Why Are Japanese Fruits So Perfect… and So Expensive?
In the food hall beneath Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, there is a fruit counter. Last winter, I found strawberries there — sold one at a time, each in its own box, each a different variety, each with its own price.
One strawberry at a time? How much can a single strawberry possibly cost?
The cheapest was around ¥500. And then I saw a white one — white as a pearl, with pale pink seeds. I had never seen anything like it in America. It cost ¥1,200. I bought it.
You bought a ¥1,200 strawberry.
I did. Back home in America, my local supermarket sells a whole punnet of Driscoll’s strawberries for $2.99. And yet this one came resting on a small cushion.
A cushion.
The strawberry was more comfortable than I was. But this brings us to the real question — not “why is Japanese fruit expensive?” The question is: what exactly are the Japanese trying to create?
It was never just food.
In many countries, fruit is something you toss into a shopping basket. In Japan, it can also be a gift. A flawless melon, a perfect bunch of grapes, a peach without a single blemish — these are given to clients, teachers, and relatives during the summer gift season. The department store fruit counter is closer to a jewellery shop than a grocery aisle. And when fruit is expected to be a present, appearance suddenly matters as much as taste.
This is the first thing to understand: the ¥1,200 strawberry and the $2.99 punnet are not competing products. American growers produce enormous quantities of strawberries for everyday shopping — prices vary by season and by store, but the point is the same: strawberries there are groceries. Japan grows everyday strawberries too — an ordinary supermarket pack costs a few hundred yen, much like anywhere else. But Japan also grows another kind entirely, and the rarest gift strawberries can cost over ¥1,000 apiece. The two countries are not trying to make the same thing.
So the cushion is packaging for a gift.
The cushion is a velvet box, and the strawberry is the diamond.
You are paying for the fruit that isn’t there.
Here is something that surprises most people. Japanese fruit growers routinely remove perfectly healthy fruit from the tree while it is still growing. Fewer fruits on the branch means each remaining one receives more sunlight and more nutrients — larger, sweeter, more evenly shaped. Premium fruits are often individually bagged on the tree, shielded from insects and sunburn, rotated by hand for even colour, and inspected one by one at harvest. Some premium fruits are handled with cotton gloves.
So when you buy one perfect peach, you are not only paying for that peach. You are also paying for all the peaches that were deliberately sacrificed to make it.
That is either beautiful or heartbreaking.
Both. That is rather the point.
Even the strawberries have names.
In many supermarkets overseas, the label simply says Strawberries. In Japan, you will meet Amaou, Tochiotome, Benihoppe, Skyberry, Kotoka — and dozens more, each with its own balance of sweetness, acidity, aroma and texture. Japanese shoppers don’t just buy strawberries. They choose which strawberries. And within a famous variety like Amaou, the very best individuals are selected again, for the gift market. A fruit can pass an exam, and then pass a harder one.
Japan doesn’t simply grow fruit. It breeds fruit.
Those named strawberries didn’t appear by accident. Behind many of them stands a prefectural agricultural research station — a government facility where scientists spend years, sometimes more than a decade, developing a single new variety. Amaou was bred in Fukuoka. Tochiotome, Tochiaika and Skyberry come from Tochigi. Kotoka was developed in Nara. Sweeter, more disease-resistant, more beautiful: each variety is the result of thousands of crosses and generations of patient selection, by researchers and farmers alike.
And when a new variety is finally ready, it doesn’t quietly appear on the shelf. It debuts. There are announcements. There is news coverage. There are tasting events. In Japan, a new strawberry is launched roughly the way other countries launch a smartphone.
So somewhere there is a scientist whose life’s work is one strawberry.
Several scientists. Several decades. One strawberry.
There is one more difference.
Japanese people don’t expect every fruit to be available all year. The first peaches of summer, the first Shine Muscat grapes of autumn, the first mandarins of winter — each arrives in its season, and then it is gone. Waiting is part of the experience. A fruit you can buy any day of the year is groceries. A fruit you waited ten months for is an event.
There is even an old custom of celebrating the season’s first fruit. The first peach, the first melon, the first persimmon. Eating the season’s first harvest has long been considered something to look forward to — even a little lucky.
None of this means American fruit is worse, by the way. American supermarkets generally don’t mind if an apple has a small scar or a strawberry is oddly shaped — if it tastes good, it gets sold. That is a perfectly sensible philosophy. Japan simply decided that some fruit should aim for something else.
Jiji’s verdict.
Why is Japanese fruit so perfect and so expensive? Because Japan treats some of its fruit not as produce, but as craftsmanship. Looking at a perfect Japanese strawberry, it’s easy to think you’re paying for fruit. In reality, you’re also paying for decades of research, generations of farmers, thousands of discarded peaches, and a country that decided fruit could be something extraordinary. The next time you see a ¥1,500 peach, you are not looking at a peach. You are looking at everyone who wanted it to be the most beautiful peach ever grown.
I still think ¥1,200 is a lot for one strawberry.
But you ate it. How was it?
Sweet, with a scent like a peach. And after tasting it, I understood why it cost ¥1,200.
Would you buy another one?
Perhaps after winning the lottery. Until then, I shall simply visit the fruit counter and admire them, like tiny edible jewels.
That is exactly what you said before you bought this one.
…My wallet is strict. My curiosity, regrettably, is not.