A single cherry in Japan has sold for 40,000 yen ($276) at an auction in the northeast prefecture of Aomori, on Honshu island. This has happened at the tail end of the cherry harvest which peaks in June through July.
The single box of 15 heart-shaped cherries fetched 600,000 yen ($4,143) or 150,000 yen ($1,034) more than in the 2023 auction.
According to the Asahi Shimbun newswire, the sale comprised the premium Aomori Heartbeat types, from the specialty Juno Heart cherries.
Unlike conventional Juno Hearts, which measure a minimum 250 mm diameter, Heartbeats measure over 310 mm in width.
Glossy, scarlet, shapely and sweet-tasting because of its 20-degree sugar content, the Heartbeat sub-cultivar is rare even in Aomori.
Buying a single cherry in Japan is uncommon and in fact supermarkets sell them in handfuls inside punnets.
In normal times, a 300-gram punnet of cherries costs 598 yen ($4.13) at a supermarket, and 10,000 yen ($69.11) at luxury grocers.
Decreasing Cherry Yields
Perhaps the record price at the Aomori auction owes to climate-related decreasing production of cherries in the far-east nation.
According to Japan Crops, the yield rate declined by 22.6% in the period between 2006 and 2022. In the same period, the total cultivated area also fell by 5%. So were yields, which declined from over 400 kg an acre in 2006 to over 300 kg an acre in 2022.
Aomori in particular has seen its production rankings fall from the 2nd position in 2006, when it supplied 7.84% of national cherries.
From 2006 to 2022, Yamagata Prefecture, also on Honshu island, has led national production, sometimes at 77.02% share.
Thus, it is easy to see why a single cherry in Japan should cost a fortune, not least variety exclusivity to Aomori. Indeed, Nagatsuka Seika, the firm that bought the lucky cherries in the 2024 auction says, “you cannot find (the cherries) elsewhere.” And as the following statistics reveal, Japan as a whole is a major global cherry center.
Japan Cherry Statistics
Japan is one of the top 7 cherry-producing countries in Asia behind Turkey, Uzbekistan, China, Syria, Iran and Lebanon. In 2022, the country ranked 25th worldwide with a production total of 16,100 tonnes. This marked an increase in output from 2021’s 13,100 tonnes, according to FAOSTAT. The production improvement happened despite acreage shrinking from 4,260 hectares in 2021 to 4,230 hectares in 2022.
Does Japan export cherries?
Despite top rankings in terms of production, Japan ranks lowly in exports. Fresh cherry shipments from the country in 2019, for example, totaled 983,000 kg. With an export value of $25,840, Japan’s shipments ranked 64th globally, according to the World Bank. Comparably, 2019’s export champ, Chile, sold 220,928,000 kg of fresh cherries worth $1,609,165.
Which are the three major cherry-producing prefectures in Japan?
Yamagata-Ken commanded 77.02% of cherry production in Japan in 2022, ranking first. The next big producer was Hokkaido with 9.5% national share, then Yamanashi-Ken with 3.32%. But in the mid-2000s, specifically 2006, Aomori-Ken prefecture ranked second with a 7.84% national production share.
How much fruits do the Japanese eat per capita?
Each person in Japan consumed 11.2 kg of fruit, including cherries, per year in 2021. According to Helgi Library’s data, this was position 129 among some 165 nations under fruit per capita monitoring. The high point for Japan, however, was in 1994 when fruit consumption per capita reached 13.9 kg per person per year.