Apples

In 1875, the Meiji government distributed Western apple saplings to the prefectures. Three reached the Aomori prefectural office. A former samurai named Kikuchi Tate-e planted them on the office grounds, and is remembered as the father of apple cultivation here.

The motive is the part usually left out. Early-Meiji fruit programmes were, substantially, employment schemes for a warrior class that had just been abolished. The domains were gone, the stipends were going, and a great many trained, proud, suddenly purposeless men needed something to do. Aomori's orchards are what some of them did.

Japan's apple capital exists because the samurai needed a second career.

The scale, which surprises people

Aomori now grows around 60% of Japan's apples — a 2023 harvest of some 374,400 tonnes. The runner-up prefecture, Nagano, managed 106,900. That ratio, not the percentage, is what conveys it: Aomori grows roughly three and a half times as many apples as the second-place region in the country. Hirosaki City alone is Japan's largest apple-producing municipality.

Fuji is a town, as well as a mountain

This is the correction worth carrying home. In 1939, breeders at a research station in the Aomori town of Fujisaki crossed the old American variety Ralls Janet with pollen from Red Delicious. The seedlings went into the ground in 1940 and survived the war. One of them, coded Ro-628, first bore fruit in 1951. It was selected as "Tōhoku #7" in 1958 and released in 1962 under the name Fuji — for Fujisaki, the town where it was bred, and for Mount Fuji.

It went on to become the most widely grown apple on Earth. Every Fuji apple in every supermarket in the world descends from a seedling that spent the Second World War quietly growing in northern Japan.

When to come, and what to eat

The earliest varieties arrive in June and July, but the main harvest runs September to November. Tsugaru variety peaks in September; Fuji is the late one, hanging on the branch into November while growers work in the cold to let the flavour build. Late October is the best single window — peak Fuji, peak foliage, still comfortable outdoors.

At the port itself, A-FACTORY — the name is a contraction of "apple cider factory" — sits beside Aomori Station, a 20-minute walk from the cruise berth, with a glass-walled working cidery in the middle of the building. You watch cider and apple brandy being made through the glass. The tasting system is self-serve and slightly baffling on first contact: you charge a card (from about ¥900), take a glass, and dispense samples from the machines yourself. No Japanese required, and nobody explains it, so now you know.

The apple pie map

Forty minutes inland, Hirosaki's tourism office produced something I think is quietly perfect. Their concierges personally researched and tasted every apple pie in the city and published a guide map that rates each one from 1 to 5 on three axes: sweetness, tartness, and cinnamon intensity. More than forty shops appear — Western patisseries, bakeries, cafés, and Japanese-sweets makers who decided to have a go at apple pie.

It is free, it exists in English, and it is a municipal government rating pastry on a cinnamon scale. If you have a long call and a rail ticket, it is a genuinely lovely way to spend an afternoon.