Every time someone goes somewhere special, even if it is the next town over, you will get food. These little rice cracker omiyages or a sweet cookie flavored in that cities famed orange flavoring. As you might know here, every city is 'famous' for something. And many cities just so happen to be famed for exceedingly similar if not identical things.
But beyond the little food culture presents, everyone here is forever taking photos of their food. You will always know a Japanese tourist in any country if they are the ones taking about 20 pictures of their dinner plates while it grows cold. Turning it different angles trying to get the light and the shutter frame exactly perfect to best accent their delicious dish. And then they might even proceed to whip out their phone to take a few more to upload them to facebook or mixi or whatever other social network they are using.
And then. Then there are the mangoes that cost 20-30 dollars per mango. Or the melons, the cantaloupes that are upwards of 50 dollars or some even nearing 100. Just for a single, solitary, individual, normal sized melon. These melons and mangoes are thought to be perfectly shaped and perfectly colored and the perfect gift. I cannot attest to the taste of them and I almost wonder if anyone actually eats them or just has them rotting on display as a look what perfect amazing melons I have (jokes intended). I also have never seen anyone buy them, which begs the question, what does the store do when the melons and mangoes start to go soft and over ripen? Do they just get placed with the other fruits? Do they go on discount? Perhaps this is all just an elaborate scheme to garner more money by the grocery stores who just switch out the melons with a more ripe one with no one the wiser, because honestly, who really looks and measures how perfectly their melon is shaped? I can say this for the stores though, these delectable are exceptionally carefully packaged and preserved with the best efforts, placed in silk lining and cradled in foam and then packaged up neatly in a nice little box. So maybe you are just buying into the appearance? Wouldn't be the first time anyone bought into appearances (one night stands, wives, material goods, plastic surgery) But who would ever want to buy into this beyond me. Additionally, when all gift wrapped up, no one will really know how much it is worth, unless they are a shapely-melon connoisseur. So my idea would be to by a nice, normal looking melon and wrap it up neatly and make people think that you spent that much on them and then bathe in their worship for your perfect choosing of melon-ness. Honestly, if you are going to spend 50 dollars buying me fruit, I am going to be expecting like a me-sized portion of bananas. Which would be undoubtedly awesome. Especially if it looked like me.
These special fruits in Japan are bought and given obviously on special occasions, perhaps to a retiring boss or to an employee who recently received a promotion, or maybe in the event of a wedding. I can't help but think of this as a way to throw money around and flaunt it. I have so much money I don't know what to do with myself, so let me buy this outrageously priced melon to flaunt it a bit. And oddly, people don't have that much money here. By far and large ( way over 50%) of the money held in Japan is by the elderly who have retired.
Korea actually has something similar to this, but with a much more reasonably priced tag. Korea will sell you boxes of spam or fruit or what have you all neatly packaged for perhaps a third or a fifth of the price. These gift boxes are much more common in their culture and are given on any number of occasions. House warming, recent holiday, home coming, new baby, hair cut. Well you get the point. But these things will normally at most cost you 30 dollars for an extremely nice set of what have you. Also their gift goods have a much wider variety: dishes, towels, spam (a crowd favorite), grapes, even toothpastes (that was a weird one to get!).
I can understand the little rice crackers from every city and prefecture, I can almost understand the food pictures, but this...This is a truly outrageous and bizarre food culture of Japan.
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