Previously: A young woman from Taiwan went to the Tanaka family in Miyazaki, Japan to help with farm work, suddenly plunging into the traditional Japanese farm household and farming scene. The author put pen to paper to write a farming diary. In installment 02 of the [Miyazaki Farming Diary], we arrive at the decisive harvest season for oranges, and Japanese fruit growers are on edge, ready for battle.

Most Japanese fruit growers inherit the business from the previous generation and carry it on. Tanaka's parents are the second generation. Although orange prices fluctuate each year with supply and demand, growers still resignedly stick to the same crop and do not casually cut down trees to switch to another variety. This is very different from the ecology of Taiwan's fruit market, where people often chase the market and rush to plant, leading to frequent price collapses.

Also, because fruit trees usually take several years from planting to the first harvest, and there is usually only one harvest period a year, Takamine Yumi, an advisor at the Miyazaki Industrial Promotion Organization, also believes that Japanese fruit growers are more like typical traditional farmers in character, while farms growing vegetables, which have short growing periods and relatively regular income, are comparatively more merchant-like in character.

For the Tanaka family, the orange growers, all of the year's income depends on shipments during this period. Every day is a state of readiness, nerves strung tight. Depending on the weather and the number of people, the husband and wife need to discuss harvest details with each other, from big matters such as which field and which section to pick tomorrow, and whether to have workers pick on two sides, to small matters such as who is responsible for transport, whether the large and small trucks have enough capacity, whether they need to take a load home partway through, and, since the weather forecast says it will rain later, whether to harvest all day tomorrow so that on rainy days they can sort fruit indoors. You can often see Tanaka's parents sitting grim-faced in the warehouse "discussing business."

A disciplined body and spirit, the Japanese sense of work

The first stage of work was relatively simple: fruit picking all day long, and around three in the afternoon Dad would use the large truck to deliver the oranges to the JA collection center in downtown Nichinan to hand them over. A few days before September 27, Dad changed to taking the load over in the morning.

When asked why he switched to morning delivery, he said the other nearby orange growers all had smaller acreage than the Tanaka family and had mostly finished picking what they needed to, so they no longer sent goods to the JA. The Tanaka family was one of the few households with enough acreage to keep producing continuously. JA was anxious that no one was sending oranges over, so they asked him, if the family had any already picked, to send them to the JA in the morning so they could sort and pack them. (To be continued in the diary.)

To read the full "Miyazaki Farming Diary" series, please click here