Fujikaori: The Japanese Tea That Smells Like Jasmine

The first time someone hands you a cup of Fujikaori without telling you what it is, you assume the tea has been scented. It smells like jasmine. Not faintly, and not in the way people sometimes say a good sencha is "floral," but obviously, the way a jasmine pearl tea smells when the lid comes off.

Nothing was added to it. The aroma is in the plant.

That fact has a cause, and the cause is the most interesting thing about this cultivar. Fujikaori's grandparent line traces back to Assam, in India. A Japanese green tea bred in Shizuoka carries the genetics of a subtropical Indian tea plant, and that inheritance is what puts the jasmine in the cup. It also goes some way toward explaining why Fujikaori never became a national cultivar, while its own sibling did.

Key Takeaways

• Fujikaori came from a cross made in 1980 in Fujieda city, Shizuoka. Seed parent Shizu-Inzatsu 131, pollen parent Yabukita. It was registered in 1996 under Japan's Seed and Seedling Law.
• The name means "wisteria aroma," but the scent people actually reach for is jasmine. The compound behind it is methyl anthranilate, confirmed in Fujikaori by peer-reviewed analysis.
• That compound traces to var. assamica through the Shizu-Inzatsu 131 parent, whose seed reached Japan on a 1922 collecting expedition and was selected in 1944.
• It is an early budding cultivar, harvestable 2 to 3 days before Yabukita, strong against cold, anthracnose and gray blight, but very weak against bacterial shoot blight.
• It is not a Cha Norin cultivar. Its sibling Soufuu, from the same parent, is Cha Norin 49. Fujikaori has no number at all.

What is the Fujikaori tea cultivar?

Fujikaori is a Japanese tea cultivar bred in Fujieda city, Shizuoka prefecture, from a cross made in 1980. The seed parent was Shizu-Inzatsu 131 and the pollen parent was Yabukita. It was registered in 1996 under Japan's Seed and Seedling Law (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-12). The same parentage is recorded in the peer-reviewed literature, which describes Fujikaori as "the hybrid of 'Shizu-Inzatsu 131' crossed with 'Yabukita' as the pollen parent" (JARQ 38(4):271-274, 2004).

Fujikaori at a glance

Attribute	Detail
Japanese name	藤かおり ("wisteria aroma")
Bred in	Fujieda city, Shizuoka prefecture
Cross made	1980
Seed parent	Shizu-Inzatsu 131
Pollen parent	Yabukita
Registered	1996, Seed and Seedling Law
Cha Norin number	None
Budding	Early, 2 to 3 days before Yabukita
Key aroma compound	Methyl anthranilate
Made as	Sencha, kamairicha, oolong

The men behind it were Morizono Ichiji and Koyanagi Miyoshi. Their names matter here, because this is not how most Japanese tea cultivars come to exist. The famous ones are institutional. Yabukita was a selection by Sugiyama Hikosaburo that a prefectural station carried forward. The Saitama cultivars come out of a prefectural research institute. Fujikaori has two named growers attached to it and a single town, and it has stayed close to both. Today the tea comes from the plantations of Koyanagi Tsutomu, Miyoshi's son (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

The written name, 藤かおり, is literally "wisteria aroma." Wisteria is the flower in the name, and Fujieda, the town, carries the same 藤 character. So the name does double duty, pointing at a scent and at a place at once. Almost nobody describes the tea as smelling like wisteria, though. The World Green Tea Association's cultivar reference lists it simply as having a "jasmine-like fragrance, branded in Fujieda" (o-cha.net, retrieved 2026-09-12), and that is the description that has stuck.

If you want the wider map of how these plants relate to each other, we keep one at our guide to Japanese tea cultivars.

Why does a Japanese green tea smell like jasmine?

Because of a single aroma compound called methyl anthranilate. It is the same class of compound behind the lift in grape soda and orange blossom. In a green tea it reads as jasmine.

The science here is specific, and it was settled fairly recently. In 2004, Sawai Yusuke, Yamaguchi Yuichi and Tanaka Junichi published an analysis in the Japan Agricultural Research Quarterly using simultaneous distillation extraction and gas chromatography. They were chasing the distinctive smell of a related cultivar, Sofu, and found a peak in it that appeared in none of the other cultivars in their screening panel. It was methyl anthranilate, the first documented detection of the compound in Japanese tea cultivars.

The paper then reports the related lines separately, and it is explicit about Fujikaori: "Furthermore, 'Fujikaori', the hybrid of 'Shizu-Inzatsu 131' crossed with 'Yabukita' as the pollen parent, contained methyl anthranilate" (JARQ 38(4):271-274, 2004). So the compound in Fujikaori is not an inference from its parentage. It was measured.

One caveat on wording. The paper reports the compound's presence, not a concentration figure. Descriptions of Fujikaori as carrying a notably high concentration come from the cultivar literature rather than from a published measurement, and no ppm value for Fujikaori turned up in the sources I could reach.

A note on names before we go further, because both spellings appear in the literature. "Sofu" in the JARQ paper and "Soufuu" elsewhere are the same cultivar, そうふう. We have written about it at Soufuu. It shares the Shizu-Inzatsu 131 parent with Fujikaori, which is exactly why the two share the aroma. The crosses run in opposite directions: Fujikaori takes Shizu-Inzatsu 131 as its seed parent and Yabukita as pollen, and Soufuu is the inverse.

The Assam grandparent nobody mentions

Shizu-Inzatsu 131 is the part of the story that gets skipped, and it is the part that makes everything else make sense.

It is not a pure Indian plant, and it is not a pure Japanese one. JARQ describes Shizu-Inzatsu 131 as "derived from a cross between var. assamica and var. sinensis." Var. assamica is the large-leafed subtropical Indian variety that most of the world's black tea is made from. Var. sinensis is the small-leafed variety that Japanese green tea is built on. Shizu-Inzatsu 131 is a bridge between the two.

The name says so outright, once you know how to read it. "Inzatsu" is an abbreviation of indo-zasshu (印度雑種), which means "Indian hybrids" (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12). "Shizu" is Shizuoka. The plant is called, more or less, Shizuoka Indian Hybrid number 131, and it has been announcing its own ancestry the whole time.

The JARQ team followed the compound back along that line and concluded that "the origin of tea which contains methyl anthranilate is in var. assamica." So the jasmine note in a Shizuoka green tea is an Indian inheritance, arriving through a breeding programme that crossed an Assam-derived line with Japan's most planted cultivar.

Japan's breeders sort their work into groups by what was crossed with what. Fujikaori sits in the Japanese-crossed-with-foreign group, not the Japanese-crossed-with-Japanese group where most of the household-name green tea cultivars live. Okuhikari is another plant from that same side of the ledger.

A 1922 expedition, and the man who did not come home

How does an Assam tea plant end up in a Shizuoka breeding programme in the first place? Through a collecting trip in 1922.

A scientist from the Tea Department of the Shizuoka Agricultural Research Center, Maruo Fumio, was sent to India, Sri Lanka and Java to gather tea plant material. He brought back seeds of the Manipuli variety from Assam. He did not survive the trip. The seeds reached Japan, but Maruo died of a tropical disease on the way back, in Taiwan (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

The seeds were planted at the research centre and numbered from 1 to 90. They sat in that collection for twenty-two years. Then, in 1944, a seedling grown from a seed of Manipuli No. 15 was selected and developed, and named after its number at the centre: Shizu-Inzatsu 131.

Shizu-Inzatsu 131 was never officially registered, for a straightforward reason. Japan's cultivar registration system did not begin until 1953, nine years after the selection was made. The plant simply predates the paperwork.

Why Fujikaori is not a Cha Norin cultivar

Japan has a national tea cultivar registry called Cha Norin (茶農林). A number in it is the formal marker that a tea plant has been adopted into the national breeding record. Yabukita is Cha Norin 6. Asatsuyu is Cha Norin 2. Sayamakaori is 31, Benifuuki is 44, Minekaori is 38.

Fujikaori is not in it.

I checked this directly rather than taking anyone's word for it. The registry table is published as a PDF, and reading it end to end turns up a named row for every registered cultivar above. There is no row for Fujikaori, under any spelling I tested, including ふじかおり and 藤かおり. The kanji 藤 does not appear in the document at all (Cha Norin registered cultivar list, a publicly mirrored copy of the registry table, retrieved 2026-09-12).

Its 1996 registration was under the Seed and Seedling Law instead. That is plant variety protection, a different instrument with a different purpose. A Cha Norin number generally means a public institution carried the plant through national trials and expected it to be planted widely. A Seed and Seedling Law registration protects a variety as intellectual property, and says nothing about national ambitions for it.

Here is what makes this more than a technicality. Soufuu, Fujikaori's sibling from the same Shizu-Inzatsu 131 parent, is in the table. It is Cha Norin 49, registered in 2002, listed with the parentage Yabukita crossed with Shizu-Inzatsu 131. So the aroma line did produce a nationally adopted cultivar. Just not this one.

That fits everything else about Fujikaori: two named local breeders, one town, and no particular hurry to spread.

Two to three days before Yabukita

Fujikaori is an early budding cultivar. It can be harvested 2 to 3 days before Yabukita (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-12).

Two or three days sounds like nothing. In practice it is one of the main reasons a Japanese grower plants anything other than Yabukita at all. Tea factories are a bottleneck. Fresh leaf has to be processed within hours of plucking or it starts to oxidize. A farm that plants a single cultivar therefore has one enormous, frantic window in which everything must come off the bush and go through the machines at once. Stagger the cultivars by a few days each and that wall becomes a schedule. Labour spreads out, the factory runs at a sane pace, and less leaf is lost to waiting.

Early budding carries an obvious risk in exchange, which is late frost. A bush that pushes out tender new shoots earlier in spring has more to lose if the temperature drops after it has committed. Fujikaori's cold resistance takes some of the sting out of that trade, which brings us to the rest of its constitution.

Strong against three things, very weak against one

Fujikaori has strong resistance to cold weather, to anthracnose and to gray blight. It is very weak against bacterial shoot blight (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-12).

Fujikaori resistance profile

Stress or disease	Resistance
Cold weather	Strong
Anthracnose	Strong
Gray blight	Strong
Bacterial shoot blight	Very weak

A resistance profile like this is a map of where a plant can be grown and how much attention it will need. Anthracnose and gray blight are both leaf diseases that thrive in warm, wet conditions, which describes a Japanese summer well. Strength against them is genuinely useful. Cold resistance protects the early budding habit described above.

Bacterial shoot blight is the problem. It attacks new shoots, which on a tea bush are the entire product. A cultivar that is very weak to it needs either a site where the disease does not press hard, or a grower willing to manage it closely. For a plant that was already staying close to home, that is one more reason it stayed there.

Sencha, kamairicha, or oolong?

All three, depending on who is making it. The cultivar is used for sencha, and also for kamairicha and oolong (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-12).

In Fujieda itself, though, the answer narrows. Koyanagi Tsutomu produces only kama-iri cha, the pan-fired style, rather than the steamed sencha that dominates Japanese green tea production (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

That choice is not arbitrary. Steaming, the standard Japanese fixation method, is fast and wet, and it locks in the fresh, green, marine character people associate with sencha. Pan-firing is dry heat, and dry heat builds aromatic compounds rather than preserving vegetal ones. If your plant's entire distinction is an unusual perfume, pan-firing is the processing choice that gets out of the aroma's way.

It also makes Fujikaori a slightly awkward fit for the Japanese tea market as most people meet it, which expects steamed sencha. Aroma-named cultivars often end up in this position. Sayamakaori carries its aroma in its name too and found a much wider planting, but it had a prefectural institute behind it.

What it tastes like, and how to brew it

Here the sources genuinely disagree, and I would rather show you the disagreement than average it into something tidy.

The cultivar record describes Fujikaori as having good body with a notable astringency and bitterness (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-12). A tasting note on a specific pan-fired lot from Fujieda says close to the opposite: the liquor is "very light, silky, without any aggressiveness," and "there is no astringency, but there is no umami" (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

Both can be true. A cultivar record describes the plant's general tendency across growing conditions and processing styles. A tasting note describes one lot, pan-fired, brewed a particular way. Pan-firing and a cooler steep will pull far less astringency than a hard-steamed sencha from the same bush. If you meet Fujikaori as kama-iri cha, expect the lighter picture. If you meet it as a steamed sencha, expect more grip.

What both agree on is the jasmine. Beyond that, the fullest sensory account comes from the tasting note: a sweet, floral scent with a strong mineral texture, notes described as sweet corn and white grapes, and a sweet, floral finish that returns through the nose after you swallow (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

For the pan-fired version, a reported approach is 3 to 3.5 grams of leaf per 70 to 80 ml of water, at 80 degrees Celsius, steeped for a generous minute. That yields 3 or 4 good infusions (Japanese Tea Sommelier, retrieved 2026-09-12).

That is a high leaf-to-water ratio and a cooler temperature than instinct suggests. The small volume concentrates the perfume rather than diluting it, and cooler water favours the aromatics. If you are used to brewing sencha, resist the urge to go hotter.

Frequently asked questions

Is Fujikaori a scented or flavoured tea?

No. Nothing is added. The jasmine aroma comes from methyl anthranilate that the plant produces itself, confirmed in Fujikaori by gas chromatography in a 2004 JARQ study, and inherited through its Shizu-Inzatsu 131 parent.

What does the name Fujikaori mean?

It means "wisteria aroma." The 藤 character is wisteria, and it is also the first character in Fujieda, the Shizuoka town where the cultivar was bred, so the name points at both the scent and the place.

Is Fujikaori the same as Soufuu?

No. They are siblings. Both have Shizu-Inzatsu 131 in their parentage, which is why both carry methyl anthranilate and a jasmine-like aroma, but the crosses run in opposite directions and they are separate cultivars. Soufuu is registered as Cha Norin 49. Fujikaori has no Cha Norin number.

Why is Fujikaori hard to find?

It was never bred for wide planting. It has no Cha Norin number, its 1996 registration was under the Seed and Seedling Law, and it is very weak against bacterial shoot blight. The breeders were also reluctant to let it spread far beyond Fujieda. It is not quite unobtainable, though. Koyanagi Miyoshi gave cuttings to the father of Yusuke Ota in Ureshino, a Kyushu region with its own pan-fired tea tradition, so a Fuji-kaori is made there too.

Does Fujikaori contain caffeine?

Yes. It is a true tea made from Camellia sinensis, so it contains caffeine like any green tea. No cultivar-specific caffeine figure for Fujikaori turned up in the sources reviewed here.

A note from me

I like Fujikaori for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I would sell it, and to be straightforward with you, we do not. We do not stock it, and this article is not trying to move anything. I write these cultivar pieces because the plants are the most under-told part of Japanese tea, and because the interesting answer is usually one layer below where most write-ups stop.

Here the stopping point is normally "Fujikaori smells like jasmine, isn't that lovely." Which it is. But the reason is an Assam seed carried back from a 1922 expedition by a man who died before he could see what it became. That seed sat in a collection for twenty-two years, got selected in 1944, and half a century later two growers in Fujieda crossed its descendant with Yabukita and got a perfume. The aroma and the obscurity are the same story seen from two ends.

There is also something I find quietly good about a plant that two named men in one town made, protected, and then declined to scale, while the sibling cultivar from the same parent went on to get a national number. Not everything has to become Yabukita.

If you want to keep pulling this thread, Soufuu is the obvious next stop, and the cultivar guide maps the rest.

Sources

• The Fujikaori Tea Cultivar, My Japanese Green Tea. Parentage, 1980 cross, 1996 registration, methyl anthranilate, budding time, disease resistance, processing uses, astringency description. Retrieved 2026-09-12.
• The Fuji-kaori cultivar from Fujieda, Japanese Tea Sommelier, 17 August 2016. Breeder names, seed and pollen parent roles, kama-iri cha production, the Ureshino cuttings, tasting notes, brewing parameters. Retrieved 2026-09-12.
• Shizu-Inzatsu 131, an historical cultivar, Japanese Tea Sommelier, 24 January 2017. The indo-zasshu naming, Maruo Fumio's 1922 expedition, the Manipuli seeds, the 1944 selection, and the cultivar's unregistered status. Retrieved 2026-09-12.
• Sawai Y., Yamaguchi Y., Tanaka J., Methyl Anthranilate is the Cause of Cultivar-Specific Aroma in the Japanese Tea Cultivar 'Sofu', Japan Agricultural Research Quarterly 38(4):271-274, 2004. Compound identification, the direct detection of methyl anthranilate in Fujikaori, and the var. assamica origin.
• Tea Cultivars, World Green Tea Association. "Jasmine-like fragrance, branded in Fujieda." Retrieved 2026-09-12.
• Cha Norin registered cultivar list (茶農林登録品種一覧), publicly mirrored copy. Checked directly for the absence of a Fujikaori entry and for Soufuu's Cha Norin 49 row. Retrieved 2026-09-12.