Region · in Japan
Nagasaki
Nagasaki is the door Japanese tea left the country through. The first tea shipped to Europe is generally dated to 1610 and to a Dutch consignment out of Hirado, in what is now this prefecture, and from 1641 the trading post at Dejima was Japan's only opening to the West for two hundred years. What the prefecture grows today is a separate and much smaller story with a single centre: Sonogi, on the hills above Omura bay, and its steamed tamaryokucha.
What grows here
Steamed tamaryokucha, the curled green tea that skips the needle-shaping roll, made almost entirely around Higashisonogi and Sonogi. Sencha is made in the prefecture too, but Sonogi is what the name means in practice.
How it got here
The Dutch East India Company set up its factory at Hirado in 1609, and the consignment credited as Europe's first tea left from there the following year, though the same voyage bought again at Macau and some accounts credit that leaf instead. After the country closed, Dejima in Nagasaki harbour was the only channel left open, so what Europe knew of Japanese tea for two hundred years came through this one port. When the ports reopened, a Nagasaki merchant named Oura Kei is credited with restarting the trade, shipping six tons of Japanese tea to Britain in 1859 and setting off the export boom that carried Japanese green tea to America.