Nanadan, Organic Asamushi Okumidori Sencha is a Yunomi collaboration with one of our oldest, most trusted customers, Macha Tea Company in Madison, Wisconsin. We tested dozens of candidates from our extensive supplier network to finally find this delicious, lightly steamed, beautifully shaped premium sencha. This sencha uses an extra early April harvest of tea leaves shaded for a few days for a splash of umami, and is lightly steamed to preserve the delicate needle shape that can be obtained only from leaves as young as these. The okumidori cultivar has come under the spotlight recently among Japanese tea experts here in Japan and abroad. It produces a deep green color and a naturally sweet flavor. THE NAME, NANADAN Our partner, Macha Tea Company, submitted this tea leaf to the North American Tea Championships where it won 3rd place in the Sencha Origin Authentic category despite being a lightly steamed, therefore light-bodied tea. As a challenger in this field, and because the cultivation origin of the leaves, Kirishima, Kagoshima, is a rising star in the Japanese tea industry, we have named this tea "Nanadan" or "7th rank". The name is taken from the character "Otake Nanadan" ("the 7th rank Otake"), the challenger in Nobel Prize winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari's masterpiece, The Master of Go (Meijin in Japanese), depicting the epic 6-month match between the unbeaten Igo (a Japanese board game) master Honinbo Shusai, and Otake Nanadan, the rising star in the world of Igo.