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Fujisaka No.4
Parents: Norin No.1 (seed parent) and Ou No.200 (pollen parent). Bred by Ou Testing Site, National Agricultural Experiment Station.
Fukei No.19 FKE0000190
Pedigree
Skip the diagram and read the listParents
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Norin No.1 seed parent
Hokuriku No.4 ・ High yielding with good grain quality and eating quality; susceptible to rice blast
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Ou No.200 pollen parent
Descendants
Relations are counted along the shortest line of descent. The rows in the diagram follow the order of crosses, so a variety with more than one path down can sit lower in the diagram than its relation here suggests.
Norin No.1 is the mother here
"Paddy Rice Fujisaka No.4" was crossed at the Ou Testing Site of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Agricultural Experiment Station, taking "Norin No.1" as the mother and "Ou No.200" as the father, and in 1942 its F3 seed was distributed.
Paddy Rice Norin No.1 appears on this site almost always as a father. It is Koshihikari's father, and in the Hokuriku and Tohoku lines added in this batch it was the father every time.
In Fujisaka No.4 it is the mother.
NARO's listing holds 263 varieties with Norin No.1 as a parent. Of those, the ones where the side can be confirmed in words are the ones whose historical document survives. Being numerous and having the role recorded are two different things.
The year of the cross is not written
What the document gives is "in 1942 its F3 seed was distributed", and no more.
If the F3 went out in 1942 the cross must have been some years earlier — but that year is not written.
This site records no cross year for it. An estimate would land around 1939 or 1940, but a year arrived at by arithmetic is not put down as the source's year.
There is one more gap in the text.
Under the line name "Fukei No.19" from 1945 its regional suitability was tested, and in [month missing] 1948 it was named "Paddy Rice Fujisaka No.4".
The month is left blank.
479 characters in all
The whole historical document runs to 479 characters — alongside Paddy Rice Norin No.50's 476, the thinnest record on this site.
Even so, there is one place where it commits itself.
Resistance to panicle-neck blast is strong and its cold tolerance also fairly strong; as a mid-maturing variety it is the safest of them all.
"The safest of the mid-maturing varieties." In a short document, this alone takes the form of an assertion.
Immediately after, though:
Its fertiliser tolerance is not very strong, so while it suits standard and late-planted cultivation, under heavy fertiliser it is inferior to Norin No.1.
Give it more fertiliser and it loses to its mother. Safe but not expansive — that is the shape of the variety.
The Fujisaka lines out of the Ou Testing Site were long used in Aomori for breeding cold tolerance. Yamaseshirazu's parent Fujisaka No.2 comes from here too.
Sources disagree
How the seed parent of Norin No.1 is written
- Moritawase, written 森多早生 — イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「北陸4号」
- Moritawase, written 森田早稲 — イネ品種データベース検索システム「北陸4号（水稲農林1号）」品種来歴文書
The two spellings appear in the same NARO database, in the pedigree field and in the historical document respectively. We use the pedigree field's spelling and list the other.
How Kamenoo No.4 is written
- 亀の尾4号 — イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「陸羽132号」
- 亀ノ尾4号 (the common spelling)
We follow the NARO database. The commonly seen spelling uses a katakana no; we prefer the spelling we can cite.
On naming
Variety names are proper nouns. We use a name in this language only where a published source for it can be cited; otherwise the Japanese name stands.
What we have not yet confirmed
We have not looked below the top twenty
The site covers the twenty most widely planted varieties of the 2024 crop and the varieties that connect them back to Koshihikari. Many descendants exist below that line; we have not yet verified them against primary sources.
The year Masshigura was crossed
Neither Aomori Prefecture's table of recommended-variety characteristics nor the NARO database gives the year Masshigura (Aokei No.138) was crossed. The cross itself, Ou No.341 / Yamagata No.40, and its adoption as a recommended variety in fiscal 2004 are confirmed from primary sources; the year of the cross is not. For the same reason we do not say which parent was the seed parent. On 8 October 2026 we went back to the breeder's own side. The Masshigura page in the variety database of the Aomori Prefectural Industrial Technology Research Center's Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute carries a heading reading “The origin of Masshigura” — with nothing under it. Of the institute's bulletins, only No.42 (2015) onward are online, and the issue that would hold the breeding report for Masshigura is not among them. So the year of the cross is absent from the breeder's own published material as well.
Sources
The source document is in Japanese.
- イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「越南17号」 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- イネ品種データベース検索システム「北陸4号（水稲農林1号）」品種来歴文書 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「北陸4号」 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- イネ品種データベース検索システム「北陸4号を親とする品種一覧」（全263行） — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-10-01
- イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「陸羽132号」 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- イネ品種データベース検索システム 交配系譜図「陸羽20号」 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- コシヒカリのエピソード1 〜交配から系統の育成まで〜 — Niigata Prefectural Government ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-09-10
- イネ品種データベース検索システム「ふ系19号（水稲藤坂4号）」品種来歴文書 — Institute of Crop Science, NARO ・ primary source ・ accessed 2026-10-01