Talk:Tochigi

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Page scope

Tochigi treats Tochigi Prefecture, the former province of Shimotsuke, as a cannabis growing area: Yashū hemp from the Edo period to the present, the Kanuma hemp district, and the breeding of 'Tochigishiro' from a Tochigi landrace. The prefecture as an administrative unit is treated at Tochigi Prefecture; Japan's law on cannabis at Japan.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and other reports bearing on the area here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why Tochigi is a growing area

• Hirano (Sekai Daihyakka, revised edition, entry アサ, section on hemp after the Meiji period) writes that hemp growing became concentrated in Tochigi Prefecture, with about half the national acreage in the early Shōwa years.
• Murakami and Chiba (Sekai Daihyakka, entries 鹿沼 and 粟野) place hemp between Kanuma and Tochigi from early times and at Kuchi-Awano before the Second World War.
• The prefecture's own breeding record (Takashima 1982) names the landrace of Nanma village as the parent of 'Tochigi Shiken No. 1', and the north-western mountain district as the producing district that survived the 1950s.
• The Hokkaido government's report of 2014 gives Tochigi 5.3 ha in 2012, more than 90 per cent of the national area; Kanuma City's pages (2025, 2026) place more than 90 per cent of national output in the Nagano district of Kanuma.
• The Imaichi sheet of 1901 is catalogued at the University of Colorado as "Imaichi, cult. prov. Shimotsuke".

How the border is drawn

• The line is Tochigi Prefecture, from OpenStreetMap relation 1800742: about 6,400 km², the figure in the infobox.
• Most of the sources report the crop by prefecture or by province. The Kanuma district alone (Kanuma city, about 490 km²) would match the modern growing more closely, but would leave out the 1901 Imaichi sheet, about 5 km outside the city, and the Edo- and Meiji-period growing the sources place across Shimotsuke.
• The infobox point (36.69, 139.82) is the centre of the prefecture, not a field.

Growing status

The status is Active: Tochigi had 5.3 ha of hemp and 17 hemp farms in 2012, and Kanuma City's pages of 2025 and 2026 describe hemp grown there now.

Accessions

• NPG-JPN-TOC-0019150001 (1915) and NPG-JPN-TOC-0019160001 (1916) are seed lots the United States Department of Agriculture received from Tochigi through the Yokohama Nursery Company; the 1916 inventory calls the seed Tochigi hemp.
• Anon. s.n., Imaichi (1901) is listed under the area because the Colorado duplicate of the gathering is catalogued as cultivated ("cult. prov. Shimotsuke"). The Leiden, Edinburgh and Taipei labels give the place only.

The parentage of 'Tochigishiro'

Takashima's breeding record (1982) gives the cross as a selected line of the CBDA strain, found in 1967 in a landrace of Shiroishi, Saga Prefecture, crossed with 'Tochigi Shiken No. 1', the station's 1918–1928 selection from the landrace of Nanma village. Shiroki (白木) appears in the record only as the plant type selected for in the second generation (白木型). Accounts that describe 'Tochigishiro' as a cross of a Tochigi variety called Shiroki with a non-toxic landrace do not match the record.

Names

• Yashū (野州) is the old short name of Shimotsuke province; Yashū asa is the name of its hemp.
• The 1916 lot's notes call the crop Tochigi hemp.

Sources

• Hirano, Sekai Daihyakka. The section 日本における栽培の歴史 and its sub-section on hemp after the Meiji period are signed by 平野綏; other sections of the same entry are by other authors.
• Murakami and Chiba, Sekai Daihyakka. The Kanuma passage is signed by 村上雅康, the Awano passage by 千葉立也. The Nipponica entry 鹿沼（市）, also by 村上雅康, gives the Edo-period post town and its hemp trade.
• Takashima (1982). 高島大典, 栃木県農業試験場研究報告 No. 28, pp. 47–54, with an English summary under the title A new hemp variety "Tochigishiro". The landrace grown at the time, used as the standard in its trials, is 'Minami-Oshihara No. 1' (南押原1号).
• Hokkaido Industrial Hemp Feasibility Committee (2014). The Tochigi figures (p. 16) come from the Hokkaido government's own inquiry in Tochigi in 2013.
• Hashimoto (2016). 橋本寿夫, of the agricultural promotion section of Kanuma City, in Farumashia 52(9).
• USDA inventories. Inventory No. 42 (1918), p. 18, and No. 46 (1919), p. 59; the notes on the 1916 lot are by S. Iida and Lyster H. Dewey.