insights from frontier Japan

It’s the height of the cherry harvest season in the southern Hokkaido town of Nanae, which is famous for the cultivation of fruit trees. The trees in the orchards are adorned with red cherries, which producers harvest carefully by hand.

Starting on January 10, southern Hokkaido's Hakodate Nanae Snowpark launched a new tour called "Snowshoe and Sky Top Lunch". Participants don snowshoes and walk across a snow slope one thousand meters above sea level.

This year’s first auction of ‘Nanamitsuki’ apples, the original brand of the town of Nanae in southern Hokkaido, took place at the Hakodate Regional Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Market on November 12. One box of seven apples with a net weight of 3 kg was auction-off for 70,000 yen, the same record-high price as the past 5 years.

While grapes for making wine are starting to ripen in southern Hokkaido in September, efforts to transform the area into a wine production region are advancing.

A research group consisting of Hokkaido University Graduate School of Fisheries Sciences and other institutes artificially bred approx. ten thousand kaluga sturgeons. The kaluga sturgeon is a very rare fish that yields premier grade caviar.

At the Junsainuma Swamp in Onuma Park located in southern Hokkaido's Nanae Town, a summer vegetable called ‘water shield’ with a pleasantly viscous texture is in its peak harvest season.