Toyoka

Toyoka is a sencha cultivar bred in Saitama Prefecture from a cross of Sayamamidori and Yabukita, and registered in 1976 as Cha Norin No. 33 (茶農林33号). It belongs to the same breeding programme that produced Sayamakaori five years earlier, and was bred for the same reason every Saitama cultivar of that era was: to give Sayama, well north of Japan’s main tea belt, a cultivar suited to its colder winters rather than one borrowed from Shizuoka or Uji. Unlike Sayamakaori, Toyoka never became a fixture of the district. It is grown today by only a handful of farms, and is now more often encountered as a Japanese black tea than as the sencha it was registered for.

Lineage

• Sayamamidori ♀ (さやまみどり, Cha Norin No. 5) — the seed parent, itself a Uji Zairai seedling selected in Saitama and registered in 1953. It contributes the colder-climate breeding stock that had already been through one round of Saitama selection.
• Yabukita ♂ (やぶきた, Cha Norin No. 6) — the pollen parent, and by 1976 already the country’s dominant cultivar. It contributes the productivity and general vigour Toyoka is compared against.

Toyoka is a controlled cross, not a landrace selection, but both of its parents are: Sayamamidori is a single-plant selection from Uji Zairai seed and Yabukita a single-plant selection from Shizuoka Zairai seed, so Toyoka combines two independently domesticated Zairai lines rather than extending either one further. It was carried through Saitama’s trials under the line number 23-114. No descendants bred from Toyoka were found in the sources consulted, and it does not appear in NARO’s published pedigree charts for Saitama’s cultivars, which only run from Saemidori (1991) onward under the Plant Variety Protection Act — Toyoka’s 1976 MAFF registration predates that system entirely.

History

Toyoka was developed at the Saitama Prefectural Tea Experiment Station (埼玉県茶業試験場, now the Saitama Prefectural Tea Research Institute), the same station responsible for Sayamamidori, Okumusashi and Sayamakaori. It was crossed from Sayamamidori and Yabukita and carried through trials as line 23-114 before registration in 1976 as Cha Norin No. 33; no source consulted gives the year the cross itself was made, so that date is left unstated rather than guessed.

Agronomic trial data from the following decade back up the cultivar’s reputation for vigour. A 1989 report on cultivars planted from 1987 at a trial site in Mizobe, Aira County, Kagoshima Prefecture, found Toyoka outperformed Yabukita in autumn plant spread during its first two years, and a companion 1989 report on branching habit found it produced significantly more primary branches than Yabukita across the first, second and autumn flushes of its second year. A 1980 survey of green-tea cultivars grown in Tokyo placed Toyoka’s first-flush nitrogen and amino-acid content just behind Yabukita and Yamakai among the cultivars tested — respectable, if not class-leading, umami potential. A 1996 evaluation of disease resistance across Japan’s tea genetic resources grouped Toyoka with Sayamamidori, Yabukita, Hokumei, Asatsuyu, Natsumidori, Okumusashi and Saemidori as susceptible or slightly susceptible to ring spot disease (輪斑病).

Despite this, Toyoka did not spread the way Sayamakaori did. Saitama’s own current listing of its recommended cultivars — the page that promotes Fukumidori, Hokumei, Musashikaori, Sainomidori, Yumewakaba, Okuharuka and Sayamaakari to growers today — no longer includes it; it survives only on the prefecture’s own historical roster of cultivars it has bred. By the 2020s specialty retailers and growers were describing it outright as a 幻の品種, a “phantom cultivar.” One of the few farms still growing it, Nakajima Tea Garden (中島茶園) in Iruma City, gives an account of why: they say Toyoka was originally bred with an eye to gyokuro production, and lost ground because Sayama never became a gyokuro-producing district — a claim that fits the cultivar’s obscurity but is not corroborated by the registry, which records its intended use as sencha alone.

What has kept Toyoka from disappearing entirely is a second life as a Japanese black tea. Leaf from the cultivar has placed highly in domestic wakōcha (和紅茶) competitions in recent years, and that result is cited by growers and retailers alike as the reason interest in it has picked up again, decades after it fell out of favour as a sencha cultivar.

Characteristics

Toyoka is a mid-season (中生) cultivar; no source found gives its budding date as a specific number of days before or after Yabukita, only the general “mid-season” classification. Saitama Prefecture describes it in two words — cold-resistant and high-yielding — and the trial data bear that out: in second-year field trials it built a fuller autumn canopy and more primary branching than Yabukita, though no kg/10a yield figure was located. Set against that vigour is a real disease weakness: it is grouped among the cultivars susceptible to ring spot disease, the same weakness Yabukita itself carries, and no data on its resistance to anthracnose or red blight specifically were found.

In the cup as sencha, growers describe good colour and pronounced body — strong astringency, bitterness and richness rather than a light, easy-drinking style — alongside an aroma repeatedly called 一癖ある, “distinctive” or “idiosyncratic” rather than simply pleasant. One grower’s tasting note goes further, describing a milk-like note on the finish. That powerful, unusual aroma is the trait the name records — Saitama named the cultivar for the fragrance that set it apart, joined to the 豊岡 (Toyooka) test site where it was raised — and paired with the heavy body it is plausibly why it never became an easy sell as everyday sencha: it reads as a characterful, minority-taste tea rather than a balanced one, and it lost out in Sayama to the milder, better-adopted Sayamakaori in the very market it was bred for. As black tea, that same intensity has instead worked in its favour, though no source consulted gives a specific flavour description of the finished wakōcha beyond its competition placings.