The Least Useful Guide to Fukuoka

 Fukuoka is l not warm enough for bananas to fruit. So we have to import them from somewhere warmer in the world. When I was a child, my mother kept telling me that when she was a child (in the 1930s?) bananas were very luxurious, almost decadent fruit, imported mainly from Taiwan. But, by the time when I could see how much bananas were, they were an affordable and very accessible fruit gathered from all over the world.

However, for the past few years we had some difficulties to get bananas at reasonable (by my standard) prices. I guess there were two reasons. First, “banana diet.” (see http://en.asabanana.net/ for details, if you are interested): After a TV program introduced it, obachans throughout Japan rushed to supermarkets to empty banana shelves, just like they did when “cocoa diet” and “natto diet” were introduced.

Second, the more people in China started eating bananas. Even after obachans ceased ransacking banana shelves (probably because another nice’n easy diet was introduced), it was still not easy to get nice bananas at reasonable (by my standard) price. I don’t like to ascribe everything inconvenient to China’s economic power, but the idea that nine million people in Beijing started eating more bananas seemed a more convincing explanation for the banana shortage than that all banana importers in Japan suddenly started embracing “fair trade.”

Then, recently, bananas have finally come back to my table. A plenty of affordable and delicious, plump bananas are on the shelves now.  Why?  I heard China (again) has stopped importing bananas from Philippines for some political reasons, and the surplus bananas, which were going to go to China, are now headed to Japan.