central to Japanese creation mythology, though the registration paper’s own naming rationale is geographic rather than mythological.

Lineage

• Miyazaki indigenous (zairai) seedling — a single-plant selection from a seed-grown stand, not a controlled cross.

Like Yabukita, Takachiho has no recorded pollen parent: it was picked out of an open-pollinated, seed-grown population rather than bred from named parents, and the individual plants around it cannot be reconstructed. What is documented is its role as an ancestor. Takachiho is the seed parent of Unkai (うんかい, Cha Norin No. 29), registered in 1970 from a 1952 cross with the breeding line Miya F1 9-4-48 as pollen parent. Unkai is in turn the pollen parent of Minekaori (Yabukita × Unkai), registered in 1988 as Cha Norin No. 38. Separately, a pedigree chart in NARO’s tea cultivar handbook places a cross labelled Miya A-6 — Takachiho × Miya F1 9-4-48 again, but made in 1970 — in the ancestry of Minamisayaka; whether Miya A-6 is a repeat of the cross that produced Unkai or an independent selection from it is not established in the sources found for this record.

History

Takachiho was selected from an indigenous seedling garden at what became the Miyazaki Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station. A pedigree chart in the 1971 paper announcing its offspring Unkai’s registration dates that initial selection to 1924, when the plant carried only the working designation Miyazaki No. 9 (宮崎9号). The 1953 registration paper gives a separate and later date for the cultivar’s formal development: from 1935 (Showa 10) it was raised at the station’s Kawaminami branch, in a breeding stock garden designated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The two dates are not in conflict — one marks the original selection, the other the start of institutional evaluation a decade later.

Registration followed in 1953, the first year Japan ever ran a national tea cultivar registration system. The paper that announced it, 茶の品種登録と命名 (Registered Tea Varieties), published that October in 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal) No. 2, covered fifteen cultivars in total — ten for green tea, of which eight were for sencha, one for tamaryokucha (玉緑茶) and one for kamairicha, plus five for black tea. Takachiho was the sole kamairicha entry, issued registration number eleven, five ahead of Yabukita’s number six on the same list. The paper describes it as a medium-season type with an upright growth habit, strong vigour, large elliptical leaves with strong colour, good disease resistance and strong regrowth vigour; the young bud is noted as pale green and glossy with thick leaf flesh, and the paper rates its quality as kamairicha as good. Its recommended range is given as Miyazaki, southern Kyushu, and the early-harvest districts of Shikoku, “especially the kamairicha belt.” The naming rationale is stated simply: it represents “the breeding location and the main area of dissemination.” Because the actual breeding site, Kawaminami, sits on Miyazaki’s coast some 60 km from Takachiho’s mountain country, the name evidently refers to where the cultivar spread in cultivation rather than to where it was raised.

Reference cultivar for Kyushu’s kamairicha trials

From 1953 to 1961, Takachiho was used as the standard cultivar (標準品種) in a regional adaptability trial for kamairicha varieties run across sites in Fukuoka (Chikugo), Kochi (Asakura), Saga (Ureshino), Nagasaki (Sonogi), Kumamoto, Miyazaki (Kawaminami) and Kagoshima (Chiran). Six candidate strains — bred at stations in Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Saga and Nagasaki — were tested against it over eight years; the trial report records that none was judged good enough to warrant registration. The gap was not filled until 1970, when Unkai, bred from Takachiho itself, was registered as Cha Norin No. 29.

Superseded by its own offspring

The 1971 paper announcing Unkai’s registration is candid about why a successor was wanted. It names the three registered kamairicha cultivars then in general use — Takachiho, Izumi and Yamanami — and gives each a specific documented weakness: Izumi’s disease resistance, Yamanami’s quality, and Takachiho’s regional adaptability. Unkai was bred to combine strong growth and yield with disease and cold resistance and consistent kamairicha quality across a wider range of sites than Takachiho could manage. Comparative trials at the Miyazaki station, with bushes planted in March 1961, showed Unkai’s yield running to roughly 150% of Takachiho’s in the third to fifth year after planting and 115–130% in the sixth to ninth year — a wide enough margin that Unkai displaced Takachiho as Miyazaki and Kumamoto’s recommended kamairicha cultivar from 1969.

Characteristics

Takachiho is a medium-season (中生) cultivar with an upright growth habit and strong vigour. In the 1971 comparison trial its budding date, averaged over 1964–69, fell on 29 March — four days ahead of Unkai’s 2 April — though its first-flush harvest date came in on 7 May, two days behind Unkai’s 5 May. Yabukita was not carried in that table. The mature leaf is elliptical, medium-sized, yellowish-green and moderately glossy; the young bud is pale yellowish-green, soft-textured and shows no anthocyanin colouration.

Disease and cold resistance are respectable without being exceptional. The 1971 trial’s anthracnose inoculation test rated Takachiho “medium to weak” (中〜弱), while its field records show almost no mochi-disease infection; its cold hardiness was judged “somewhat strong” — the same rating Yabukita received in that comparison, a shade below the “strong” given to Unkai. Its clearest documented weakness is not a disease at all but regional adaptability: the 1971 paper that introduced its replacement names this directly as the reason Unkai was bred. Across the eighth and ninth years of that trial, Takachiho’s own recorded yield ran to 1,743 and 2,284 kg/10a total across three flushes, well behind Unkai’s over the same years, though this is trial-plot data from one experiment station rather than an independently sourced national average.

As kamairicha, the 1953 registration paper rates Takachiho’s quality as good, citing its thick leaf flesh and lustrous young bud. The 1971 comparison against Unkai is more specific: Unkai’s shape and twist are rated better, and its liquor colour lighter, while the two are comparable on aroma and astringency — meaning Takachiho, by implication, carries a somewhat darker liquor and a shade more tannin than its own offspring. Kamairicha remains its defining use, and one Miyazaki retailer selling it as a single-cultivar tea describes the pan-fired version as light in umami with a floral note “you’d want to drink while watching the sunrise from a mountain peak” — a fitting echo of the cultivar’s mountain namesake — while listing the same leaf processed as ordinary and deep-steamed sencha, and as black tea, alongside it. That commercial listing is itself evidence the cultivar is still grown today, and that its use is not confined to kamairicha, even though pan-firing is what it was bred and registered for.