JET teachers living in the middle of nowhere! I want to hear from you about local fruit prices!

Its not a fruit but, if you go to the right town in Kyoto you can pick up bags of cucumbers for 100 yen!

A bunch of bananas is 99 yen in Toyama. That's normal, right? I'm not really much a fruit person, but I do know our apples are way too expensive.

Your right the price of apples in japan are way too expensive, however they are pretty big.

last week, one watermelon in asakusa was 2000 Yen. Come to Portugal, fellows.

Hm, I've never been to NC, but in Western PA where I grew up, all the local farmers are being put out of business by big AgriBusiness corporations. The only farmers who sell produce for cheap are the Amish, who are mostly growing for their own needs anyway.

Those of you who have been to Kyoto will know all about the shops in Nishiki Market that sell watermelons for 10,000 yen!

"(...) But maybe - isn't it better to pay high prices and know that there is no migrant labor being exploited?"

Good question there, but when you pay those high prices don't **you** feel exploited?

--
Grandmother used to say that with watermellon you must drink wine, if you drink water it turns to cork in your stomach, and then you die!! wooot!!! 8) gasp!
--

I moved from sacramento to aomori. In sacramento I could get a pound of organic tomatoes for 59 cents or so. It's a rare occasion that I can get the vaguely pinkish yellow-green, grass-tasting monstrosities around here for less that 90 yen a piece.
Right now it's corn season, and our local famous corn is on deep deep discount for 160 yen an ear. 10 cents back home.
Garlic's another thing were famous for. One head of aomori garlic is anywhere for 200 to 300 yen. 3 heads of chinese garlic run 99 yen on the same shelf.
And even though aomori is all about apples, they aren't any cheaper here than in Tokyo.

being vegetarian was cheap back home.

perhaps this thread is a tiny root of economic proof arguing that people are designed to be omnivorous rather than vegetarian.

Marxy: WTF is this with "exploitation" of immigrant labor? As an immigrant laborer myself who gets exploited regularly, let me say I am merely happy to have an income to support my family. If we no apply Momusian process to this survey of one, ALL immigrants are happy to be exploited and we may perhaps say that the ritual/social spectacle of exploitation is part of the grant nature of the exploitative (labor providing) host nation.

chris_b, migrant workers are different from immigrant workers. my family were californian migrant workers 4 or 5 generations back, and had been in the country for ages.

I'm fine with people not being vegetarians, so long as they feel some moral obligation to animals. if not, well I wouldn't be surprised if they compared their lives as overprivileged foreigners in japan to those of workers paid a fraction of minimum wage in america... or that they would get up in arms about looting in the wake of disaster. but that's just me.

nate: ok if it wasnt entirely obvious I'm not being very serious about the matter. Also I have no moral issue or investment with what people eat or dont eat. No need to get your knickers in a bunch. Now that thats been spelled out country simple, you have any more snyde comments to make about people you dont have any working knowledge of?

I've no idea on the current prices, but when I lived in southern Mie-ken four years ago, you could buy a huge bag of mikan from the weekly farmers' market for 450 yen and sometimes cheaper from roadside sellers. Considerably cheaper than Jusco or similar. And the UK for that matter. As for persimmons, you couldn't even give those away. Most appeared to fall from the trees and be left to rot. J'accuse those big city types and their modern tastes in fruit.

Persimmon wine is really quite drinkable and can be fairly easily distilled into a raki-style spirit, provided you live far enough from anyone to avoid detection of the fumes.

chris, sorry, re-reading momus had me worked up. I was bein lame.

I live out in the countryside in Gunma and the best I've seen for watermelon has been about 900 yen for a 10" round.

Of course that's supermarket pricing. There may be better deals at farmside stands. Out here there's a lot of the fruit picking... Pay 5-600 yen and get in an orchard for an hour to pick as many cherries, blueberries, what-have-you as possible, so I guess if you don't get sick, it can end up being pretty cheap.

I'm gonna hijack this thread a little bit because I have a question for Nate about vegetarianism in Japan. Have you been able to find anything equivalent to a meat substitute here? I don't necessarily need morningstar, but it seems there has to be something.

I've no idea on the current prices, but when I lived in southern Mie-ken four years ago, you could buy a huge bag of mikan from the weekly farmers' market for 450 yen and sometimes cheaper from roadside sellers. Considerably cheaper than Jusco or similar. And the UK for that matter.

Yeah, exactly. Watermelons are notoriously expensive in Japan, but I don't think they're really representative of the general price of fruit/veg here. Especially the veg: if you're buying pumpkin, mushrooms, spinach, daikon, etc. etc. it really ain't all that bad. I still hate having to fork out five times as much for a bag of potatoes here as I would in the UK but, hell, I can live with that when there's plenty of other, cheaper stuff on offer, too. Of course, seeing as how I hail from one of the priciest countries in the world, I'm probably not the best person to ask about "rip-off Japan".

r.e. veggie grub - I've heard rumours of things like tempeh being available here, but can't say I've ever seen it. As for all that "looks like meat but is really made from genetically-altered fungi" stuff - I think some of the mail-order companies like the Foreign Buyers Club stock it.

I know there are some vegan/vegetarian resteraunts in Tokyo but they are few and far between. A friend of mine from NYC who wont eat meat had a hard time when visiting. His suggestion was to check out the Krishna presense since they have vegetarian food and dont seem to be too malnourished.

my local supermarket actually stocked tempeh for a while, and seitan is pretty readily available from health food and natural food stores. theres gluten based a product called 畑肉 from "ohsawa" or a less attractive "グルテンミート" from "san iku".
but sadly most of the products from the health food store shelves are really bland.

there's no one making meat-replaced products that I know of... though you can pick up curry mixes minus the chiken extract, and instant ramen minus the pork powder at the same health food stores usually.
Though in the gunma sticks, you're probably sol.

as an aside, a friend of mine recently accidentally bought gluten meat yakitori from somewhere, but she never shed any light on where. considering how hard it is to find that kind of thing, I was really surprised.

I am by the way, in the city. my prices aren't from the farmers market or anything. I think I've seen roadside apple booths that have good prices, but never paid a closer look.

and I got a large head of cabbage earlier in the year for 29yen. that's a pretty damned good price.

and now I'm pulling an alin, posting 3 in a row.

less than the migrant worker exploitation (which seems a little tongue in cheek), the difference that I see in agriculture around here is that it's mostly quite small, independent farms (excluding rice). Even the people supplying the supermarkets are often independent, especially in the case of organics, and local apples.

Took a vegetarian friend out for dinner a few months ago and had the hardest time trying to order food without any trace of meat in it. Figured we'd be safe with the salads but, of course everything comes with a topping of fish flakes. Vegetarianism just isn't something that fits with japanese cuisine.

eggs are popular in japan, isn't it a vegetarian food?

or american 'vegetarian' means really 'vegan'?

Eggs are popular in Japan but, aren't most of them cracked on top of bowls of meat?

Eggs are fine... I'm not vegan. I'm not really even vegetarian, I just have to be careful not to meat too much (blame it on the Gout).

Where I live has a huge Brazilian population, so I have a pretty good international selection. Maybe I can find those items. Then again, Brazilians are more meat crazy than anyone I've ever seen, what with the pork-roasts on a skewer and such.

Thanks for the link Jrim.

Thanks to the omnipresence of dashi in japanese sauces and the indiscriminant use of meat extracts and consomme in prepared foods, if you want to be serious about vegetarianism, you can't really eat out unless it's at restaurants specifically intended for veggies.

Sorry for helping the thread to be hijacked.

wasn't the whole vegetarian soy et al paradigm that really took off in the 80s, during the time of the Futon boom, taken 90+% straight from japan. tofu/shoyu/tamari etc. all the stuff is obviously available; if you look around the edges of the fridges in your local supermarket you're most likely to find okara, the stuff left over when you make soymilk: quintesential vegetarian meat, you can make lovely burgers from it. and it's super-cheap.

try 精進料理.

try 精進料理.

One of the things that has most puzzled me during my years in Korea, is the seeming uniformity of prices, regardless of situation. This is most surprising when you find yourself paying exactly the same for a coke in a tourist hot-spot like Gyoengbok palace as you would in the local store. I feel like I must be missing something, but of the many paradoxes that exist in Korea, that of rampant capitalist/consumerist economics vs. limitation of choice (in marked contrast to Japan) and uniformity of price seems the most pronounced.

You can pick up cheap fruit & veg in Shin Koiwa in Tokyo, but if you want a gold & black valour track-suit with a motif of cartoon dogs playing golf on it it's going to cost you at least 14,000 yen..

Alin, thanks for the heads up. Funny how things start showing up all over once you know what to look for.

Just did a quick google search on 'Japanese vegetarian food' and got a load of great results.

Going back to the original topic, I have to say that I find Tokyo offensively expensive compared to Kobe. Fruit costs about the same, but everything else (with very few exceptions) is ridiculously cheaper.

The fruit and farm produce in Miki prefecture (just north of Kobe) is almost as cheap as i would expect back home if you buy directly from the farmers, although coming from London that's not really saying that much...

I think most of the problem is that no-one would even thinking about buying a 600 yen watermelon; people would assume there's something wrong with it (or worse still, it was imported from China) and avoid it. Same goes for the UK; prices are artificially inflated as a sign of quality.

I suspect what you are actually discovering is that agriculture product prices are regulated/supported in Japan. (Of course, agricultural protectionism is approximately as bad in the USA and EU as well - all very quaint until one discovers that it actually causes third world poverty. They would *love* to produce food for export, if rich countries export subsidies didn't price them out of the market.) The family ownership structure most likely means that the cost of production is high as well (lots of really small family owned farms with part-time farmer owners is a lot less efficient than large farms.)

Unfortunately for Momus, that kind of cronyism and protectionism is what might get thrown out now that the LDP has been reformed. Or it might not.

Just in China for 3 months; fruit there awfully cheap. Stupidly huge sweet watermelons six rmb a pop, thats somewhere well below a hundred yen. And that's the foreign devil price. But I have to say, the japanese housewife side of me noticed there were some tiny blemishes on the surface, and the bottom was a little bit flat and pale. It could never be sold in Japan...
I have heard that the high prices are a result of prohibitively high import taxes, but I'm not sure if this applies to fruit or just rice. Can anybody shed light on this? I think it might be attributed to picky consumers, whether this pickiness (fetishism?) is a natural result of the Japanese mindset or artificially induced by adverts is another story.
What people don't seem to realize is that the rotten spots are where the flavor comes from. Nothing like a little brown to give that lasagna that extra kick. I call for a boycott of all fruit that has no blemishes, and if you can't find any less than supernaturally perfect specimens at your local Shinanoya, knock a few off the shelf (watch out for the plastic sleeve/life-preserver thingies though - they could foil all of our wicked plans); the staff will apologize profusely and you can come back the next day for a nicely softened fruit (though you may have to hide it at the bottom of the bin unless you want to rescue it from the dumpster, and forget about a discount).

hmmm ... even slightest rotten spots show that the whole fruit is actually already rotten and useless /i mean no vitamins etc /