Yabukita

Yabukita is not the most interesting tea plant in Japan, and that is very close to the point of it. A single seedling picked out of a seed-grown landrace stand in 1908 and registered in 1953 as 茶農林6号, it covered 67% of the country’s tea area in 2023 and rather more than that for most of the half-century before. Every other cultivar in this collection is described in relation to it: budding times are quoted in days before or after Yabukita, yields as an index against Yabukita’s 100, flavour as more or less umami than Yabukita. It is less a cultivar than the coordinate system the others are plotted in.

Lineage

• Shizuoka zairai ♀ — an individual seedling out of a seed-grown landrace stand. Because a zairai field is pollinated at random, the pollen parent was never recorded and could not have been.

Yabukita is a landrace selection, the same category of breeding as Samidori, Asahi and the rest of the Uji cultivars: one bush picked out of a seed-propagated population for traits worth keeping, then multiplied onward by cuttings. Every Yabukita plant in Japan is therefore a clone of Sugiyama’s original, which matters more than it sounds. A cultivar on two thirds of the national acreage with no genetic variation within it means that a weakness of the clone is a weakness of the industry — Yabukita’s susceptibility to anthracnose is the reason a large share of Japan’s tea pesticide programme exists.

Its output as a parent runs the other way and is without parallel here. Twenty-four of the eighty-two records in this collection name Yabukita as a parent, as the seed parent in most and the pollen parent in Kanayamidori, Toyoka, Fujikaori, Ryofu and Harumidori. The breeding stations reached for it so consistently that several of the crosses are effectively Yabukita against itself at one remove: Fukumidori is Yabukita crossed with 23F1-107, a line that was already three-quarters Yabukita, and Saemidori, Okumidori and Sofu all put Yabukita against one landrace selection or another. Mineyutaka is not a cross at all but a bud sport — a mutation on a Yabukita bush, selected and propagated on its own.

History

Sugiyama Hikosaburo (1857–1941) farmed in the former Udo village of Uto district, now Nakayoshida in Suruga ward, Shizuoka city. In 1908 he cleared a stand of bamboo on his own land and planted it to tea, and out of the seedlings that came up he kept two: one from the northern half of the plot, one from the southern. He named them for where they stood — Yabukita, north of the thicket, and Yabuminami, south of it. Yabuminami is a footnote; Yabukita is the reason anyone knows Sugiyama’s name.

It was not an immediate success, and Sugiyama did not live to see it become one. He died in 1941, midway through the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station’s trials of the plant in its MAF-designated foundation-stock nursery, which ran from 1935 to 1946 and established what it could do — high and dependable yield, unusually good cold and frost tolerance, easy rooting from cuttings, and tolerance of a wide range of soils. That last group of traits is what actually explains the spread: a cultivar that roots readily and survives a hard winter is one a farmer can replant an entire hillside with, and Yabukita’s cold hardiness took tea further north and higher up than the cultivars available before it. MAFF registered it as 茶農林6号 in 1953, after which it moved across the country quickly. Quite when Shizuoka Prefecture added it to its own recommended list is disputed — sources give 1945 and 1955, on opposite sides of the national registration (see conflicts).

The original plant survives. It was designated a natural monument on 30 April 1963, moved in 1968, and is now kept as the 杉山彦三郎記念茶畑 (Sugiyama Hikosaburo memorial tea garden) in Suruga ward — an unusual thing for a crop plant, and a fair measure of what the cultivar is worth to the prefecture that trialled it.

Characteristics

Yabukita buds mid-season (中生), which is less a description than a definition: it is the zero point, and the other eighty-one records in this collection state their own season as an offset from it. The bush is vigorous and roots easily from cuttings. Yield is high and, more usefully, consistent across the first, second and later flushes rather than concentrated in one.

Cold and frost tolerance are its standout agronomic traits and the reason it travelled. Against the two winter cold-scorch syndromes, 赤枯れ (red scorch) and 青枯れ (blue scorch), it rates around the middle — good enough to be the reference other cultivars are graded against, not good enough that later breeding programmes stopped trying to beat it, which several of them explicitly set out to do. Fukumidori exists because Yabukita struggles at the cold northern limit of the tea belt; Kirari 31 and Okuhikari were bred against frost damage of different kinds.

Disease is where it is genuinely weak. It is susceptible to anthracnose (炭疽病), net blister blight (網もち病) and ring spot disease (輪斑病), and because the national planting is one clone, that susceptibility is uniform across it.

In the cup it is described as balanced rather than distinctive: a clean, well-formed sencha with a good aroma and no particular excess of anything. That is not faint praise in context. A cultivar planted on two thirds of the country’s tea land has to make an acceptable tea in every district and every processing style it lands in, and Yabukita’s lack of a strong character is what let it do so — the same quality that now has growers replanting away from it, towards early cultivars like Saemidori and late ones like Okumidori, in order to spread a picking season that one uniform mid-season clone concentrates into a few frantic weeks.