The parent was a landrace. In the Akatsuchi district of Kanasago, now part of Hitachiota, farmers had been growing their own buckwheat for generations, and that population became the starting material. Seed was selected from it for size and uniformity, repeatedly, over something more than three years, and the result was registered as a prefectural recommended variety in 1985.

The technical account of what changed is dry. Thousand-grain weight went up. Uniformity improved. Quality improved. Those are the sentences in the record.

What people actually praise is neither of those things. They talk about the aroma, which is unusually strong, and a sweetness that arrives late. It is regarded as being at the top of the range for unhulled buckwheat, and it is used not only by shops in Ibaraki but by well-known soba restaurants in Tokyo.

Buckwheat has been grown around Hitachiota since the Edo period. So the story here is not one of introduction but of return: somebody went back to a field that had been producing for centuries, selected out of it grain by grain, and gave the result a name. The variety is not a new crop at all. It is the old one, looked at a great deal more carefully than before.