Fujimidori: The 1962 Tea Cultivar That Is Still Unregistered

Fujimidori (ふじみどり) is an unregistered Japanese green tea cultivar from Shizuoka, bred from a Yabukita mother for sencha and named in 1962. It has a strange kind of record. Four years after it was named, it was the subject of a research paper, in the very first issue of the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station's bulletin. Its pollen went on to help make another cultivar, which the prefecture later recommended to growers. And yet, as far as the cultivar references show, Fujimidori itself is still unregistered. Officially, it is still a selection with a name.

I find that more interesting than most success stories. The tea cultivars everyone knows are the ones that won, above all Yabukita. Fujimidori is one of Yabukita's own children that stayed small, and following it tells you a lot about how Japanese tea plants actually get made, tested, kept, and quietly passed over.

Key Takeaways

• Fujimidori (ふじみどり, translated as "Fuji green") was originally a numbered selection called Shizu-7224 and was named in 1962 at the Shizuoka prefectural tea research station.
• Its mother plant was Yabukita. Its father is unknown. It belongs to Shizuoka's "7000 series" of Yabukita-mother selections.
• It is unregistered and has no Cha Norin number. I searched the registry list (entries 1 to 52, through 2003) and found Yabukita and Soufuu, but no Fujimidori.
• Sources disagree on timing: a 1966 station paper, cited in English as describing it as "medium maturing", while a modern cultivar reference calls it "slightly late budding". It has thick leaves and makes a vegetal, umami-rich sencha. A Yame tea also sold as Fujimidori is a different cultivar, written 藤翠.
• Crossed with Yabukita, it produced Sawamizuka, selected in 1966 and registered in 1995 under the Seed and Seedling Law.

What is the Fujimidori tea cultivar?

Fujimidori is an unregistered Japanese green tea cultivar from Shizuoka prefecture, bred for sencha at the Shizuoka prefectural tea research station. That institution published its early research as the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station. Today it is the Shizuoka prefectural tea research center, and all three names refer to the same place. It was originally known by the serial name Shizu-7224 and "received its name in 1962 because it had a unique aroma and flavor" (My Japanese Green Tea, retrieved 2026-09-13). The same source describes it as "unregistered and one of the lesser grown Japanese tea cultivars," with Yabukita as the mother plant and an unknown father.

A second independent cultivar table lists it the same way: "Fuji-midori," non-registered, grown from Yabukita seed, used for sencha, dated 1962, and credited to the Shizuoka prefectural research center, meaning the same station (Japanese Tea Sommelier, "The Japanese tea cultivars", 22 August 2022). Two sources that agree on the serial number, the year and the mother plant are about as solid as the record gets for a cultivar this small.

Fujimidori at a glance

Attribute	Detail
Japanese name	ふじみどり (Fujimidori, "Fuji green")
Original serial name	Shizu-7224 (静7224)
Named	1962
Bred at	Shizuoka prefectural tea research station
Mother plant	Yabukita
Father plant	Unknown
Registration	None. Not in the Cha Norin registry
Budding time	"Medium maturing" (1966) or "slightly late budding" (modern reference)
Leaf	Thick
Main use	Sencha
Flavour	Vegetal, rich in umami
Best-known offspring	Sawamizuka (Yabukita × Fujimidori)

One small note on the name. It is written in hiragana, and ふじ can stand for more than one kanji, such as 富士 (Fuji) or 藤 (wisteria). The Fujikaori cultivar, for example, uses the kanji 藤 for wisteria (My Japanese Green Tea, Fujikaori), and a different cultivar from Yame, covered below, is written 藤翠 with that same character. An English reference that documents Fujimidori translates it as "Fuji green," and I follow that here, but I have not found a source that spells out which reading its breeders meant.

It is also old. As My Japanese Green Tea puts it, "Since the first Japanese cultivars were officially registered in 1953, Fujimidori is quite old." In 1953 Yabukita itself became Cha Norin 6. Fujimidori was named less than a decade later.

The Shizu 7000 series: Yabukita's quiet children

Fujimidori belongs to a family of Shizuoka selections that share a numbering system and a mother. "Since the 1960's, many cultivars were developed in Shizuoka prefecture using Yabukita as the mother plant. Those cultivars have the serial 7000 number. For example, we have Surugawase and Fujimidori" (My Japanese Green Tea, Shizu-7132, retrieved 2026-09-13). The father plants of this series are unknown.

Japanese Tea Sommelier names four members of what it calls the "Shizu-7000 series": Yamakai (Shizu-7166), Suruga-wase (Shizu-7109), Kurasawa (Shizu-7111), and Fuji-midori (Shizu-7224). A fifth, Shizu-7132, is not officially registered and is still known by its number, though a farmer once nicknamed it shimo shirazu, meaning unaffected by frost. It is best known for a cherry blossom aroma that comes from coumarin, a compound whose concentration "is highest in Shizu-7132" among the cultivars that carry it (My Japanese Green Tea).

Here is the part I like. Fujimidori and Shizu-7132 are described as siblings, both Yabukita children from the same series. Yet one reviewer who tasted a Fujimidori sencha wrote that "while this cultivar is a sibling of Shizu-7132, their aroma and flavor aren't similar at all" (My Japanese Green Tea, Fujimidori sencha review, retrieved 2026-09-13). Same mother, same station, same numbering, and two completely different cups. An unknown father may be part of the reason.

This is also why the series matters for anyone trying to understand Japanese tea cultivars as a whole. As far as the record shows, the 7000 numbers reflect a simple approach in 1960s Shizuoka: raise many seedlings from the proven plant, keep the ones that show something distinct, and name only a few. Fujimidori was one of the named few.

Is Fujimidori registered? What the Cha Norin table shows

Fujimidori has no Cha Norin number and no national registration. Both cultivar references I rely on class it as unregistered, and the registry itself agrees.

I checked the Cha Norin table directly rather than taking that on trust. The registered cultivar list mirrored at minorien.jp is a PDF that most web tools cannot read, so I extracted its text locally, one cell per line, and searched it. The mirrored list has 52 Cha Norin entries and ends at Cha Norin 52, dated 2003, so it settles the Norin question up to that point; the current unregistered status comes from the cultivar references above. To confirm the method works, I looked for two cultivars that should be there. Yabukita (やぶきた) is present as 茶農林6号, Cha Norin 6, dated 1953. Soufuu (そうふう) is present as 茶農林49号, Cha Norin 49, dated 2002. Fujimidori (ふじみどり) has no row. It also does not appear in any row as a listed parent. The same search finds no row for Sawamizuka, its best-known offspring, which fits its registration under the Seed and Seedling Law rather than the Norin system.

Nothing I found explains why Fujimidori was not registered, and I do not want to invent a reason. What the record does show is that registration was never the only way a Shizuoka selection could matter. Fujimidori was named, studied, and used as breeding stock without it. Fujikaori, another Shizuoka tea with no Cha Norin number, makes a useful comparison, though unlike Fujimidori it was later registered under the Seed and Seedling Law. Fujimidori has neither kind of registration.

Sit with that for a moment, because it runs against how we usually think about value. The registry rewards what can be scaled. Much of what makes tea interesting lives in the plants that were not.

Medium or late? The budding question

The honest answer is that the sources do not quite agree, and no source I found gives a number of days.

The earliest scientific description is a 1966 paper, credited in Kubo et al. to Oishi and Hitaka and cited in English as "On the medium maturing variety 'Fujimidori' for green tea," published in the Bulletin of the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station, issue 1, pages 13 to 22. I have not been able to read the paper itself. I know it through the reference list of Kubo, Yokoyama and Ohgushi's chapter "Tea Cultivars in Japan" (Springer, 2023; reference list viewed via OUCI). So the only thing I will take from it is that English citation title, which calls Fujimidori medium maturing. Japanese bulletin titles do not always match their English versions, and this one does not. The Japanese catalogue record in CiNii Research lists the paper as 緑茶用品種 ふじみどり について, roughly "On Fujimidori, a cultivar for green tea," credited to 大石貞男 (Oishi) alone, in issue 1 of the bulletin, June 1966, starting on page 13. The Japanese title says nothing about maturing time, so treat that label with some care.

That first-issue detail is not trivial. According to its record in CiNii, the Japanese academic library catalogue, the bulletin (静岡県茶業試験場研究報告) began in June 1966 and ran until March 2006. The Fujimidori paper appeared in its first issue, four years after the cultivar was named.

The modern English references describe it differently. My Japanese Green Tea says "Fujimidori is a slightly late budding cultivar with thick leaves." A tasting note on its offspring Sawamizuka goes a step further, saying that cultivar is late budding "like its pollen parent Fujimidori" (The Floating Tea Stem, 10 January 2023).

These are not necessarily contradictions. "Medium" and "slightly late" can describe the same plant from different reference points, and budding labels are usually given relative to Yabukita. But I would be misleading you if I picked one and printed a day count. What can be said is that no source calls Fujimidori early, and that the English citation of its first paper puts its maturing time in the title.

Why does that matter to a grower? Growers tend to value cultivars that bud at a different time from Yabukita, because they spread the spring harvest across more days. Fujimidori's own offspring Sawamizuka is the clearer example, with a harvest some six to eight days after Yabukita (The Floating Tea Stem).

Thick leaves and vegetal umami

The plant description is short: thick leaves, meant for sencha, and "as a sencha, its flavor is vegetal and rich in umami" (My Japanese Green Tea). That is a familiar Shizuoka sencha profile, which fits a Yabukita child bred in Shizuoka.

The fuller picture comes from My Japanese Green Tea's review of an organic Fujimidori sencha made in Kawane, Shizuoka. The dry leaf had "something odd about their aroma, perhaps a fruity note. But it's mostly a sweet fragrance as with any first harvest sencha." After brewing, the wet leaf smelled "vegetal, and not as sweet as the dry tea leaves." In the cup, "the first thing that stands out is that it has an intense umami taste," with "a vegetal flavor with good body." The second infusion had "less umami taste" and was "slightly astringent," and the reviewer's summary was "a rich first infusion but after that the flavor fades quickly."

What I notice in that description is the small detail, the fruity note that the reviewer could not quite place. It lines up with the reason the cultivar was named in the first place, a "unique aroma and flavor." It is a quiet distinctiveness, not a perfume like Fujikaori or a cherry blossom note like Shizu-7132. You would have to be paying attention.

That is not a bad description of how to drink it, either.

What the record does not contain matters too. I found no published yield figure for Fujimidori, no planted area, no disease or cold resistance profile, and no chemical analysis of its aroma. Where those numbers exist for other cultivars, they usually come from breeding trials published around registration, and, as far as the record shows, Fujimidori did not go through that step.

One name, two different teas

Two different tea cultivars are sold in English as "Fujimidori." The Shizuoka cultivar in this article is written in hiragana, ふじみどり. A cultivar from Hoshino village in Yame, Fukuoka, is written 藤翠, and it is a separate, privately grown plant that only shares the romanized name. If you buy a tea labelled Fujimidori, the region and the Japanese script on the label usually tell you which one you have.

The Shizuoka Fujimidori: a Kawane sencha

A detailed tasting of the Shizuoka cultivar is My Japanese Green Tea's review of an organic sencha from Kawane, Shizuoka, described in the section above. It brewed "a pale yellow liquor" on the first infusion and "a more intense yellow color" on the second. If you are new to the style, our guide to sencha covers how it is made.

The Hoshino Fujimidori: 藤翠, a different plant

The second tea comes from the Fujiyama district of Hoshino village, in the mountains of Yame city in southern Fukuoka (The Floating Tea Stem, 13 June 2020). The taster is explicit that this cultivar, 藤翠, "is different from the Fujimidori grown in Shizuoka prefecture," and that it "was created by one tea producer and privately grown in the Fujiyama district in Hoshino village." When The Floating Tea Stem's author raised the Hoshino tea in the comments on My Japanese Green Tea, that site's author replied, "They are different, although the name is the same."

That tea was a fukamushi, a deep-steamed sencha, made from buds that, according to the seller's description, were "shaded for a week before they were harvested. This is to bring out its umami and vivid colour." Shading before harvest is also the idea behind kabusecha. The liquor was "vivid green," with a sudden kick of umami, then "a smooth, almost-vanilla kind of sweetness," and "no astringency at all."

Put side by side, one cup is pale yellow and the other is vivid green, and it is tempting to credit processing alone. But because the plants are different, this comparison cannot separate cultivar from processing. What it does show is how little a romanized name tells you. The Japanese script carries the information that the English drops.

Sawamizuka: the cultivar Fujimidori helped make

Fujimidori's most lasting contribution may be its offspring. Sawamizuka is a cross between Yabukita and Fujimidori, bred at what is today the Shizuoka prefectural tea research center.

The timeline is long, and it shows how slowly this work moves. At the Shizuoka station, "the Yabukita cultivar was crossed with Fujimidori and the best seedling was selected in 1966. It was tested in 1974, then in 1992 it was named Sawamizuka and acknowledged as a high quality cultivar. [...] In 1995 it was registered under the seed and seedling law" (My Japanese Green Tea, Sawamizuka, retrieved 2026-09-13). That is almost thirty years from seedling to registration.

The Floating Tea Stem identifies Fujimidori as the pollen parent. It describes Sawamizuka as a late-budding cultivar "that could be harvested some six to eight days after Yabukita," developed for making sencha, with a higher yield than Yabukita, resistance to cold and to anthracnose, and adoption as a recommended cultivar for the prefecture in 1992. Those figures describe Sawamizuka, not Fujimidori, and I would not carry them back to the parent. The station's own paper on it, by Kuranuki, Shibata, Nakamura and Hidaka, was titled "A newly late budding tea cultivar 'Sawamizuka'" (Bulletin of the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station 21:1-11, 1994, listed in Kubo et al., 2023).

Seen on a timeline, the two plants tell a single story. Fujimidori was named in 1962 and, on paper, went no further. But in 1966, the same year its own paper appeared, a seedling from its cross with Yabukita was selected, and that seedling became a registered, recommended Shizuoka cultivar. A parent does not need a number to leave something behind.

How to brew Fujimidori sencha

Start with the parameters from a detailed tasting of the Shizuoka cultivar, then adjust to your own cup. Before you brew, check the label: ふじみどり with a Shizuoka origin is the cultivar in this article, while 藤翠 from Yame is a different plant with its own documented parameters.

Documented brewing parameters for teas sold as Fujimidori (My Japanese Green Tea; The Floating Tea Stem, 2020)

Tea	Leaf	Water	Temperature	Time
Shizuoka Fujimidori (ふじみどり), Kawane sencha	4 g (1 teaspoon)	60 ml	80°C	60 seconds
Hoshino Fujimidori (藤翠), shaded fukamushi, 1st steep	3 g	Not stated	70°C	1 minute
Hoshino Fujimidori (藤翠), 2nd steep	Same leaf	Not stated	60°C	10 seconds

For a Shizuoka Fujimidori sencha like the Kawane tea, the My Japanese Green Tea reviewer's 4 g in 60 ml of water at 80°C for 60 seconds is a good first cup. That is a lot of leaf for very little water. The reviewer shortened the second infusion to 40 seconds and found less umami and a slight astringency, so keep later steeps short if you prefer a softer cup.

If what you have is the Hoshino 藤翠, follow The Floating Tea Stem taster's cooler approach instead: 70°C for one minute, then a quick 10 seconds at 60°C. That taster steeped the same leaf four more times after that.

Whatever you have, give it a slow first minute. A tea this uncommon is rarely something you will drink every day, so taste it deliberately rather than in the background. Smell the dry leaf for the faint fruit note the Kawane reviewer could not quite place.

To see where this cultivar grew up, our guide to Shizuoka tea covers the region and the sencha tradition it came from.

Frequently asked questions

What does Fujimidori mean?

My Japanese Green Tea, an English cultivar reference that documents it, translates Fujimidori (ふじみどり) as "Fuji green." It was originally known by the serial name Shizu-7224 and received its current name in 1962.

Is Fujimidori a registered tea cultivar?

No. Fujimidori is unregistered. It has no Cha Norin number and does not appear in a mirrored Cha Norin registry table (entries 1 to 52, through 2003), which lists Yabukita as Cha Norin 6 from 1953.

What are Fujimidori's parent cultivars?

Its mother plant was Yabukita. Its father is unknown. It is one of Shizuoka's "7000 series" selections, all bred with Yabukita as the mother from the 1960s onward.

Is Fujimidori an early or late budding cultivar?

No source describes it as early. A 1966 Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station paper is cited in English as "On the medium maturing variety 'Fujimidori' for green tea," while My Japanese Green Tea calls it "slightly late budding." No source I could access gives a day count for Fujimidori itself.

What cultivar was bred from Fujimidori?

Sawamizuka, a cross of Yabukita and Fujimidori. The seedling was selected in 1966, tested in 1974, named in 1992, and registered in 1995 under the Seed and Seedling Law. It is a late-budding sencha cultivar.

Is the Fujimidori from Yame the same cultivar?

No. A tea from Hoshino village in Yame, Fukuoka, is also sold as Fujimidori, but it is written 藤翠 and is a different, privately grown cultivar that only shares the romanized name, according to The Floating Tea Stem, a point My Japanese Green Tea's author agreed with in a comment reply. The Shizuoka cultivar is written in hiragana, ふじみどり.

A note from me

To be straightforward with you: we do not sell Fujimidori, and this article is not trying to move anything. I write these cultivar pieces because the plants are the least told part of Japanese tea, and the smaller ones often say the most about how the whole system works.

What stays with me about Fujimidori is how little it needed in order to matter. Somebody at the prefectural station noticed one Yabukita seedling with a unique aroma and flavor, and gave it a name. It went on to parent Sawamizuka without a registration number of its own.

There is a kind of quiet in that I find reassuring. Not every good thing needs to scale, or be certified, or win. Some plants are simply noticed, kept, and passed on. When I drink a tea like this, I try to taste it the way that first person must have: slowly, curious, without deciding in advance what it should be.

If you want to keep following the family, start with Yabukita, then read why Japan's dependence on it is a problem, and see Kanayamidori for another Shizuoka-bred cultivar with a very different path. The cultivar guide linked above maps the rest.

Sources

• The Fujimidori Tea Cultivar, My Japanese Green Tea. Name and translation, Shizu-7224, 1962 naming, Yabukita mother and unknown father, 7000 series, unregistered status, budding time, thick leaves, flavour, and the author's comment reply to The Floating Tea Stem's author agreeing that the Hoshino cultivar is different. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• The Fujikaori Tea Cultivar, My Japanese Green Tea. The 藤 (wisteria) kanji in Fujikaori and its 1996 Seed and Seedling Law registration. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• The Japanese tea cultivars, Japanese Tea Sommelier, 22 August 2022. Non-registered cultivar table row for Fuji-midori and the Shizu-7000 series list. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Shizu-7132, My Japanese Green Tea. The 7000 series as Yabukita-mother cultivars since the 1960s, and Shizu-7132's coumarin aroma. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Fujimidori sencha review, My Japanese Green Tea. Kawane origin, brewing parameters, tasting notes, sibling relationship with Shizu-7132. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Tea tasting: Shincha 2020 (Fujimidori cultivar), The Floating Tea Stem, 13 June 2020. The Hoshino cultivar 藤翠, stated to be different from the Shizuoka ふじみどり and privately grown; shading, fukamushi processing, brewing parameters, tasting notes. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Sawamizuka, My Japanese Green Tea. Yabukita × Fujimidori cross, 1966 selection, 1974 testing, 1992 naming, 1995 registration. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Tea tasting: Sawamizuka cultivar, The Floating Tea Stem, 10 January 2023. Fujimidori as pollen parent, Sawamizuka's six to eight day harvest gap after Yabukita, yield and resistance, 1992 recommendation. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Kubo N., Yokoyama H., Ohgushi T., Tea Cultivars in Japan, in Natural Products in Beverages, Reference Series in Phytochemistry, Springer, 2023. Reference list (viewed via OUCI) cites Oishi S., Hitaka T. (1966) "On the medium maturing variety 'Fujimidori' for green tea," Bull. Shizuoka Pref. Tea Exp. Stn. 1:13-22, and Kuranuki Y. et al. (1994) "A newly late budding tea cultivar 'Sawamizuka'," Bull. Shizuoka Tea Exp. Stn. 21:1-11.
• 緑茶用品種 ふじみどり について, CiNii Research article record. Japanese title, sole author 大石貞男, issue 1, June 1966, starting page 13. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• 静岡県茶業試験場研究報告 (Bulletin of the Shizuoka Tea Experiment Station), CiNii catalogue record. First issue published June 1966; series ran to March 2006. Retrieved 2026-09-13.
• Cha Norin registered cultivar list (茶農林登録品種一覧), publicly mirrored copy. Checked directly for the absence of a Fujimidori entry, with Yabukita (Cha Norin 6) and Soufuu (Cha Norin 49) as positive controls. The mirror lists entries 1 to 52, through 2003. Retrieved 2026-09-13.