flameraven | WTF Japan: #1 (Reply)

So, with an absence of really interesting things happening lately, I’m going to start writing about some of the weird (or unexpected) things I’m seeing here in Japan.

The first thing I’ll talk about is something that’s giving me a bit of trouble—namely, the cost of food, particularly produce. Normally, produce is all I eat. Fruits and veggies, bread and pasta, that’s most of my diet right there. Here… that’s not really an option.

Fruit is the worst of it. The most obvious expense are the melons—a watermelon (suika), which is only half the size of one you’d find in the US (about the size of a basketball), goes for a cool $30. I’m told they’re not in season yet, and when they are, they go for about $15. Because that’s… such an improvement. Watermelons in the US are what, maybe $5 in the summer? And they’re a lot bigger than the ones you find here. Cantelopes are about $8 or $9 each as well, and there are a few other melons which I’m less familiar with, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any go for less than $8 each.

The melons are infamously expensive (if you bring a melon to someone’s house as a gift, you’re a seriously generous person), but the rest of the fruit is just as bad. Apples may be huge here, softball-sized instead of the ones you see at home, but they’re also almost $4 each. The cheapest apples I saw were a pack of five for about $5, and they bruised ridiculously fast. A pack of strawberries are $5 or so each. The station grocery recently got American cherries in stock—they run $5 for less than a pint, and $8 or so for a full pint. Japanese cherries (sakuranbo), though, are almost $10 (980yen) for the same amount. And on the same scale as the melons, I saw a single mango selling for nearly $24. (See the pic above.)

Even if you do splurge and buy some of the fruit, it doesn’t keep for more than a day or maybe two. Keleih has spent more on food than I have, but she’s been complaining that when buying bananas, she gets a bunch for about $5, but that they don’t stay good long enough for her to eat them—they bruise and brown almost immediately.

Vegetables aren’t quite as bad, but if you don’t want to spend a fortune, you have to buy Japanese-grown veggies only. A daikon the size of a baseball bat is only $2, but that same $2 will only buy you a handful of peas or green beans—a problem for me, as I’d originally planned on buying veggies to mix in with pasta. However, I won’t spend the $8 or more it would take to get a pound of vegetables, and as far as I can tell, they don’t do frozen vegetables. At least, I haven’t seen any.

I talked to Yuuhei about this, because he asked what surprised me in Japan, and this was one of the biggest things. (I mean, I knew that fruit was expensive when I came here the first time, but I wasn’t the one paying for groceries then, so it didn’t really sink in as much.) His response was that the Japanese like to have the best fruits possible. And I mean, this is true, the fruits are delicious if you buy them. You are getting great fruit for your money.

However, I’m still not sure the trade-off is worth it. The labor involved in getting this perfect fruit is apparently huge—I’m no expert on the subject, but I’ve seen the apple trees which are bent into perfect T-shapes so that the fruit gets more sun and can grow bigger. Brian tells me that they actually cut off all the smaller apples so that the ones left can grow even bigger. And the watermelons are apparently hand-rotated so they’re perfectly round. (I think square watermelons were also considered, since they’d be easier to ship.) Add that to the fact that Japan has to import a lot of the fruits, and you get these ridiculously high costs.

Yuuhei didn’t seem bothered by the cost of produce, and seemed content with this idea that it’s better to pay more and get the best fruits possible, but then, the Japanese don’t seem to eat much fruit anyway. I still remember my first time here—Mia and I were both starved for fruit. I ate mikans by the handful in the winter, and both of us would gobble down as much fruit as we could whenever we were at a party or whatever that would have plates of mixed fruit… and the Japanese would watch us in amazement. Mia said that one of her host mothers tried to stop her from eating more than one mikan a day, because it was “bad for her,” and I got a similar response from one family I stayed with. When I requested orange juice to drink, my host mother refused, saying it had “too much sugar,” and it wasn’t good for me. So maybe if you don’t eat more than a few sliced pieces of apple at a time, it doesn’t bother you that you can’t buy, you know, three pounds of cherries and eat them all at once. But it bothers me, and all I can say is that when I get home, I might be going a little crazy in the produce section.