Where can I find this brand of buckwheat tea?

January 19, 2014 6:31 PM

Where can I find this brand of buckwheat tea? I tried Googling the phone number without any luck. All the text is in Japanese, I think, so I can't dig any deeper than that.
posted by archagon to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Can you give us some more clues like where you got it? Where you are located? Can you take a picture of the back (I may have it but I put it in a jar and just pasted the back label on it)?
posted by melissam at 6:41 PM on January 19, 2014

Response by poster: I'm in the Bay Area. My mom's coworker gave her this tea, and I don't have any more information than that. Here's the back. Here's a bit of hidden text under the front label.
posted by archagon at 6:51 PM on January 19, 2014

It's "dattan soba cha," I guess AKA "Tartary buckwheat tea," from Saga prefecture. But I can't easily read more than that, and googling all of the above in Japanese does not reveal any similar labels. At least, as far as I could tell. (I'm not fluent, I don't know all that much about tea, etc.)
posted by wintersweet at 8:28 PM on January 19, 2014

Oh, and adding Sakuma (サクマ, under the label) in either English or Japanese didn't do anything either...
posted by wintersweet at 8:29 PM on January 19, 2014

Seconding wintersweets translation. Google it with no space between dattansoba cha brought up lots of pictures of tea. I don't have Japanese fonts enabled to search in Japanese for you. You could always use a computer program to try and call the phone number and maybe you'll get someone who speaks enough English to give you a name of a distributor.
posted by AlexiaSky at 8:49 PM on January 19, 2014

I found (strangely enough) a Google+ page but it seems to be a generic placeholder. They don't appear to have any real web presence in Japanese. The company name is （有）佐熊製茶園 (sakuma-sei saen). The other stuff on the front is basically "order factory direct, dial toll-free," with the phone number and address.

It's entirely possible that there is no distribution for this brand in the US. But you might try calling the various Japanese markets around the Bay Area (Mitsuwa, Nijiya, Tokyo Fish Market, etc) with the clues so far.
posted by Standard Orange at 10:30 PM on January 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you all! This may be harder than I thought. I might try calling around.
posted by archagon at 10:48 PM on January 19, 2014

Yeah, the tea producer has no Japanese web presence to speak of (googling their name brings up directory sites with nothing more than the address and phone number). The "dattan soba cha" type of tea seems relatively common however, and if you search on the Rakuten global site lots of shops ship to the US, so if you're not picky about the specific brand you can try buying some online.
posted by monocot at 5:46 AM on January 20, 2014