Terakawa-wase

Terakawa-wase is a tencha cultivar selected from Uji Zairai seedlings and registered in 1990 by Terakawa Toshio, a private grower in Uji city, Kyoto — not a prefectural or national research station. It belongs to the same family of Uji shaded-tea cultivars as Asahi, Samidori and Gokou, and like those it exists to make tencha, the shade-grown leaf that becomes matcha. Its defining trait, recorded in its own registration text, is speed: it buds and can be picked earlier than both Yabukita and Asahi, the two cultivars it was measured against at registration. It is little known today, cultivated by only a small number of growers, and turns up more often as a curiosity — the occasional sencha or kabusecha lot — than in the tencha production it was bred for.

Lineage

• Uji Zairai seedlings — an individual selection from a seed-grown, native (zairai) stand in Uji city, not a controlled cross.

Terakawa-wase was picked out, not bred. Like Yabukita in Shizuoka, or Asahi in Uji and Asatsuyu from Uji zairai seed before it, it began as one tea tree among many genetically distinct seedlings in a zairai planting, noticed for budding early and yielding well, then propagated by cuttings so every Terakawa-wase bush is a clone of that one plant. Because it was selected rather than crossed, it has no recorded pollen parent, and no source found documents any cultivar bred from it in turn — it appears to have no registered descendants.

History

The record here is thin, and mostly consists of the registration itself rather than a documented breeding narrative. Terakawa Toshio, working in Uji city, selected an individual seedling from a local Uji Zairai stand for its early budding, early picking and strong yield. An application was filed in 1988, and the variety was registered on 6 February 1990 under Japan’s Plant Variety Protection Act (種苗法) — as Registration No. 2092, not a MAFF Cha Norin (茶農林) number. The registrant’s address on file, Uji-shi Uji Ichiban 40, is also given as the breeder’s own address: this was a grower’s private selection, filed and registered by the same person who found the plant, in the same pattern as a cohort of other late-20th-century wase cultivars registered by named individuals rather than institutions — Satō-wase (Satō Mitsuteru), Sagara-wase (Nakamura Magoichi), Takane-wase, Inaguchi. No source gives an earlier date for when the parent plant was actually spotted or first propagated, so a selection year distinct from the 1988 application cannot be stated with confidence.

Terakawa-wase’s Plant Variety Protection rights carried a statutory 18-year term but lapsed early, on 7 February 2002, twelve years in, after which propagation was no longer restricted to a licensed grower.

The name is unremarkable by design: Terakawa is simply the breeder’s surname, and wase (早生) is the standard Japanese term for an early-budding cultivar, the same suffix seen in Kondō-wase, Satō-wase and Sagara-wase. There is no evidence the name refers to a place — it identifies the person who found the plant.

Terakawa-wase has stayed a minor cultivar. It surfaces occasionally in modern single-cultivar teas from outside its home prefecture — a Yokkaichi, Mie producer (Marushige Shimizu Seicha) and other Mie growers have processed it as sencha and lightly shaded kabusecha rather than the tencha it was registered for — and vendors and reviewers alike describe it as one of the rarer named cultivars still grown in Japan, without giving cultivation-area figures.

Characteristics

Terakawa-wase is an early cultivar: wase (早生) is the conventional Japanese term for early-budding, sitting opposite nakate (中生, mid-season) and banshu/bansei (晩生, late), and its own 1990 registration text confirms the label is not just marketing — at its place of origin in Uji, both budding time and picking time come earlier than Yabukita and earlier than Asahi, the latter itself a medium-season (中生) Uji cultivar on par with Yabukita. No source found puts a number of days on that gap relative to Yabukita, the usual reference point, so the “early” here should be read as qualitatively confirmed rather than quantified.

Growth habit and leaf: mature leaves are described as slightly thin, elliptical, medium-sized, with medium creasing on the blade and slightly sparse waviness at the margin. The same registration compares it directly to Asahi — smaller mature leaf, but higher yield — and My Japanese Green Tea separately reports “good yield at harvest.” A Japanese cultivar-reference site also notes it allows early orchard establishment (早期成園化), meaning a newly planted field reaches full productive maturity sooner than usual, a practical advantage for growers even without hard numbers attached. Disease resistance is reported as medium against anthracnose and fairly strong against gray blight, and the registration rates its cold hardiness — resistance to red-withering, blue-withering and split-type frost damage — as strong on all three counts.

Processed as tencha, the use it was bred for, the registration rates the product’s shape and colour and its taste as superior (上), with aroma a notch below at upper-medium (中上). Away from that traditional processing, results are more mixed and more interesting. A 2019 tasting of a Mie-grown, lightly shaded sencha lot found it strikingly unlike ordinary sencha: a vegetal but unfamiliar aroma, a light, almost “watery” body, mild sweetness and umami without astringency through the first two infusions, and a little astringency and bitterness only appearing by the third — a tea the reviewer called surprising and worth trying rather than straightforwardly good. A more recent Mie shincha marketed as Terakawawase leans the other way, described in vendor language as soft and creamy with edamame and mochi sweetness and a marshmallow finish, turning more floral in later, hotter infusions. Taken together, the honest summary is that Terakawa-wase’s cup character away from tencha is inconsistent between lots and producers, which is itself consistent with a cultivar that has almost no processing track record to standardise around.