Still, tossing an apple into a lunch sack to eat out of hand is foreign to the Japanese, who treat fruit less casually than Americans do. To find out more about produce handling in Japan, Gehrt and Shim visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market and other produce markets, both wholesale and retail. We needed to understand their retail structure as well. While on the tour, they noticed that even at the wholesale level, the produce is meticulously handled. It's packed well, usually individually wrapped, and produce prices are high.
Expensive fruit is all over the place, and right nearby.
Honeydews and cantaloupe command the highest prices, and they are readily available. Organic fruit is becoming more popular. They wanted to define the criteria the Japanese use in selecting fruit for different occasions. The researchers asked two groups of housewives from the Tokyo area about Japanese snacking and giftgiving habits. Then we used that wide variety of products to ask for the situations that would cause people to choose one item over another.