Ryumaru Ome Senbei Japanese Wheat Cracker Assortment Gift Box

This box of traditional wheat crackers comes from a single senbei shop in Ome, a small city of plum groves and river gorges on the mountainous western edge of Tokyo — and it carries a story most Japanese sweets can only envy, because the senbei is named after the town, and the town is named after a tree.

At Kongōji temple in Ome stands an ancient plum tree linked by legend to the tenth-century warrior Taira no Masakado.

Its fruit, the story goes, stays stubbornly green through autumn, never ripening, never falling — ao ume, “green plum” — and in time the townspeople’s name for the tree became the name of the place itself.

The senbei honors the legend in its very shape: each cracker is molded as a plum blossom.

A word on what kind of senbei this is.

Not the salty rice cracker most associate with the word, but the wheat cracker tradition — the other, older gift lineage of Japanese senbei: a batter of carefully aged wheat dough poured into molds and baked, producing a crisp, lightly sweet, toasty cracker with a rustic depth.

It is a craft this shop describes simply as inherited, the recipe now more than a century old, made by Ryumaru since 1945 with the waters of a town known for them.

Every assortment holds the shop’s three signatures, all individually wrapped in the Japanese gift manner: the classic Ome senbei wheat cracker in its plum-blossom form, a folded miso senbei whose savory-sweet miso note is the local specialty, and small, charming ume-shiso pieces that add the tart perfume of pickled plum and shiso leaf.

Each size comes in a presentation box — the format Japanese travelers buy at the source and hand to neighbors and colleagues back home, equally at ease as a celebration gift.

Choose your box size from the options above.

Mass-market snacks show you what Japan eats. A box of handmade wheat crackers like this shows you how Japan gives.

About this item
Item Name : Ome Senbei Assortment Gift Box
Brand : Ryumaru
Item Form : Wheat Cracker
Number of Items : 14, 28 and 38 Counts (Box of 1)