Yutakamidori

Yutakamidori is Japan’s second most-planted tea cultivar after Yabukita, and it dominates a single prefecture in a way Yabukita never has to: nearly all of it grows in Kagoshima. It began as an open-pollinated seedling raised from Asatsuyu seed at the national tea experiment station in Kanaya, Shizuoka, was picked out in 1949 under the trial designation Y2, and was named and adopted by Kagoshima Prefecture in 1966 — a real, formal step, but one that stopped there rather than continuing on to a national Cha Norin number. It buds early, yields heavily, and on its own is markedly more astringent than Yabukita; Kagoshima’s answer to that, a standard combination of deep steaming and brief pre-harvest shading, is now the cultivar’s defining treatment and the reason it reads as inseparable from Kagoshima’s fukamushi sencha style.

Lineage

• Asatsuyu (あさつゆ) — the seed parent. An early-budding, low-astringency landrace selection from Uji, Kyoto, in its own right (registered 1953 as 茶農林2号 under the strain name 国茶U14号), Asatsuyu’s own seed, sown at Kanaya, produced the population Yutakamidori was picked from.
• Pollen parent — not recorded. Yutakamidori was raised from Asatsuyu seed, not from a controlled cross, so there is no second parent to name.

This is an open-pollinated seedling selection, not a controlled cross, a sport, or (as one unrelated draft in this project’s own example directory claims) a self-pollination. Tea is self-incompatible — a mechanism that stops a flower fertilising itself or a genetically identical one — which is exactly why every landrace selection in this collection, Yutakamidori included, carries an unknowable pollen parent rather than a recorded one: whatever pollinated the Asatsuyu flower that produced Yutakamidori’s seed was some other, unidentified tea plant growing nearby at Kanaya. Yutakamidori is, in turn, the seed parent of two documented full siblings: Okuyutaka (茶農林34号, registered 1983) and Shunmei (茶農林37号, registered 1988), both crossed against the same unreleased Kanaya breeding line, F1NN8, in a single 1958 crossing batch. MAFF’s own registry table records both crosses as “ゆたかみどり×F1NN8,” confirming Yutakamidori as their common seed parent even though Yutakamidori itself carries no Cha Norin number of its own.

History

The seedling that became Yutakamidori was grown from Asatsuyu seed at what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s tea experiment station in Kanaya, Shizuoka. The best individual from that seedling population was selected in 1949 and carried forward under the trial designation Y2. Kagoshima Prefecture adopted it and gave it the name Yutakamidori in 1966 — Kyo Chikiriya’s own history page states this plainly: 「『あさつゆ』の実生で、農林省茶業試験場（静岡県金谷町）でＹ-２として育成され、1966年に鹿児島が命名登録を行いました」 (“a seedling of Asatsuyu, raised as Y-2 at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Tea Experiment Station in Kanaya, Shizuoka, and in 1966 Kagoshima carried out its name registration”). That 1966 event was a prefectural naming, not a national one: MAFF’s own 茶農林登録品種一覧, the authoritative list of Cha Norin registrations, runs from 茶農林1号 in 1953 to 茶農林52号 in 2003 without ever including Yutakamidori — the only place its name appears on that table is as the parent line behind entries 34 and 37. Because the Plant Variety Protection Act did not exist until 1978, a Cha Norin number was, in 1966, the only national-level status a cultivar this age could have held; Yutakamidori simply never went through that process, even though it clearly could have.

The new cultivar was trialled seriously in Kagoshima. A 1972 comparison run by the national tea experiment station’s Makurazaki branch (農林水産省茶業試験場枕崎支場) in farmers’ tea gardens around Makurazaki, published in the Tea Research Journal in 1979, tested Yutakamidori alongside five other early cultivars — Kuritawase, Makinoharawase, Hatsumidori, Yaeho and Surugawase — against a Yabukita control, and put its optimal first-flush plucking date at 18 April, eight days ahead of Yabukita’s 26 April. Yutakamidori ranked fourth on tea quality behind Surugawase, Yabukita and Kuritawase, but the study still recommended it, alongside Kuritawase, as a suitable early cultivar “for the warm region of southern Kyushu.”

What the trial reports do not fully convey is the rockier commercial start Yutakamidori actually had: processed the ordinary way, as a standard sencha, the leaf came out noticeably astringent and with a dull, undesirable liquor colour. Kagoshima’s tea industry worked out a fix rather than abandoning the cultivar — deep steaming the leaf, combined with shading the bushes for about a week before harvest, which is the light end of what “kabuse” cultivation covers. My Japanese Green Tea puts it directly: the astringency and colour problem “was fixed by processing it as a fukamushi sencha and by shading the tea plants one week before harvest,” after which “Yutakamidori became a well-known cultivar of Kagoshima prefecture.” Kyo Chikiriya describes the same mechanism from the growing side: 「耐寒性に弱いですが、収量は全茶期を通じて多く、被覆を行い、蒸しを強くすることで濃厚な水色と味になります」(“weak in cold tolerance, but yield is high through all flushes, and shading combined with strong steaming produces a concentrated liquor colour and flavour”). That combination — light pre-harvest shade plus deep steaming — is now the cultivar’s standard commercial treatment rather than an exception, and it is the direct reason Yutakamidori and Kagoshima’s fukamushi, lightly shaded sencha style are so closely identified with each other.

By the 2010s the cultivar had become the clear second choice nationally after Yabukita. Kyo Chikiriya gives its cultivation share as 5.2% of Japan’s tea acreage as of December 2013, with roughly 95% of all Yutakamidori grown within Kagoshima, where it makes up about 30% of the prefecture’s own tea acreage — a scale of concentration in a single region that has no real parallel among Japan’s other major cultivars.

Characteristics

Yutakamidori is an early cultivar, budding about five days ahead of Yabukita (Ito En’s comparison page states this directly; other sources round it to “about a week”). A 1990 Tea Research Journal trial in southern Kyushu, tracking third-year plant growth after first pruning, found that in its five-cultivar plot Yutakamidori’s pruned-branch cross-sectional diameter was significantly larger than all four comparison cultivars, and its canopy spread larger than three of them, with only Kanayamidori matching it — a vigorous, fast-establishing plant by measured standards, not just by reputation. Yield is reported as high and consistent across all three flushes; no source independently checked here gave a specific figure relative to Yabukita, so none is stated.

That vigour comes with a real limitation: cold and frost tolerance are weak. A 1991 Tea Research Journal trial recorded severe frost damage to Yutakamidori in a hard frost year, pushing the actual plucking date five days later than expected and cutting first-flush yield — a direct demonstration of why the cultivar is grown almost exclusively in the warm southern reaches of Kyushu rather than anywhere frost is a routine risk. Disease resistance is more favourable: sources describe it as strongly resistant to anthracnose, with medium resistance to grey blight (ring spot).

In the cup, the two versions of Yutakamidori are genuinely different teas. Processed as an ordinary sencha from unshaded bushes, it is markedly astringent, with a liquor that reads dull or slightly red rather than clean green — a real weakness, and one every source consulted here is candid about. Grown under about a week of shade before harvest and deep-steamed, as it is throughout Kagoshima, it is a different cultivar in the cup: a dark, vivid green liquor, a mild and balanced astringency against real sweetness, and the “concentrated colour and flavour” that both Kyo Chikiriya and My Japanese Green Tea attribute directly to that combination of shade and steam. Senbird’s description of the shaded, fukamushi-processed leaf — deep colour, strong umami, less astringency than Yabukita — matches the growers’ own account of what the shading and steaming were adopted to fix. It is grown almost entirely as sencha and fukamushi sencha; nothing in the sources checked here describes it being made into gyokuro or tencha.