Japanese Tea Cultivars

Last updated 2 August 2024
This is a living document aggregating information about the Japanese Tea Cultivars. The following resources and spreadsheet will be updated when new sources or cultivars are added.

Most of this information is only available in Japanese, sometimes in hidden corners of research or governmental documents. This is a resource that aggregates basic information from those sources and the few in English.

Below, you will first see a short list of the sources used to obtain the information compiled in the spreadsheet. You will find a description of the type of material as well as the author, if any. The spreadsheet provides basic information on the different Japanese tea cultivars, with names both in English and Japanese. It also includes information that can be found elsewhere, but needs to be cross-referenced with other materials, like breeding and registration names or the breeding year if available.

As of now, the list of the resources used is available to anyone, with the spreadsheet also being available. The aim of the blog is to promote tea, its culture and the craftsmanship behind it. Currently, we are sitting around at 60% completion for the initial round of data points. If you would like to suggest changes or improvements, please feel free to email us.

Source materials in Japanese

Tea Research Journal published by the Japanese Society of Tea Science and Technology. With its first issue in 1953, at the same time as the first round of tea cultivar registrations, the Tea Research Journal has been published as an academic journal specializing in tea. Here you will find a huge amount of information regarding tea, pests, soil, and a lot more technical details on tea.
J-STAGE is a platform for scholarly publications in Japan. It is developed and managed by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. You can consult, for example, the Tea Research Journal archive mentioned above in J-STAGE. It also provides a great place to extract citations for the many research papers on cultivars or related topics. In particular because some papers are released through prefectural research stations that might not publish their research through the same channels as the ones managed under MAFF.
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) Variety registration website. For any cultivar or varieties that have been breed and registered in Japan, this website includes a browsable registry of them. For tea cultivars, not much information about the plant itself is presented. Only a brief description of some characteristics, but it's a great resource to check registration years, rights to the intellectual property of the cultivar, breeding group or individual among others.
AgriKnowledge website. This is an indispensable resource when it comes to researching the cultivars personally. It is an integrated search engine for the multiple databases of MAFF. Which makes it easy to search for different papers or information about a cultivar across many places with one single search.
Wachaclub online shop blog. The online shop of Wachaclub, a shop specializing in tea and tea sweets, has an extensive collection of information about tea. History, tea types, processing, and also cultivars. The cultivar section often includes a few information points difficult to find anywhere else, like in the case of unregistered tea cultivars.
Japan National Diet Library (NDL) website. NDL allows you to search for materials and digital materials held by the National Diet Library of Japan. That includes virtually any book, manuscript, copies of old texts held by the many institutions in Japan. It makes a great resource to use for the times when a research paper cites documents about cultivars, but the document is nowhere to be found on the other resources listed. Usually, if it was published, some reference might bring you back on track, usually in an obscure journal publication only accessible physically through libraries. NDL helps you locate those resources, sometimes having digitised versions of those.
Minorien website resources. Minorien is a tea retailer with an intensive part of their website dedicated to education. The contents vary from history to processing, and it also includes a rundown of what a cultivar is. In that section, they created an extremely useful PDF table with many cultivars, its development names and year of registration. This resource has proven a cornerstone in keeping track of some data points and I have used it extensively to cross-check its information against the official documents like release papers.
Tea Cultivars book, 茶の品種 in Japanese. This book might be one of the few published books abut tea cultivars. This new edition was released in 2019 by the Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Industry Association Chamber. The book is an extremely useful resource to learn about Japanese tea cultivars, it is my preferred source of information when cross-referencing information with the release papers in the websites and registries mentioned above. The book is unfortunately only in Japanese and only sold in Japan as far as I have seen. If you live in Japan or are interested in getting a copy, the following are two of the places I found that sell it. Shizuoka Prefectural Tea Industry Association Chamber website and Ruralnet bookstore website.
Encyclopedia of Tea, 茶の事典 in Japanese. Ōmori, Masashi, editor. Cha No Jiten Encyclopedia of Tea. Shohan, Asakura Shoten, 2017. A great book with ample details on all the aspects of tea production in Japan, from farming to cultivars, tea types, supply chain and more.

Source materials in English

For English resources in tea there are several books, publications, and websites that provide great information and educational content in them. As for cultivars, though, there are mainly two that stand as cornerstones of the few resources in english related to Japanese tea cultivars.

Japanese Tea Sommelier website. For anyone interested in Japanese tea from a point of view of sourcing, cultivars and regionality, the blog from Florent is an absolutely indispensable resource. His article on Japanese Tea Cultivars is probably the most extensive piece of information in English on the topic. His article is the main source of inspiration for creating this version of a resource for Japanese tea cultivars myself. While the technical content like years might be the same, for obvious reasons, I wanted to add on his work by adding other data points like the breeding year and development names used before registration. I also want to mention that while I consulted his work heavily, the main source of information has been the original release papers published in Japanese by the respective institutions. Then using Florent’s article as a reference to cross-check many of the data points. In case of inconsistencies, a “?” has been written on the spreadsheet, and the data inputed has always been the one written in the scientific papers.
My Japanese Green Tea website. Ricardo, the brain behind the blog, also has a useful table on the different Japanese tea cultivars, separated by which registry they are under. Which is not an easy feat as some are in both, only in one or in none as is the case of unregistered cultivars. With some, it's difficult to figure out exactly where they are registered, even in the official registry operated by MAFF mentioned above. He periodically adds cultivar specific posts on his blog, with a brief description of the plant characteristics, history and tasting notes. Same as with Florent, some information will be identical, but I have only used Ricardo's website as a way to cross-check the data from the official registries against his list. In case of inconsistencies, a “?” has been written on the spreadsheet, and the data inputed has always been the one written in the scientific papers.

Other resources

Google Scholar. It has proved useful in a few cases where searching around the Japanese databases didn't return any substantial amount of information. Although only used a couple of times, I found it beneficial when looking for citations for a particular cultivar and follow that citation to get to the original release paper, for example. Some minor, prefectural cultivars are notoriously difficult to find information on, both registered or unregistered.

Table of Japanese Tea Cultivars

The following spreadsheet will be updated when I find out new information on cultivars. Most of this information is only available in Japanese, sometimes in hidden corners of research or governmental documents. This is a resource that aggregates basic information from those sources and the few available in English.

It also includes information that can be found elsewhere, but needs to be cross-referenced with other materials, like breeding and registration names or the breeding year if available.