Tamamidori

Tamamidori is one of the first fifteen tea cultivars Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry ever registered, named and numbered in the same October 1953 batch as Yabukita, as Cha Norin No. 4. Like several of its cohort-mates it began as an individual picked out of Uji-strain seed-grown stock, sown far from Uji itself at a government experiment station in Tokyo. What sets it apart from that cohort is its intended use: where Yabukita, Miyoshi, Asatsuyu and Sayamamidori were all registered as sencha cultivars, Tamamidori was registered specifically for tamaryokucha (玉緑茶), the curled, non-needle-shaped green tea more associated today with Kyushu than with the sencha heartlands. On its own terms it is a minor, scarcely-grown cultivar. Its real significance to this collection is as an ancestor: an open-pollinated seedling of Tamamidori and a deliberate cross involving it each went on to found a small breeding dynasty, making Tamamidori one of the more consequential root nodes in this project’s lineage graph despite being almost invisible as a tea in the shops.

Lineage

• Uji-strain (宇治種) zairai seedling — an individual selected from seed sown at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce’s tea manufacturing division in Nishigahara, Tokyo, using Uji (Kyoto) native stock; not a controlled cross, so Tamamidori has no recorded pollen parent of its own.

Tamamidori was one of three Uji-strain Nishigahara selections registered in the same 1953 cohort, alongside Asatsuyu (Cha Norin No. 2) and Miyoshi (Cha Norin No. 3) — all three grown from Uji zairai seedlings sown at the same Nishigahara facility and carried forward at the national tea experiment station. They were not the only Uji-derived entries in that round: MAFF’s own 茶農林 registry table records five of the 1953 cultivars as 宇治在来種実生, adding Sayamamidori (No. 5), selected in 1935 and carried forward in Saitama, and Koyanishi (No. 8), a Shizuoka selection for which the registration paper itself names no origin at all. Unlike its two sencha-registered Nishigahara siblings, Tamamidori was registered for tamaryokucha, the one tamaryokucha slot among the ten green-tea cultivars named that year (the other nine split between eight sencha and one kamairicha).

Tamamidori’s own descendants are what make it worth a longer look. It has no recorded children of its own by controlled crossing, but it appears twice as a grandparent, in two unrelated breeding efforts run decades apart at the Kanaya national tea station:

• Z1 — an unregistered breeding line raised from Tamamidori seed by open pollination (自然交雑 in NARO’s own pedigree charts), with an unrecorded pollen parent. Z1 was itself used as a parent three times: as the seed parent of Fushun (Z1 × Kanayamidori, crossed 1965, registered 1991 as Cha Norin No. 41), as the seed parent of Saeakari (Z1 × Saemidori, crossed 1989, registered 2012), and as the pollen parent of Meiryoku (Yabukita × Z1, registered 1986/87 as Cha Norin No. 35).
• F1NN8 — a numbered F1 hybrid breeding line kept at the Kanaya station, never released as a cultivar itself, from a deliberate cross of Tamamidori and S6 (静岡在来種実生, a numbered Shizuoka zairai selection the station had kept in its own right). MAFF’s own registry table records the parentage in full: おくゆたか — 金谷3号 — ゆたかみどり×Ｆ1NN8（たまみどり×Ｓ6）. F1NN8 was crossed with Yutakamidori to produce both Okuyutaka (registered 1983, Cha Norin No. 34) and Shunmei (registered 1988, Cha Norin No. 37) — full siblings from the same crossing batch, one early and one late.

Both branches converge loosely on the same breeding stock: S6, F1NN8’s other parent, was separately crossed with Yabukita to produce Kanayamidori (Cha Norin No. 30, 1970) — which then became Fushun’s own pollen parent. Fushun’s two parents, Z1 and Kanayamidori, are consequently both descended from the same small set of Kanaya-held zairai lines that Tamamidori and S6 belonged to, even though Tamamidori and S6 were never themselves crossed with each other directly except through F1NN8.

History

The seedlings from which Tamamidori was chosen were sown from Uji-strain (宇治種) seed at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce’s Agricultural Experiment Station, tea manufacturing division, in Nishigahara, Tokyo — the same programme that produced Asatsuyu and Miyoshi. The registration paper does not give a sowing date, but records what followed: in Taisho 10 (1921) the selected individual was transplanted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s tea experiment station, and it was established as a fixed line in Showa 15 (1940), under the trial designation 国茶U17号 (Kokucha U17). By the time of registration in 1953, the registry table places its breeding station at Kanaya, Shizuoka — the government’s national tea research site, forerunner of NARO’s present-day Institute of Fruit Tree and Tea Science (果樹茶業研究部門).

Registration came in Showa 28 (1953), Japan’s first tea cultivar registration round of any kind. Fifteen varieties were named and numbered at once: ten for green tea (eight sencha, one tamaryokucha, one kamairicha) and five for black tea. Tamamidori was Cha Norin No. 4 in that list, between Miyoshi (No. 3) and Sayamamidori (No. 5). The announcement was published as “茶の品種登録と 命名” (Registered Tea Varieties) in 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal) No. 2, October 1953 — the second issue of a journal that had itself begun publication only that same year. The paper’s own words on Tamamidori read: “中生種で樹姿直立、樹勢甚強、葉は楕円形で緑色である。耐寒性が強く、収量が多いが、 耐病性の弱い欠点がある。蒸製玉緑茶として品質優良である” — a medium-budding, upright, very vigorous bush with elliptical green leaves, strongly cold-hardy and high-yielding but weak in disease resistance, making an excellent steamed tamaryokucha. Its recommended region was given as “九州各県、 静岡県、三重県における玉緑茶地帯” — the tamaryokucha-producing districts of Kyushu’s prefectures, Shizuoka, and Mie.

Tamaryokucha, kamairicha, and where Tamamidori actually sits

Because tamaryokucha and kamairicha are so often produced by the same growers in the same corner of Japan, it is worth being precise about which one Tamamidori was actually registered for, since secondary sources disagree.

Kamairicha (釜炒り茶, “pan-fried tea”) is defined by how the leaf is fixed: instead of steaming the freshly picked leaf to halt oxidation — the method that has dominated Japanese tea since the Edo period — the leaf is tumbled dry in a heated iron pan, a technique that arrived from China and survives today mainly in pockets of Kyushu, above all Miyazaki’s Takachiho and Gokase districts and Saga’s Ureshino. Tamaryokucha (玉緑茶, “ball-shaped green tea,” also called guricha) is defined instead by the finished leaf’s shape: rather than being rolled straight into the needle shape that defines sencha, it is left curled, in loose comma-shaped pellets. Because pan-firing does not lend itself to needle-rolling, most kamairicha ends up tamaryokucha-shaped by default — which is exactly why the two get conflated. But tamaryokucha can equally be made by steaming, simply by omitting sencha’s final needle-rolling step, and the 1953 registration paper is explicit that this is Tamamidori’s process: 蒸製玉緑茶, steamed tamaryokucha. The same paper registers a cohort-mate, Takachiho (Cha Norin No. 11), in the sentence “釜炒茶として品質優良である” — kamairicha, not tamaryokucha — and MAFF’s own registry table tags the two cultivars with different use-codes, 玉緑茶 for Tamamidori and 釜炒り茶 for Takachiho, confirming the distinction was deliberate rather than incidental. My Japanese Green Tea’s cultivar table and its dedicated Tamamidori page both independently agree with the steamed-tamaryokucha designation.

Against all of that, two circulating secondary sources — the Japanese Tea Sommelier’s master cultivar list and 日本茶備忘録 (Japanese Tea Memorandum) — group Tamamidori under kamairicha instead. Both are reasonable places to make that slip: Tamamidori’s own recommended growing districts are Kyushu’s tamaryokucha country, the same prefectures where kamairicha is actually made, and a fair amount of tamaryokucha sold from that region today genuinely is pan-fired. But Tamamidori’s own 1953 registration is unambiguous, and Takachiho — bred at the Miyazaki prefectural station from Miyazaki zairai and registered in the same round — is the cultivar in this pair actually designated for kamairicha.

Characteristics

The 1953 registration paper describes Tamamidori as medium-budding (中生種), upright in growth habit (樹姿直立) with very strong vigour (樹勢甚強), and elliptical leaves (楕円形) coloured green — the same leaf-shape term the paper uses for most of its other 1953 entries. My Japanese Green Tea agrees on the elliptical shape and adds more detail: a greenish-yellow leaf with high lustre. One secondary source, 日本茶備忘録, instead classifies it as late-budding; this is not corroborated by the primary source or by My Japanese Green Tea, both of which agree on medium.

Cold hardiness is explicitly called out as strong in the registration paper — a real asset for a Uji-origin cultivar being pushed into more marginal growing districts — and yield is described as high. Set against that is a stated weakness in overall disease resistance; My Japanese Green Tea’s more recent account specifically flags susceptibility to anthracnose, one of the diseases that Yabukita and much of the rest of this collection also struggle with.

As tea, Tamamidori’s registered strength is specifically steamed tamaryokucha, where the 1953 paper rates its quality as excellent; it can also be processed as sencha, though no source treats that as its primary use. No detailed flavour description — aroma, liquor colour, specific taste notes — was found in any source consulted for this record, and none is invented here to fill the gap. What is better documented is its present scarcity: My Japanese Green Tea describes it as still grown but genuinely hard to find even within Japan, with the authenticity of some online listings uncertain. Seventy years on, Tamamidori is a far more solid presence in tea genealogy than in tea shops.