Tsuyuhikari: The Shizuoka Cultivar Bred for Character

Every tea cultivar is an answer to a question somebody was asking at the time. Read Shizuoka's breeding history in order and you can watch the question change. In the 1960s the prefecture bred for yield and for timing, because demand was climbing and the processing machinery was getting bigger. In the 1970s and 1980s it bred for cold, because the frost kept taking the crop.

Then the bubble burst, demand went flat, and the question changed again. Shizuoka started breeding for flavour. Tsuyuhikari is one of the two cultivars the prefecture's own breeding programme names as the product of that turn. One of the men who wrote that history is also on its registration record, as one of its breeders.

Key Takeaways

• Tsuyuhikari (つゆひかり) is a Shizuoka Prefecture sencha cultivar. The prefecture itself holds the registration, No. 11103, granted on 17 March 2003.
• It came from a 1970 cross of the breeding line Shizu-7132 with Asatsuyu as the pollen parent, and carried the trial name 70-30-302 for three decades before it was named.
• Its resistance to anthracnose is rated extremely strong, and the prefectural account draws the consequence out loud: agrochemical use can be reduced, which suits environmentally friendly growing.
• The Shizuoka breeding record singles out its liquor colour, writing it as エメラルドグリーン, emerald green.
• It is not all upside. Red scorch does appear on it and has to be actively controlled.
• Shizuoka plantings went from 31 hectares in 2007 to 111 hectares in 2018, while the prefecture's total tea area fell from 19,902 to 16,500 hectares over the same years.

What is the Tsuyuhikari tea cultivar?

Tsuyuhikari is a slightly early Japanese green tea cultivar, bred for sencha in Shizuoka Prefecture and registered under Japan's Seed and Seedling Law. The breeding record knows it for two things: a vivid liquor colour, and unusually strong resistance to anthracnose.

The registration record is unambiguous about who owns it. The applicant and registered holder is 静岡県, Shizuoka Prefecture itself, at the prefectural offices in Shizuoka City. The application went in on 14 September 2000, was published on 13 March 2001, and the registration was granted on 17 March 2003 as plant variety No. 11103, with a breeder's right running 40 years (農林水産省 品種登録データベース, registration 11103).

Six people are named on that record as having bred it: 倉貫幸一, 中村順行, 日高保, 青島洋一, 青野真里子 and 永谷隆行. Hold on to the second name. Yoriyuki Nakamura went on to write the account of Shizuoka's breeding programme that this article leans on most heavily, which means the history and the plant come from the same hands.

Between the cross and the name it spent thirty years as a number. It was carried through clonal comparison trials and recommended cultivar determination trials as line 70-30-302, and became an official Shizuoka recommended cultivar in April 2001 (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり, reprinted from 月刊「茶」, 静岡県茶業会議所). For where this plant sits among the rest, our guide to Japanese tea cultivars and the plants behind matcha and green tea maps the wider field.

Where Tsuyuhikari came from

Tsuyuhikari came from a cross made in 1970 at the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station, using the breeding line Shizu-7132 as the seed parent and Asatsuyu as the pollen parent.

The two Tier 1 accounts agree and describe it from different angles, which is the kind of corroboration worth pointing at. The prefectural account names both parents outright, 静七一三二 as the mother and あさつゆ as the father, crossed in 1970 (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり). The national registration record is written from the applicant's side. It says the plant was raised by crossing Asatsuyu into a breeding line the applicant already owned, and it gives the breeding site as Kikugawa, in the Ogasa district of Shizuoka (農林水産省 品種登録データベース). Same cross, two vantage points.

The name carries its mother in it. That story belongs to the parent plant rather than to this one, so we tell it in full on our profile of Asatsuyu. What matters here is that Asatsuyu is a plant famous for sweetness and umami and almost absent from Japan's fields, and that its genes kept arriving in the cultivars that replaced it. Yutakamidori, now second in Japan by planted area, is another of them.

One clarification, because this is where write-ups tend to overreach. Tsuyuhikari does not carry a 茶農林 number, and neither do several other cultivars in this series. That is a fact about which register a plant went into, not a verdict on it. Japan's Chanorin list and the national handbook cover a particular, nationally funded slice of breeding work. Tsuyuhikari went the prefectural route instead, bred and registered by Shizuoka under the Seed and Seedling Law. That is the whole story of its paperwork, and it is worth stating plainly rather than reading anything into an absence.

The era that produced it: when Shizuoka started breeding for character

Shizuoka's breeding programme changed its objective roughly every twenty years, and Tsuyuhikari belongs to the era when the objective became flavour.

Nakamura's account of the programme lays the eras out in a single table, pairing each period with the conditions driving it and the cultivars that came out of it. Read down that table and the logic of an entire prefecture's agriculture becomes visible (中村順行, 静岡県立大学茶学総合研究センター, 静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用).

The first era gave Shizuoka plants like Kanayamidori, chosen against a backdrop of rising domestic demand and larger processing machinery. The second answered a harder problem, repeated frost damage against flat demand, and produced Okuhikari alongside Sayamakaori. Those were cultivars bred so a crop would survive and pay.

The Heisei row is the one that changed the terms. Its objective is written as the adoption of cultivars with distinctive aroma and flavour. Its background is the collapse of the bubble economy and the diversification of what people wanted. It names two plants: Kashun and Tsuyuhikari. This is the moment a prefecture with a commodity problem stopped trying to grow more tea and started trying to grow tea that tasted like something in particular. Shizuoka's other aroma-forward answer from around the same stretch, Soufuu, came at the question from a different direction entirely.

Bred to need less spraying

Tsuyuhikari's resistance to anthracnose is rated extremely strong, and because of it the prefectural account says agrochemical use can be reduced, making the plant suited to environmentally friendly cultivation.

That sentence is doing something most cultivar descriptions never do. Plenty of records list a disease rating. This one draws the practical consequence in the same breath: 農薬削減が可能であり、環境に優しい栽培に向く品種 (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり). Nakamura's profile card gives the same rating in the compressed form the breeding programme uses, 炭疽病に極強, extremely strong against anthracnose (中村順行, 静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用).

I want to be careful about what this does and does not mean, because it is exactly the kind of fact that gets stretched in marketing copy. Reduction is not absence. The source says spraying can be reduced, not eliminated, and nothing here makes Tsuyuhikari an organic plant or a pesticide free one. Those are decisions a grower makes, not properties a seedling has. What the cultivar does is widen the room a grower has to make them.

And the same record is honest about the other side of the ledger. Resistance to blister blight is rated only somewhat strong, and red scorch does appear on this plant and needs active control (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり). A cultivar that shrugs off one disease can still hand you another. Cold is the better news: its resistance to red wither is rated stronger than Yabukita's, and coming into bud about two days ahead of Yabukita it is early without being reckless about it.

Emerald green, and what the record actually says

The Shizuoka breeding record singles out liquor colour as Tsuyuhikari's distinguishing feature, describing it as 鮮やかな水色, a vivid liquor, and writing the colour itself as エメラルドグリーン, emerald green (中村順行, 静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用).

I am quoting rather than tasting on purpose. We do not sell this tea and I have not cupped a single cultivar Tsuyuhikari, so emerald green here is the breeding programme's verdict on its own plant, not a One with Tea tasting note. The full line rates its aroma and taste as on a par with Yabukita and then says that it is especially the vivid emerald green liquor that sets it apart (中村順行, 静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用).

The national registration record reaches the same conclusion in the flat language of an official assessment. It rates the finished product's shape, colour and lustre, aroma, liquor colour and taste all at 上, superior. It then establishes the plant's distinctness against Yabukita, Kurasawa and Sayamakaori, resting that on two details: the long ovate shape of its mature leaves, and the low waviness of the leaf margin (農林水産省 品種登録データベース).

There is a processing note attached to the colour that matters if you ever meet this tea. Leaning the steam deeper brings out a clean green in the cup, which puts Tsuyuhikari on friendly terms with fukamushi, the deep steamed style. The prefectural account adds a caution in the same passage: the manufacturing method still deserves close study, and steaming degree and leaf temperature need watching, because the fresh aroma is the thing most easily lost.

What Tsuyuhikari asks of the grower

Tsuyuhikari is rated relatively easy to manage thanks to its disease and cold resistance, but its extremely strong vigour (樹勢極強) creates one specific problem a grower has to work against (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり).

The plant is rated 極強, extremely strong, for vigour. Its habit is intermediate, its spread is large, and it is a heavy bud type, meaning it puts its energy into fewer, heavier buds rather than many light ones. Yield is rated high (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり). That is a breeding record rating rather than a measured tonnage, and it is worth reading it as a relative judgement rather than a number.

The catch is that heavy bud type is a tendency, not a setting. Because the plant is so vigorous it drifts further that way on its own, so growers have to train and prune it deliberately to bring the bud count back up. A bush left to its own preferences gives you fewer, larger buds than you want.

Its adaptability is genuinely broad. The prefectural account puts it as suited to the whole of Shizuoka. It also notes that being slightly early, it pairs well with Yabukita. That lets a grower spread the picking window across two plants instead of asking everything of one week. For a sense of the ground all this sits on, our guide to the Shizuoka tea region covers the geography. Mohei Honda's farm is one of the places we have actually stood in it.

The one cultivar gaining ground while Shizuoka's tea shrinks

Between 2007 and 2018 Tsuyuhikari's planted area in Shizuoka rose from 31 hectares to 111 hectares, while the prefecture's total tea garden area fell from 19,902 hectares to 16,500.

Those figures come from the prefecture's own table of planted area by recommended cultivar, and every one of them is a dated survey reading rather than a running total (中村順行, 静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用). The 2008 reading is given elsewhere in the same document with a decimal, 41.4 hectares, which is a useful check that the columns line up.

Set that rise against what the rest of the table is doing and it stands out. Over those same eleven years Yabukita fell from 18,423 hectares to 15,104. Sayamakaori fell. Kanayamidori fell. Okuhikari held roughly flat. Going row by row through the named cultivars, Tsuyuhikari's gain of 80 hectares is the largest in the table. It is still a small plant in absolute terms, well under one percent of the prefecture, and it is the one moving in the opposite direction to everything around it.

Part of that is deliberate promotion rather than pure demand. Nakamura's account carries Omaezaki City as a worked example, where the city's tea merchants, the JA co-operative and the local government pushed Tsuyuhikari together as a single effort, including selling it in drip bag form. A cultivar does not spread on its merits alone. Somebody has to decide to plant it, and somebody has to decide to sell it.

What does Tsuyuhikari taste like, and will you see it on a tin?

Tsuyuhikari is described in the prefectural record as having a distinctive fresh aroma (さわやかな香気) and a mild, gentle taste (滋味は温和), with first flush leaf showing a bright green colour and lustre (世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり).

Notice how restrained that is. The record does not claim this plant out-tastes Yabukita. It rates aroma and flavour as on a par with it and puts the difference in the cup's appearance and in the particular character of the aroma. For a cultivar bred in the era of breeding for character, that is a modest and rather believable claim, and it reads more honestly than the language a marketing team would have reached for.

As for finding it, be realistic. One with Tea does not sell a single cultivar Tsuyuhikari. Most Japanese sencha is blended, and cultivar names reach the label far less often than cultivar enthusiasts would like. Your likeliest routes are a Shizuoka producer selling single cultivar lots, or an Omaezaki tea shop, where there has been a coordinated push behind this plant for years. If a tin does not name a cultivar, that is not a red flag. It is just how most of the category works.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tsuyuhikari tea?

Tsuyuhikari is a Japanese green tea cultivar bred in Shizuoka Prefecture for sencha. It buds about two days earlier than Yabukita, is rated extremely strong against anthracnose, and is singled out in the Shizuoka breeding record for a vivid emerald green liquor.

When was Tsuyuhikari registered?

It was registered on 17 March 2003 as plant variety No. 11103 under Japan's Seed and Seedling Law, on an application filed on 14 September 2000. Shizuoka Prefecture is the registered holder, and the breeder's right runs for 40 years.

What are Tsuyuhikari's parents?

It came from a 1970 cross at the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Experiment Station between the breeding line Shizu-7132 as the seed parent and Asatsuyu as the pollen parent. Asatsuyu is also the parent of Yutakamidori and Saemidori.

Is Tsuyuhikari good for organic growing?

Its anthracnose resistance is rated extremely strong, and the prefectural account states that agrochemical use can be reduced as a result, which suits environmentally friendly cultivation. That is a reduction rather than an elimination, and it is not an organic certification. Red scorch still appears on the plant and needs active control.

Why is Tsuyuhikari's tea called emerald green?

Because the Shizuoka breeding record describes it that way. Its profile of the cultivar rates aroma and taste as on a par with Yabukita and says that the vivid liquor colour, written as emerald green, is its distinguishing feature.

Does Tsuyuhikari have a 茶農林 number?

No. It was bred and registered by Shizuoka Prefecture under the Seed and Seedling Law rather than through the nationally funded Chanorin registration route. That is a difference in which register the plant entered, and it says nothing about the cultivar's quality.

Can you buy single cultivar Tsuyuhikari?

It exists but is uncommon, especially outside Japan, and most sencha is sold blended without naming a cultivar. One with Tea does not currently offer a single cultivar Tsuyuhikari.

A note from me

What pulled me into this one was not the tea. It was the table.

Seeing a prefecture's breeding objectives laid out era by era, yield, then cold, then flavour, made something click that no single cultivar profile ever had. These plants are not just a list of names with tasting notes attached. Each one is a record of what a group of people were worried about in a particular decade. And the fact that Shizuoka eventually got to worry about flavour is a kind of luxury the earlier generations never had.

I also like that the honest version of Tsuyuhikari is a little less exciting than the marketing version would be. It tastes about as good as Yabukita. Its real distinction is a colour and a disease rating. It needs pruning it would rather not have and it still catches red scorch. That is a real plant, described by people with no reason to oversell it, and I find that more interesting than a tidier story would be.

We do not sell this tea. I wrote it up because the cultivar series is meant to be a map of the whole field, not a catalogue of what sits in our shop. A map with only our own stock on it would not be worth much to anybody.

Sources

• 中村順行, 静岡県立大学茶学総合研究センター, 「静岡県におけるチャの品種育成とその活用」. A lecture by one of the cultivar's six named breeders. Used here for:

  • The breeding era table and the objective set for each era
  • The Tsuyuhikari profile card: 2003 registration year, the Shizu-7132 × Asatsuyu pedigree, the slightly early rating of −2, and the resistance ratings
  • The emerald green liquor description
  • The Shizuoka planted area series and the total tea garden area series
  • The Omaezaki City example

• 公益財団法人 世界緑茶協会, つゆひかり, reprinted from 月刊「茶」(静岡県茶業会議所), by 小柳津勤. Written while the name was still provisional. Used here for:

  • The 1970 cross and the named parents
  • The trial line name 70-30-302, the 2000 registration application, and the April 2001 recommended cultivar date
  • The growth habit and heavy bud description
  • The disease and cold profile, including the red scorch weakness
  • The pesticide reduction statement
  • The quality and fukamushi description, and the cultivation and processing cautions

• 農林水産省, 品種登録データベース, 登録番号 11103 つゆひかり. The registration record itself. Used here for:

  • The application, publication and registration dates, and the 40 year breeder's right
  • Shizuoka Prefecture as registered holder, the six named breeders, and the Kikugawa breeding site
  • The full characteristic description
  • The 上 ratings for appearance, aroma, liquor colour and taste
  • The distinctness comparison against Yabukita, Kurasawa and Sayamakaori

All three sources are Tier 1: a national ministry register, a prefectural university research centre, and the prefecture's tea industry council via the World Green Tea Association. All were read in the original Japanese on 10 September 2026.

Written by Christian, founder of One with Tea. We source organic Japanese tea directly from growers and write about what we find, including the teas we do not sell.