About

What this site does

It turns the pedigrees of Japanese crop varieties into family trees you can actually read.

The data already exists and is already public. Japan's national research organisation publishes crossing combinations and pedigrees. But it publishes them as breeding-line designations such as "Etsunan No.17" — not a form anyone outside the field can read.

Research institutions do not translate, because their purpose is preserving accuracy, not dissemination. The data is there. It is public. And because it is nobody's job, nobody has made it readable. That is the one job this site takes on.

Continuity over revenue

This is a project of well over a thousand pages, measured in years. The first release went out with no monetisation at all. Advertising may be added to keep the site running (see the next section), but it will never be allowed to distort which varieties are presented or how.

About advertising

This site is free; there is no registration and no paywall. To cover running costs, advertising such as Google AdSense may be displayed.

Two things will not change if ads appear.

• Advertising does not decide what is listed or how it is written. The only criterion for inclusion is whether a primary source exists
• Ads stay distinguishable from content. Ad slots are not mixed into the body text, and no advertiser's name is written into the text itself

Where an affiliate link is used, the page says that it is an affiliate link.

About the use of AI

The text and the pedigree charts on this site are produced using AI (Claude) as a tool. Here is where it is and is not used.

• Used for: drafting readings of source documents, shaping prose, translating into three languages, writing the programs that build the pages, and checking the data
• Not used for: deciding facts — parentage, year of crossing, breeding station, sources. Each of these is checked against the primary document itself and carries a link to it. No line is drawn because an AI said so
• Nothing is written that the source does not say. Mother and father are asserted only where the source states them in words
• Any image generated with AI is labelled as AI-generated on the page

Saying where AI is used, and where it is not, is more useful to someone who wants to verify the site than hiding the fact that it is used at all.

The trees we can draw, and the ones we cannot

Rice, wheat, potatoes and fruit trees are bred largely by public institutions, so their pedigrees are published. Those trees can be drawn.

Many vegetables are F1 hybrids whose parent lines are trade secrets of private seed companies. Those trees cannot be drawn. This site covers why they cannot be as well. That is more honest than showing only what happens to be visible.

If you find an error

Please tell us. A free, well-meaning site is exactly the kind that never gets corrected — and so goes on being wrong without noticing. A correction is not a failure here. It is the site working.

Who runs this

IDEA Technology (ideatech.biz)

Contact, and corrections: info@hinshu.jp

We are not agricultural scientists

The person behind this site is not a plant breeder or an agronomist. That is precisely why nothing here is copied from secondary write-ups.

Every parent-child link on this site was taken from a primary source — NARO, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, or a prefectural agricultural experiment station — and carries its own citation, one link at a time.

In place of professional credentials, we offer something else: you can check our work. Source URLs appear on every page, and the underlying data is published as JSON. If we are wrong, anyone can find out and tell us.