Kanayamidori: The Shizuoka Cultivar That Found Its Home in Kyushu

Kanayamidori is a mid-to-late Japanese sencha cultivar, registered on 24 April 1970 as Cha Norin No. 30, and named after Kanaya, the Shizuoka town where the national tea research station stood. In the agriculture ministry's prefecture figures it accounts for about 0.5% of Shizuoka's tea area and about 4% of both Miyazaki's and Fukuoka's. The plant named after a Shizuoka town is roughly eight times more common in Kyushu than at home.

I went looking for Kanayamidori because merchants keep describing it the same way, as the milky one. What I found in the original 1970s paperwork was a cultivar sold to farmers on something else entirely, and a map that has quietly turned itself inside out since.

Key Takeaways

• Kanayamidori was registered as Cha Norin No. 30 on 24 April 1970, from a cross made in 1949 between a Shizuoka landrace seedling called S6 and Yabukita. Cross to registration took 21 years.
• It is named for Kanaya, the town in Shizuoka that housed the national tea research station. Kanaya was absorbed into Shimada City in 2005 and no longer exists as a municipality.
• The breeders selected it for yield, cold hardiness and wide regional adaptability, not for flavour. Their own registration paper rates its cup only equal to or slightly better than Yabukita, with measured chemistry about the same.
• The geography inverted. It sits at 0.5% of Shizuoka's tea area against 4% in Miyazaki and 4% in Fukuoka.
• The milky, creamy character it is known for today comes from the tea trade, not from the research record.
• We do not sell Kanayamidori. This is a reference page, not a product page.

What is Kanayamidori?

Kanayamidori (かなやみどり) is a Japanese green tea cultivar bred for sencha. It entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's registered cultivar list as Cha Norin No. 30 on 24 April 1970. Its breeding line name was F1NN13, usually written NN-13.

Its parents are S6 as the seed parent and Yabukita as the pollen parent. S6 is short for Shizuoka zairai No. 6, a selected seedling out of Shizuoka's old landrace tea, the mixed seed-grown population that covered Japan before named clones took over. So Kanayamidori sits exactly on the hinge between two eras of Japanese tea, with a landrace mother and the cultivar that would go on to take about 80% of the country's planted area as its father.

If the name looks familiar, that is because Kanayamidori went on to become a parent itself. It is the seed parent of Harumidori, Cha Norin No. 48, and of Fuushun, Cha Norin No. 41. Its own page in the family tree is the one nobody writes.

Where does the name Kanayamidori come from?

The name joins Kanaya, the place, to midori, green. Kanaya was a town in Haibara District, Shizuoka, and it held the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's Tea Research Station, where the cross was made and every stage of selection was carried out. The registry table lists Kanaya as the breeding site.

The town itself is gone. Kanaya merged into Shimada City on 5 May 2005, so the municipality the cultivar is named for has not existed for two decades. The research base is still there, now run by NARO, and the tea fields around it are still some of the most photographed in Shizuoka. The name outlived the place, which is a very tea thing to happen.

What did the breeders actually select Kanayamidori for?

They selected it for yield, cold hardiness and the ability to grow well in many different places. Flavour was not the pitch. This is the part that surprised me, because it is the opposite of how the cultivar is sold now.

The 1971 registration paper opens by naming the problem the breeders were trying to solve. Japan had a dozen registered sencha cultivars by then and hardly any of them were actually planted, because of what the authors call the narrowness of regional adaptability. Cultivars worked in the valley where they were bred and disappointed everywhere else. Yabukita already held about 85% of cultivar tea gardens. What the industry wanted was something that could be planted widely and still perform.

So Kanayamidori was tested widely. Adaptability trials ran at the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute from 1963, at Miyazaki's tea branch station from 1965, at a Miyakonojo management farm from 1967, and from 1969 at the Shizuoka, Nara, Shiga and Kagoshima prefectural stations. The paper reports that results at every trial site matched the breeding site, and concludes plainly that the range of land suited to Kanayamidori is wide.

On the traits it was chosen for, the record is strong. Yield is described as markedly higher than Yabukita, with a specific detail that matters to any grower running more than one harvest: the second-flush yield does not fall away. Cold damage and winter leaf drop are both lower than Yabukita's, and it resists the fissure-type freeze injury that splits trunks in hard winters. The paper records no notable disease problems and tells growers no special pest precautions are needed.

It was also easy to work with, which matters more than it sounds. It roots readily from cuttings and grows away well once rooted, so nurseries could raise it in bulk. The one piece of planting advice the paper gives is about spacing: the bush spreads wide, so growers are told not to set it too densely. Fertiliser management is the same as Yabukita.

On flavour, the same paper is markedly cooler. Sencha quality is rated equal to or slightly superior to Yabukita. The leaf colour and liquor colour run deeper, and the aroma is called good. Then the chemistry: total nitrogen, soluble nitrogen, soluble matter and tannin are all reported as about the same as Yabukita. The breeders noticed the aroma. They did not build the case on it, and nothing in their record describes anything milky.

How late is Kanayamidori, and why does that matter?

It buds about 8 days after Yabukita and is plucked about 4 days after it, which makes it a mid-to-late cultivar. Those two numbers appear in both the Japanese text and the English summary of the registration paper.

The gap between the two figures is the useful part. Budding eight days late but harvesting only four days late means the plant catches up during the flush. That is a many-bud type at work: the paper classes it as a 芽数型, a cultivar that puts out an unusually high number of shoots rather than a few large ones.

Late budding is also frost insurance. A bush that has not opened its buds cannot lose them to a late frost, which is why the paper recommends Kanayamidori for hill country where frost damage is a real risk. Combined with its cold tolerance, that made it a sensible plant for ground that Yabukita found difficult. Growers who want a spread of picking dates rather than one frantic week still use this logic, and it is the same reasoning behind planting Okumidori at the late end of the season.

Why is Kanayamidori rarer in Shizuoka than in Kyushu?

Because the wide adaptability worked, but it worked hardest away from home. The agriculture ministry's own cultivar policy document breaks planted area down by prefecture, and Kanayamidori's numbers run in a direction nobody planned.

In the same table, Shizuoka's tea area is 93% Yabukita. Kanayamidori sits at 0.5%, level with Saemidori and Okumidori and behind Sayamakaori. Shizuoka is the prefecture that bred it, named it, and grew the trial plants.

Move south and it changes. Miyazaki's tea area is a genuinely mixed one, 44% Yabukita with Saemidori at 11%, and Kanayamidori at 4%. Fukuoka runs 75% Yabukita with Kanayamidori at 4%, ahead of Saemidori. Both of those are Kyushu prefectures, both were on the original release list, and both give it roughly eight times the share it holds in Shizuoka.

The pattern is not really about Kanayamidori. It is about how differently the two ends of Japan replanted. Shizuoka standardised hard on Yabukita and stayed there, which is a story its own tea region still lives with. Kyushu diversified, mixing early and late cultivars to spread the picking season, which is why Kagoshima ended up with Yutakamidori at 28% of its area and Asatsuyu at 5%. A cultivar bred to be planted anywhere ended up planted where growers were willing to plant something other than Yabukita.

What does Kanayamidori taste like?

The tea trade describes it as having body and a milky aroma, with a creamy mouthfeel, low astringency and a light floral edge. That description is consistent across sellers and it matches what people actually buy the cultivar for. It is worth being clear where it comes from, though: this is merchant and taster vocabulary, developed over decades of single-cultivar sencha being sold as single-cultivar sencha. It is not in the research record.

Our own cultivar guide lists Kanayamidori with a conifer-forest aroma, creamy, with lemon-basil and kombu notes. That is a taster's note too, and a good one, but it is describing an experience rather than reporting a measurement.

What the 1971 paper does support is a deeper coloured liquor and good aroma, both assessed by panels at seven institutions including the Shizuoka, Mie, Miyazaki and Kagoshima prefectural stations. So the aroma was real and noticed from the start. The specific milky quality that now sells the tea is something the industry named later, once single-cultivar sencha became a category people shopped by name. Kanayamidori is often deep steamed, which thickens and softens any sencha, so some of what tasters call creamy is processing rather than plant.

Did Kanayamidori ever reach its 2,000 hectare target?

No. The 1971 paper sets an initial diffusion target of 2,000 hectares and says the cultivar is expected to replace landrace tea, with Shizuoka, Kyoto, Miyazaki and other prefectures lined up to adopt it as a recommended variety. Cuttings were already being raised in bulk.

It did not become a national workhorse. Yabukita did, and the ministry's own documents now treat that as a problem rather than a success, noting that roughly 80% of planted cultivar area being a single plant concentrates the harvest into one window, pushes quality down when picking runs late, and flattens the flavour of Japanese tea generally. Around 30% of tea gardens are more than 30 years old, which is the replanting backlog behind all of it.

So Kanayamidori's honest place in the story is a plant that answered the right question and arrived slightly too late to change the answer. What kept it in the ground was not the yield it was selected for. It was the cup, the thing its breeders measured and set aside.

Is Kanayamidori a matcha cultivar?

No. Its registered use is sencha, listed as such in the ministry's cultivar table, and every trial in the registration paper assessed it as sencha. Nothing in the record covers shading or tencha processing, which is what a matcha cultivar needs to be selected for.

We do not sell Kanayamidori and we do not source it. I am writing this because the cultivar keeps coming up when people ask why Japanese tea tastes the way it does in different places, and because its record is more interesting than its reputation.

Kanayamidori at a glance

Attribute	Kanayamidori
Japanese name	かなやみどり ("Kanaya green")
Cha Norin number	No. 30, registered 24 April 1970
Breeding line name	F1NN13 (NN-13)
Parentage	S6, a Shizuoka landrace seedling (seed) x Yabukita (pollen), crossed 1949
Bred at	Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Tea Research Station, Kanaya, Shizuoka
Season	Mid to late. Buds about 8 days after Yabukita, plucked about 4 days after
Intended use	Sencha
Yield	Markedly higher than Yabukita, second flush holds up
Cold	Less cold damage and leaf drop than Yabukita, resists fissure-type freeze injury
Disease	No notable problems recorded, no special precautions advised
Planting note	Roots easily from cuttings. Spreads wide, so do not plant densely
Cup, per the breeders	Equal to or slightly better than Yabukita, deeper liquor colour, good aroma
Cup, per the trade	Body, milky aroma, creamy, low astringency, light florals
Descendants	Harumidori (No. 48), Fuushun (No. 41)

Frequently asked questions

What does Kanayamidori mean?

It combines Kanaya, the Shizuoka town where the national tea research station was located and where the cultivar was bred, with midori, the Japanese word for green. Kanaya merged into Shimada City in 2005.

When was Kanayamidori registered?

It was named and registered as Cha Norin No. 30 on 24 April 1970. The original cross was made in 1949, so 21 years passed between the cross and registration.

What are Kanayamidori's parents?

The seed parent is S6, a selected seedling from Shizuoka's landrace tea population, and the pollen parent is Yabukita.

Is Kanayamidori early or late?

Mid to late. It buds roughly 8 days after Yabukita and is plucked roughly 4 days after it. The late budding gives it some protection against spring frost.

Where is Kanayamidori grown?

In the agriculture ministry's prefecture cultivar table it is about 4% of tea area in both Miyazaki and Fukuoka, and about 0.5% in Shizuoka, the prefecture where it was bred.

Why is Kanayamidori called milky?

That description comes from the tea trade rather than the research record. The 1970s registration paper notes good aroma and a deeper liquor colour but rates the cultivar's measured chemistry as about the same as Yabukita's, and does not describe a milky character.

Can Kanayamidori be used for matcha?

It was not bred for it. Its registered use is sencha, and the breeding trials assessed it only as sencha.

A note from me

I like this cultivar's story because it is a quiet correction to how we talk about tea plants. We tend to describe a cultivar as if its character was the point of it, as if someone set out to make a milky sencha. Kanayamidori was made to be tough, generous and plantable in a lot of different soils. The flavour people love it for was a note in the margin of the report.

Fifty-five years later the margin is the reason it still exists. The yield argument was won by another plant. The cup kept a few hundred hectares in the ground and put the name on a lot of single-cultivar bags. There is something worth sitting with in that, about the difference between what a thing is designed for and what it turns out to be good for.

If you are working through the cultivars, the cultivar guide is the map, and tea production by region shows how the geography in this article fits the wider picture.

Christian
Founder, One with Tea

Sources

• Katsuo K., Watanabe A., Masuda K. (1971). "A Newly Registered Tea Variety Kanayamidori Suitable for Green Tea", Tea Research Journal (茶業研究報告) No. 35, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Tea Research Station. PDF via J-Stage. The breeders' own registration paper. Source for the 1949 cross, the selection timeline and line name NN-13, the April 1970 registration, the 8 day budding and 4 day plucking gaps, the yield and second-flush finding, the cold and disease ratings, the quality and chemistry assessment, the adaptability trial sites and the 2,000 hectare diffusion target. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
• Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, registered tea cultivar table (茶農林登録品種一覧). PDF. Source for Cha Norin No. 30, line name F1NN13, parentage S6 x Yabukita, year 1970, breeding site Kanaya, registered use sencha, and for the No. 41 Fuushun and No. 48 Harumidori entries. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
• Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 新品種・新技術の開発・保護・普及の方針 茶 (tea cultivar development, protection and diffusion policy). PDF. Source for the prefecture cultivar composition figures, the approximately 80% Yabukita share of planted cultivar area, and the aging tea garden context. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
• My Japanese Green Tea, The Kanayamidori Tea Cultivar. Used only for the modern trade description of the cup and the Kanaya town naming note. Retrieved 8 September 2026.