Category Archives: Photos

Kotaro Yamada Cafe de Rope La Mer, a beachside cafe in Isshiki beach in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture, offered a variety of tomatoes and tomato-centric dishes for sea bathers in a tomato-tasting event held on Saturday, August 17. People who are exhausted from swimming visited the cafe to enjoy tasting 11 kinds of red, yellow and green tomatoes to reenergize themselves. The cafe also offered some 20 tomato-inspired menu items, including pickles, curry and rice, pasta and tomato juice. The event was supported by an agricultural cooperative in Hayama (JA Yokosuka Hayama), which provided fresh summer vegetables, and Pioneer Ecoscience, a seed company in Tokyo which offered its tomato brand Mauro’s … Continue reading →

  Takuo Fukumoto An old man smiling with his friend, a farmer working in a field, an old lady sitting on an open corridor and a man trying to open the door of a warehouse – they are some of the 95 scarecrows put up in a small mountainous village with 20 residents. Known as Okuharima Kakashi no Sato (the Scarecrow Village of Okuharima), Seki district in Yasutomi, Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture attracts visitors with humorous stuffed characters in work clothes and straw hats standing here and there in farmyards and farm fields, looking just like human beings. Masato Okaue, 61, who was born in Seki and now lives in Takarazuka, … Continue reading →

Takuo Fukumoto A hotel in Wakasa, Fukui Prefecture, is known for offering baths filled with extract of ume (Japanese apricots). Guests at Kojokan Pamco, a hotel facing the Mikata five lakes near the Sea of Japan, soak in the bathwater and enjoy the fresh scent of ume. The ume bath is made by circulating hot water between the bathtub and a glass tank filled with 500 kilograms of ume fruits, so that ume extract in the water flows into the bathtub and produces the refreshing scent. The hotel began offering the ume bath some 20 years ago to appeal Wakasa as an ume-growing district. Kazuhiko Tanabe, a 42-year-old owner of … Continue reading →

  The Osaka Flower Gardening Wholesale Market and a flower farmer in Itami, Hyogo Prefecture, are marketing potted short bamboos to be displayed with strips of paper hanged to write wishes for the traditional Tanabata star festival on July 7. They plan to sell about 300 pots this year, ten times as many as five years ago when they first began selling such bamboos. They hope the bamboos, as well as being used for shop decorations, will become more popular as displays at homes, as they can be displayed even in a limited space. The plants, developed jointly by the Osaka market and flower farm Baika-en, come in pots sized … Continue reading →

Densuke watermelon, a premium watermelon brand grown exclusively in Toma, Hokkaido, was sold for 300,000 yen at the highest on the first day of seasonal bidding in Sapporo on Monday, June 17. The price, marked for a 10-kilogram, 5L-size Densuke watermelon, was the same as last year, according to the Sapporo Central Wholesale Market. Unseasonably cold weather in the spring delayed the growth of the 2013 watermelons, and the first bidding was delayed five days compared with last year, but producers say this year’s Densuke watermelons are sweet enough, although a little small in size. 73 from the first harvest of the season were sold that day. The solidly black … Continue reading →