Japan fresh produce export calendar

Aomori picks Fuji from October and ships from about November into the spring out of storage, peaking into the new year. Taiwan is by far the largest buyer, with Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam behind it.

For most of that window this is gift fruit rather than retail fruit — sized, graded and boxed for a season that ends on a date. The commercial risk is the calendar rather than the cargo: an apple that misses New Year is a very good apple in an ordinary market.

Shine Muscat runs from about August to September, opening in July on the earliest houses and finishing in October. Per kilo it is the most expensive fruit in this section by a wide margin.

It is also the most copied: the variety is now grown at scale in China and Korea, and their windows overlap this one. What a Japanese box is sold on is provenance and grading, which means the label and the pack have to arrive in as good a condition as the fruit does.

Nashi — the round, crisp Asian pear — runs from about August to November, peaking in the early autumn. Tottori and Chiba are the names on the box.

Nashi bruises like an apple and is graded like a peach, which is why it ships in a shallow single-layer tray. On a lane of a few days the fruit is never the problem; the losses on this row happen where the pallet is handled, not where the vessel is.

Roughly October and November, running into December. Japanese persimmon is a small export against a large domestic crop, and it goes to Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore rather than to Europe.

It ships in the same weeks Spain’s does, which is the only place on this calendar the two origins meet — and they do not meet as competitors. Different fruit, different markets, different prices, and neither is a fallback for the other.