It's actually true tho!! Japanese people send expensive fruits as a gift pretty often! Like for Ochugen, Japanese traditional mid-year gifts, or even for offerings! We also enjoy them just to spoil us too hehe
@@joy-to7dx some grocery stores have them. They are usually called pine-berries and are a light pink or white color. Try your local grocery store to see if they carry them!
@@joy-to7dx try to get them midsummer at a fruit and vegetable market, you'll get the best ones then! But depending on your area, it may be in a grocery store like the other person said. I'm just giving advice based off of how I got them😊
@@MaskedKilla585as someone who had social anxiety and has conquered it (with time it didn’t happen over night) honestly I would just feel bad. If I was here in the states I would say forget it lol and ask for my money back. I think because of how Japan is culturally I would just suck it up and take the L.
It's the constant care and careful environment that makes them ideal. By the time you've grown one the way they do, it's probably not worth the work. They'll cut apple blossoms off to get fewer, but better apples. Sometimes just 1 to 6 to a tree.
Japan doesn't have enough land for large fruit crops, so fruit is a luxury. BUT! Instead of a $3-5 box of US berries that's mostly sour and white, every berry in Japan is A+++ perfect. That's worth it. To me anyway.
In Japan these fruit gifts are a sign of wealth and luxury and are often given as business gifts or to VIP guests. It’s the equivalent of swag gifts in the United States. They also can get a LOT more expensive than $11 for one berry. These are usually grown within greenhouses where the farmer tends and monitors each plant. Sometimes even nurturing single fruit. The best ones are then auctioned off for these type of stores.
Fun thing to do Slice a little skin of the strawberry then find a small pot or big one whatever u have then put that skin into the soil then water it a little then cover that part to lock in the moisture then wait for a few days a plant will grow take care of it then place it into a bigger pot you can have unlimited strawberries then 🤗🩷✨
You can do this but it's not guaranteed that the strawberries will be the same as the original, since seeds have a looot of variety. On top of that, these types of expensive strawberries are constantly monitored and taken care of by the farmers, it's a sort of art form, so it's likely that they'll never reach the same level of deliciousness as the original
@@nebulabunny8633 yeah true but like a small experience this is to grow like watching a plant grow it's healing I am bad at explaining hope you understand it
Yup, I watched a documentary that states when the Japanese pick a career in life they tend to strive for perfection to become a master of their craft. They don’t mind repetition to get to perfection
Yep, fruits that are beautifully packaged and are sold in “fruit stores” (that box was literally gift wrapped) are meant to be gifts, not for you to eat as a snack. Just go to a local average sized grocery store and you can find extremely sweet strawberries for normal fruit prices/sometimes a fraction of the expensive price tag, they are small and not that pretty but are just as tastyyy
Thank you for adding this piece of info about "normal" fruits (meaning fruits bought for our own consumption, not for gift-giving) in Japan. Context is Key to understand a culture ❤
The fruits you buy are mainly purchased as gifts for people who are sick or hospitalized, so next time, buy the same things when you go to visit your parents. It will make them very happy.
I heard that fruit is often meant for gift giving in Japan and they take their fruit MAD seriously. The melon was a Yubari melon and those can be auctioned off for insane prices, all to give to someone else to eat. They have these gigantic grapes that also sell for a lot. But they also have regular fruit. This is mainly gift fruit and it's raised with obsessive levels of love. Oh, and that expensive melon is part of the type of melons (yubari and musk melon) used to make Midori liquor! I wonder if they still sell cube shaped watermelons. 🤔
This comment made me laugh so hard, cause I've seen in an anime someone giving this melon to another person and I just thought it was so nonsense to give a single fruit as a present and now I unserstand why in japan it may be actually a good thing lmao
The reason these fruit are so expensive isn't merely for taste but rather presentation. Looks are everything when it come to these forms of presentation because these fruit are intended to be given as gifts for different occasions. And in fact it's been said that the most perfect shaped and vividly colored fruits actually have a quite bland to mild flavor as the process used to grow them focuses on appearance rather than taste
they definitely weren’t talking about Japanese fruit. BOTH aspects of flavor and presentation are HIGHLY regarded and factored into the price. It would be insulting for a company to give a business gift that tasted poor quality like that.
I worked for DOLE the famous fruit Co. I worked as an administrator, inventory and data field collector. Whenever I would walk out to the fields in California, I would find out who was the buyer and where it was going to. I had to make sure I knew how much berries we were sending out & to who. GUYS, JAPAN BUYS THEM FROM CALIFORNIA if they’re not growing it there. I KID YOU NOT. I saw with my own eyes and even helped pick and pack special strawberries for them. We’re talking about pallets on pallets of strawberries. They had to be larger than a gold ball, Ruby Red, the long runner had to be attatched to a certain length. They also used the bubble wrap lol. In my position, I found out a lot things. How much it cost to send etc. The strawberry business is good if your berries are great quality. Especially if you’re shipping over in Japan!
Im guessing they buy when it’s season so quality of fruit is higher & cheaper. But this explains markup- the higher quality of packaging to prevent damage when shipping thousands of miles. shipping costs which is probably an airplane w climate control. Even the cost of paying buyers & people to take more care to load/unload. I’m assuming they were charged more if each strawberry had to be selected by hand, had to be a certain size & of good quality. The higher cost is justified over the random handfuls going to a regular American store. There is mixed quality- some will be good fruit but there will be ones not fully ripe, smaller & damaged/imperfect shoved in a plastic basket
they do have “cheap” strawberries in japan. mainly they are the ones from outside the countries. fruits grown and produced in japan will always be more expensive because fruits in japan are not mass produced from big corps. they come from individual farmers and many of these farmers likes to experiment and cross breeds in hope of a even better product, so i wouldn’t besuprised if your strawberries were used in a breeding program. ive had fruits from the states, and there’s a CLEAR difference in quality when compared to japan’s.
lmaooo the strawberry pic help😭 it's like they were trying to comfort and convince you that those dollars are worth the spend with the freebie strawberry photocard😭
During strawberry season in southern California the strawberries are huge and super sweet. You can go through a pint in a few minutes, they're so good.
Agreed! The biggest, sweetest & most juicy ruby red strawberries are grown along the coast of California, I might be biased but I think the central coast grows the yummiest ones.
And, in Humboldt, far Northern California, we grow the best, dankest, top-shelf weed you will ever experience. Never been to Jamaica, but I know that Humboldt Honeys grow & smoke, or eat, the best buds in the US. 💚 Plus, we have COAST REDWOODS & Sabé. Humboldt is Heaven. California is Paradise. (Except for Lodi.)
You see how white the inside of those strawberries were? That's straight up natural sugars. I once got a whole container from my grocery store and every single strawberry was like that to a lesser degree. Best strawberries I've ever eaten.
Reminds me of guessing from looking all over, a bag of perfect grapes. Didn't have to throw out any of them. I washed and froze them immediately. They were so good n.n
@@Crackpot_Astronaut well they may look similar because an un-ripe strawberry hasn't gained it's coloration fully yet, but they aren't the same. It's just the ones that look like that while being ripe that are super sugary.
Your "white" one is actually a pink one. There's a Japanese variety that's very white and actually has a different taste from Western strawberry or even the pink and red Japanese ones. Kinda hard to describe, but very refreshing. Anyway, enjoy!
@@trashman11 Actually that's not entirely the case because the soil and bow fruit AND vegetables are produced DOES actually make foods taste "better" so technically strawberries in America are not going to taste exactly the same in another country
These fruit are usually exceptional, larger and sweeter than your stabdard fruit because they prune off most of the fruit from the plant so that the plant puts its energy into those few fruit. As others said they are closely tended to and are intended as luxiry gifts.
my cousin went to university in Japan and she said during the whole 3 years she spent there, she only ate fruits three times 😂 now she's happily working back in our home country, savouring every fruits there is
It's like saying the same for any other fruit, just plant the seeds lol, what you don't know is how and the process taken place and well they just don't grow on the ground like that, your welcome.
This guy just paid 92 dollars for strawberries meanwhile during the summer meanwhile I pay 10PLN (2.5 dollars) for the whole basket on the local market
@wthiskubaa their soil is very unique, so food taste a lot different. Strawberries over there are cross bred with different heritage seeds, and they are unique season to season. our strawberries are rubber, and i live in a strawberry backyard. I do know that pale pink strawberries taste different, they remind me of some mild tropical fruit.
This isn’t a tourist trap, when you live in a island where it’s mostly mountains, your agriculture is limited and more prized there, especially vegetables and fruits given the majority is for rice. These are special gifts that are given for weddings as an example. You would not call champagne a tourist trap because it is intended as a gift not for tourists to buy.
Not at all. That store is made for people who live there. It’s a nicer product. You can get burger at Wendy’s for $2 or a some restaurants for $25. It’s the same but not the same
You can get amazing strawberries for much cheaper at the roadside farm stands here in Central Coast California. And ironically several of the farmers in the Pismo Beach area are also Japanese.
Its expensive because when they grow those fruits they let the plant have only one fruit on itself and they force all the energy, sunlight, water and everything else on it instead of having multiple fruits on one plant. If there was multiple fruits then they would share the sweetness and the taste and it wouldn't be the same as the expensive strawberries in Japan
For those not aware, fruits in Japan are also considered as gifts, the more expensive the gift, the higher the level of respect you have for the person you're giving it to. Kinda like that. But also the level of care, cultivation and passion of the farmers...you know you are getting premium quality fruits. Here for example in the Philippines (especially in the provinces) we get maybe 400g (around $8-10) of strawberries that are smaller than ping pong balls, they're very sour and very rarely do you get a decently sweet one unless you pay a lot. 😅
Its a scam country.. they pretend everything is extraordinary to justfy their absurd prices, but when the reality catches up, they invent excuse luke :" its supposed to ve a gift".. as if in others countries we dont offer fruits too..
@@danielkim6548no any produce that is bigger than a well cared for plant can ever produce is GMO. Yes using grow chemicals make them bigger but then make them different. Jumbo sized produce is GMO
Most plants are bioengineered these days especially here in the U.S because we use a ton of pesticides for the crops that we produce and they sell that pesticide to the farmers
