Yamatomidori

Yamatomidori is a 1953 landrace selection from Nara indigenous tea tree seed, and it holds a distinction none of the better-known Uji or Shizuoka cultivars can claim: it is the only tea cultivar Nara Prefecture has ever bred and registered nationally. Its name records that fact plainly — Yamato is the classical name for the province that became Nara. Where Yabukita is a mid-season workhorse, Yamatomidori sits at the opposite end of the calendar: a markedly late, cold-hardy variety bred for the frost-prone Yamato Plateau, valued in its own day for reliable seed and dense budding rather than for any particular finesse in the cup.

Lineage

• Nara indigenous (zairai) tea tree seedling — an individual selected from a seed-grown population, not a controlled cross; it contributes the whole of Yamatomidori’s genetics, and its own parentage is unrecorded.

Because it is a landrace selection rather than a bred cross, Yamatomidori has no documented pollen parent. It does have two documented descendants: it is recorded as the pollen parent of Okumusashi, registered in 1962 from a cross with Sayamamidori as the seed parent, and of Meiryoku, registered in 1986 from a cross with Yabukita as the seed parent.

History

The seed that became Yamatomidori was collected in 1924 (Taisho 13) from the tea garden of a grower named Fukui Kanjiro, at Kamitsu in Yamazoe village, Yamabe district, Nara — the district that gives the modern Yamatocha region its mountainous, frost-exposed character. The seedlings were raised as a seedling tea garden (実生茶園) at the Nara Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station’s tea branch, and an individual tree from that garden was selected and developed between 1935 and 1946 (Showa 10-21) at a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry-designated original-variety plot, under the working strain name Nara No. 59 (奈良59号).

It was registered nationally in October 1953 as Cha Norin No. 10 (茶農林10号), one of fifteen tea cultivars given their first Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry registration that year — the inaugural round of the system, announced in 茶業研究報告 (Tea Research Journal) No. 2 alongside Yabukita (No. 6) and thirteen others. That release paper is the primary source for this record: it gives the registration number, the strain history, and the characteristics summary quoted throughout this page. Its stated reason for the name is that it represents both the place the cultivar was bred and the region it was expected to spread into — Nara itself, and cold mountainous districts more widely.

Decline and a quiet revival

Plantings of Yamatomidori, together with the seed-grown population descended from it (“Yamatomidori-jissei”), once covered more than 50 hectares in Nara. Most of that area was later replanted to Yabukita and other cultivars, for a straightforward commercial reason: Yamatomidori buds and is picked more than ten days later than Yabukita, and Nara already picks its first flush later than almost any other tea region in Japan. A cultivar that pushed the harvest later still was a difficult sell once market timing carried a price premium, and cutting-propagated Yamatomidori all but disappeared from cultivation as a result. When Tsukigase Health Tea Farm (月ヶ瀬健康茶園) planted cuttings of it in spring 2016, a researcher at Nara’s tea research centre told the farm this was likely the first clonal planting of Yamatomidori in the prefecture in 60 years. Most tea sold under the Yamatomidori name today, including Tsukigase’s, is grown not from that clone but from Yamatomidori-jissei, the seed-propagated population that carries its characteristics without being a genetic copy of it.

Characteristics

Yamatomidori is a late-budding cultivar: the 1953 registration paper classes it 晩生種 (late-maturing type), and a Nara grower account puts the gap at ten or more days behind Yabukita in both bud break and picking date. Tree form is upright with, per the original registration paper, very strong vigour; leaves are long-elliptical and deep green. That same paper records dense budding and abundant yield, though MAFF’s own 登録品種一覧表 as published by NARO — the table the Japanese Wikipedia article on Yamatocha quotes — instead describes vigour and yield as merely medium for the same cultivar, a real disagreement between two official sources that this record resolves in favour of the original release paper. Seed-set (結実性) is high and genetic purity strong, which the 1953 paper notes made it well suited to propagation by seed rather than by cutting — a trait that, decades later, is largely why the cultivar survives at all.

Cold hardiness is Yamatomidori’s defining trait and the one most consistently attested: the 1953 paper calls it especially cold-resistant, an independent 1954 varietal cold-resistance trial in the same journal ranked it among the strongest of the cultivars tested (alongside a triploid line bred at the time, with Miyoshi the weakest), and a modern grower account describes it as extremely resistant to both winter cold and split-bark frost damage — the freeze-thaw injury that threatens tea grown in Nara’s frost-prone inland climate. Its late budding compounds that resistance agronomically as well as genetically: by the time it flushes, the worst of the late frost risk has usually passed.

Even unshaded, its naturally deep green leaf earned it the nickname “natural gyokuro” among growers, though nothing in the sources reviewed suggests it was routinely grown as gyokuro proper; the 1953 paper describes it plainly as good-quality ordinary sencha. A specialty single-cultivar retailer currently selling it (心向樹, Shinkoju) offers it as a regular-steamed sencha, also available deep-steamed or roasted, and describes the cup as low-to-moderate in sweetness, moderately astringent, and full-bodied, with a calm, old-fashioned aroma the shop likens to the smell of a grandmother’s house. At Tsukigase, the same leaf is processed into sencha, roasted into hoji-sencha (withered, aged, then roasted), and made into hoji-bancha and black tea besides — a spread that reflects a cultivar now sustained by small-scale, curiosity-led production rather than by any distinct reputation in a single tea category.