Fruit Culture

Fruit is one of the most common gifts in Japan. It is given in the summer and year-end gift seasons (ochūgen and oseibo), as a visiting gift, and when calling on the sick. Specialist fruit shops, department-store food halls and farm shipping services sell boxed fruit in graded qualities, and prestige varieties such as musk melons command very high prices at the first auctions of the season, which are reported in the news.

Fruit parlours, cafés attached to fruit shops, serve fruit parfaits, fruit sandwiches (furūtsu sando) of cream and fruit in white bread, and fresh juices. Many rural areas also sell fruit directly from orchards or at roadside stations (michi no eki).

Fruit follows the seasons closely, and the first fruit of a season (hatsumono) has always been prized. Strawberries, grown in greenhouses, run from winter into spring; cherries appear in early summer, followed by melons, peaches and watermelon in high summer; grapes, pears and figs in late summer; persimmons, apples and chestnuts in autumn; and mikan through the winter, when a bowl of them on the kotatsu table is a classic image.

Climate and history have made many prefectures synonymous with a fruit. Prefectural research stations continue to breed new varieties, and branded fruit is a significant source of rural income.

Beyond eating fruit, Japan grows many aromatic citrus fruits used mainly for their juice and zest in cooking: yuzu, above all from Kōchi, sudachi from Tokushima and kabosu from Ōita. Southern Kyushu and Okinawa grow tropical fruit such as mangoes, pineapples and passion fruit. Persimmons are eaten fresh and dried as hoshigaki, a traditional autumn preserve hung under the eaves of farmhouses.