Sakuranbo Cherries

I have a friend who loves mountains. I do, too. So, sometimes I contact him and ask when we can go hiking. Since he knows almost every mountain in Northeastern Japan, I leave it up to him where we will go.

The other day we had a plan for a hike, but since it was raining we ended up going for a long drive instead. Of course, we headed directly for the mountains, which this time meant Yamagata Prefecture.

As we were zooming along, admiring the scenery, my friend pointed out row after row of trees laden with cherries. Most of them were covered in shiny new plastic. “The trees must be protected from rain”, my friend explained. “As soon as they get wet, this delicate fruit will crack and be ruined. So the farmers must be very careful.”

These were all Sakuranbo Cherries, big magnificent balls of sweetness. They are in season for a very short time, about a month at most. At ¥1,000 (about $10 USA) for a teeny box of about twenty, they are far beyond my humble means. So, I had never tasted one. And somehow that preciousness added to their impressiveness.

Suddenly we saw some farmers balancing on ladders, small woven baskets on their hips, picking cherries one by one. “Let’s stop”, suggested my friend. So we did.

“Hello. Here is a foreigner who has never seen cherries on a tree. May we have a look and take some photos?”

“Sure”, came the kind reply. And then the woman picker said, “Chotto matte! Chotto matte!” (“Just a minute. Just a minute”) and ran off to fetch an older lady with a sunbonnet.

“Hello. Hello. Welcome!” she greeted us. “Here. Try some cherries”, and she picked a few and handed them to us. My friend bowed his thanks and eagerly popped one into his mouth. “Mmmm. Sooooo good!” he said in delight. I tried one, too, and was amazed by the delicate sweetness of these perfectly shaped jewels.

The woman explained that when the trees bloomed, the farmers had to hand pick most of the flowers off the tree. That way the cherries would be lush and large. “Fewer flowers mean bigger, plumper fruit”, she explained. “But also fewer cherries, of course.”

Farmers have to rent bees these days since the colonies are dwindling. “And those guys charge us a fortune, but don’t give us any of the honey!” she lamented with a sigh.

She told us it would take one person half a day to pick one tree. Of course, they keep only the best. The others they toss on the ground. “They split so easily”, she said. “So we have to be very careful.”

But at the end of the long day of picking the work is not finished. Far from it. “At night we sort all the cherries. We sort by size, of course, and also by color. A machine might be able to know the size, but never the color. So, we have to do all that by hand. It is extremely tedious. It is definitely the hardest part of this job.”

The entire family is involved in this major yearly project. And members who have left for work elsewhere come back at picking time if they can. Also neighbors and part-time workers help out. Later when their own fruit trees are ready for picking, the family will go over to lend them a hand, too. This tradition of mutual assistance has been going on literally for centuries.

In fact, the woman we talked to told us her family had had this business for well over seven generations. “More, more”, she said, waving her hand behind her to indicate an entire line of ancestors before her. And she hoped, despite the shrinking number of farmers all over Japan, that it would continue for a long time to come.

The trees we were standing under were about fifteen or twenty years old, but trees can produce good fruit for about fifty years or so. Since Sakuranbo Cherries are in season for such a short time, the farmers have to earn the bulk of their yearly income in about a month. That is why they work round the clock and why the fruit seems more expensive than gold.

But Japanese farmers are clever. They grow other kinds of fruit, too: grapes, apples, peaches. But the day my friend and I were there, Sakuranbo Cherries were their entire universe of attention. Everyone’s sole focus was on that delicate, delicious, and most fragile queen of fruits.