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Funny Facts About Japan
3rd October, 2013
Fruit isn’t the first thing you think about when you think of Japan, especially when you’re thinking about skiing in Japan....(fruit isnt really a winter thing after all).... However the on mountain entertainment is only part of the fun of your trip here. There is also the culture, the people, the food, the weird things you will find in the supermarket and really the list goes on and on, (we’ll get to more in other editions of Funny Facts About Japan).
A couple of those funny things you’re likely to come across is square watermelons or ridiculously over priced fruit. Yes you read right! The Japanese have created square watermelons!! Everyone knows Japan is a small country with a pretty big population that is squashed in between all those big mountains with all the great snow. That of course is why the Japanese are always worried about space and making things small enough to fit or just making them fit full stop which brings me to square watermelons.
A very enterprising Japanese guy surmised that if you grew watermelons in a square Perspex box the fruit would actually take the shape of the box and thus make it easier to pack it into a fridge. He was right and square watermelons are available at little more than the price of normal watermelons all over Japan. They pack very nicely into your fridge too. Which brings me to the what Westerners would consider the crazy prices of other fruit. Apples can cost $5 a piece!!
The Japanese worship perfection and go to great lengths to achieve it. Therefore the blemishes and bug bites that besmirch western fruit is just not acceptable here. To combat this they actually put covers or little bags over every piece of fruit in their orchards!! Seriously, when you drive through fruit growing areas the orchards are full of trees with thousands, (hundreds of thousands??) of bags covering perfect, apples, bunches of grapes, peaches and other fragile fruits before they are harvested. Awesome when you see them in the supermarket but expect to pay for it!!