Yaeho

Yaeho is an early-budding sencha cultivar registered in 1954 as Cha Norin No. 17, selected from Shizuoka Zairai stock by Sugiyama Hikosaburo — the same grower who, decades earlier and a few kilometres away, picked out the seedling that became Yabukita. It never took anything like Yabukita’s share of the country’s tea gardens; today it covers a vanishingly small fraction of Japan’s plantings and is rarely sold as a single-cultivar tea. What keeps it in the record is its lineage: it is the documented seed parent of Ooiwase, one of the few early cultivars bred specifically to work a staggered harvest alongside Yabukita, and — by a connection this record traces out below, with the caveats it deserves — an ancestor of Marishi, a cultivar now prized for a strikingly clear green liquor.

Lineage

• Shizuoka Zairai individual — selected by Sugiyama Hikosaburo from his own tea garden at a locality called Dampira, in what was then Udo village, Abe County, and is now part of Shizuoka City; not a controlled cross.

Because it is a landrace selection rather than a cross, Yaeho has no recorded pollen parent. It is the documented seed parent of Ooiwase (Yaeho × Yabukita, Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station, crossed 1960), and, on a line this record examines in detail below, an ancestor of Marishi, registered 1996.

History

Selection and registration

Sugiyama Hikosaburo selected the tree that became Yaeho from his own tea garden at Dampira, in Udo village, Abe County — the same district, on the outskirts of Shizuoka City, where he had already found Yabukita and Yabuminami. It was tested from 1935 to 1946 (Showa 10–21) at the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station’s MAFF-designated foundation-stock garden and adopted as a Shizuoka Prefecture recommended cultivar. In October 1954, alongside five other cultivars — Natsumidori, Asagiri, Kyomidori, Hatsumidori and the black-tea cultivar Benikaori — it was registered nationally as one of that year’s new Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry cultivars, Cha Norin No. 17, its former strain name given as 八重穂 (Yaeho, in kanji). The registration bulletin states the naming plainly: it was called Yae-ho, “many-layered ear,” because it puts out unusually many axillary buds.

Sugiyama Hikosaburo and the “Sugiyama-Yaeho” question

The connection to Sugiyama Hikosaburo is not in doubt — the primary registration record names him directly as the selector, just as it does for Yabukita. What is genuinely unresolved is a second, related claim made by present-day Shizuoka tea merchants. A planting said to descend from Sugiyama’s own selection still stands at Maruko, in Shizuoka City’s Suruga ward, and local shops sell it under the name “Sugiyama-Yaeho” (杉山八重穂) — explicitly distinguishing it from the nationally registered Yaeho. One shop’s account, given across two dated posts by its owner in 2005, explains the distinction in detail: Sugiyama-Yaeho reliably throws multiple new shoots from a single leaf axil — the trait the cultivar was named for — while the registered Yaeho, described there as a natural seedling selected from Sugiyama-Yaeho, does not reliably show it. A specialist retailer selling certified-organic Yaeho independently makes the same distinction, stating that “Sugiyama-Yaeho” is a different cultivar from the registered Yaeho.

This does not square cleanly with the 1954 bulletin, which describes Sugiyama Hikosaburo as having selected the registered cultivar directly, with no mention of an intervening natural-seedling generation. Both cannot be taken as simply correct, and no source available for this record resolves the discrepancy — it may be a matter of two related garden selections Sugiyama made in different locations (Udo village, which was carried to national registration, and Maruko, which was not), remembered and marketed differently seventy years later. What both accounts agree on is that Sugiyama Hikosaburo is the origin point of both plants, and that “Yaeho” in something close to its present form was current in Shizuoka tea gardens by the mid-1930s.

Ooiwase and Marishi

Ooiwase was bred at the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station, using Yaeho as the seed parent and Yabukita as the pollen parent. The cross was made in October 1960; seed was sown by the end of 1961 and seedlings raised under glass until 1963, when they were planted out. A first selection was fixed in 1967, propagated by cuttings from 1970, and carried through strain-comparison trials under the designation 60-2 from 1971 to 1976. The results were strong enough that the Shizuoka Prefecture Tea Recommended Cultivar Council approved it in January 1977, naming it Ooiwase and backdating its adoption to the 1976 season. It was never submitted for national Cha Norin registration — like Yaeho’s own path through prefectural recommendation before national listing, Ooiwase stopped at the prefectural stage.

Marishi has a smaller, more anecdotal history. In the tea garden of the Yamamori family at Mizumishiro, in the hills above Shizuoka City, an unusually handsome tea bush was found growing between the rows of a Yaeho planting — spotted, by one retailer’s account, by the mother of Yamamori Miyoshi. Miyoshi and Yamamori Risao propagated and trialled it, and it was registered under the Plant Variety Protection Act on 18 March 1996 as Registration No. 4953, named Marishi after Marici, a Buddhist guardian deity. The official registration record describes it as a natural cross-pollinated seedling selected from Yaeho, extra-early in both budding and harvest at its Shizuoka City breeding site, and distinguished from Yaeho by longer, more elliptical new leaves, a darker green colour, more gloss, and higher total nitrogen and amino acid content. Its first harvest produced only 1.5 kg of finished tea, and its liquor was reportedly so vividly green that people who saw it for the first time suspected it had been artificially coloured. A related, unregistered sibling cultivar from the same garden, Mizumishiro-kaori (Sugiyama-Yaeho × Inzatsu 131), buds even earlier than Marishi and, like Marishi, inherits the paired-bud trait — one more thread connecting both back to the Sugiyama-Yaeho line rather than to the registered clone. When the Fuji branch of the prefectural tea experiment station closed in 2007, cultivation of Marishi passed by arrangement to Fuji Akiyama-en, which still grows and sells it as its signature tea.

Characteristics

Yaeho is an early cultivar. The 1954 registration trial recorded bud-break on 28 March and a first-flush harvest on 3 May; growth habit is intermediate, vigour strong with an upright-leaning tendency, and it sets abundant flower buds though fruit-set is not especially high. No source found gives an exact day-count for Yaeho’s own budding time against Yabukita, though its offspring Ooiwase — which the 1978 release paper describes as inheriting Yaeho’s earliness — buds about ten days and is harvested about five days ahead of Yabukita in side-by-side trials, which gives a rough sense of where Yaeho itself sits.

Reported yield from the 1954 trial averaged 149.3 kan per 10a (roughly 560 kg by modern conversion) across the 1943–45 harvests on 9–11-year-old bushes, combining the first and third flushes only — the second flush went unsurveyed in 1944 and 1945 because of insect damage. Propagation is a genuine weak point: in the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station’s side-by-side cutting trials for the Ooiwase release paper, Yaeho cuttings rooted reasonably well in the short term (96.7% at two months, against Yabukita’s 93.3%) but fell away badly over the following two years — 85.0% survival and a 42.6% successful-seedling rate, against 98.5%/77.7% for Yabukita and 98.2%/72.4% for Ooiwase itself.

Cold hardiness of mature winter leaves is strong, but Yaeho is markedly susceptible to bark-splitting injury from autumn frost: a 1979 varietal comparison ranked it among the most tender cultivars tested, and a young planting followed for the 1978 Ooiwase paper recorded injury in 84.3% of Yaeho trees, with a 22.5% death rate, against 1.2% injury and no deaths for Yabukita in the same ground. It is also noted as weak against white-star disease. Set against that, a 1985 Shizuoka survey found it, together with Kanayamidori, the most resistant of the surveyed cultivars to bacterial shoot blight — 2.5% and 3.0% diseased leaves in the survey’s two fields, the only cultivar low in both. Its own offspring Ooiwase did markedly worse in one of those fields (18.5% against Yabukita’s 3.5%) and markedly better in the other (9.5% against 18.8%), so the earlier reading of that survey as showing Ooiwase “comparatively susceptible” flattened a pair of field-specific numbers into a cultivar rating they do not support.

On the chemistry behind the cup, Yaeho runs consistently lower in total and soluble nitrogen than Yabukita (5.68% against 6.20% total nitrogen; 1.90% against 2.17% soluble nitrogen, two-year averages, 1975–76, from the Ooiwase trial) and higher in tannin (12.78% against 11.94%) — the likely explanation for a 1972 warm-region comparison trial that rated its made-tea quality inferior to Yabukita and to several other early cultivars, attributing the shortfall specifically to lower nitrogen. That is not the whole story, though: growers who still work with it describe a distinctive chestnut-like aroma, and an unusual brewing behaviour in which low-temperature, longer steeping brings out a pronounced bitterness that recedes into sweetness, while a quick, near-boiling steep suppresses the bitterness and pushes the sweetness forward — the reverse of how most asamushi Tenryu teas are meant to be brewed. It is also considered well suited to gyokuro. Grown almost nowhere as a monovarietal today, it survives mainly as a rarity in Shizuoka’s Tenryu district, prized specifically for that aroma, and as a certified-organic single-origin planting as far afield as Tanegashima, Kagoshima — well outside the “Shizuoka and warmer” range its own registration bulletin recommended.