One of the quiet joys of rural Japan is the roadside vegetable stand. Often no more than a wooden shelf with a roof and an honesty box, these stands offer whatever the nearby fields and gardens have produced that week. I still remember my surprise at finding yuzu there for the first time—knobbly small yellow citrus, their fragrance spilling into the cool air. I knew yuzu were among the most frost-hardy of all citrus, but still hadn’t expected to find these plucky survivors this deep into Snow Country, set beside the daikon and leafy greens like brave emigrants from a warmer world. Their taste was intensely aromatic and bracingly tart—more perfume than fruit. In Shinshu, a place renowned for apples and peaches, seeing home-grown citrus at all felt like a small miracle. This contrast made me think of my experience of citrus over the years.
When I was small, tangerines would sometimes arrive in the UK from Japan, and my mother would place them under the Christmas tree. The Christmas season was the only time I saw them. Each one was wrapped in delicate tissue paper printed with flowers, cranes, or geometric patterns. The fruit was sweet and bright, but what lingered was the ritual of unwrapping, as if each fruit had been dressed for a holiday. I remember smoothing out the thin, colorful papers and saving them in a drawer, unwilling to throw away something that felt so precious. Even the scent of the fruit—sharp, sweet, and lightly floral—seemed to mark the season more strongly than the pine of the Christmas tree.
Years later, as a teenager traveling through southern Spain, I discovered another way oranges could shape memory. On a slow, rattling train that wound through orange groves, the scenery seemed endless: trees lined with glossy green leaves and heavy with fruit. The fragrance drifted through the open windows of the carriages. As the train slowed around a long bend around the hillside, without warning, the passengers all shuffled forward to the first carriage without a word. Then, as the train crawled along, they hopped off the still-moving cars, darted into the groves, and filled their pockets, aprons, and bags with the ripest fruit within reach. Laughing quietly, they strolled back on at the rear of the train as if nothing had happened. I followed their lead, clumsy but exhilarated, my hands sticky with juice and my coat pockets bulging with contraband oranges. For the rest of that journey, the train smelled of citrus and earth, and I felt like I had joined a small, secret rite of passage.
Later I learned that mikan, the generic name for mandarin-type citrus in Japan, are most famously grown in Kyushu and Shikoku, islands to the southwest of Japan’s main island Honshu. These areas are known for warm weather and abundant agriculture, long associated with citrus groves on coastal hillsides. Years afterward, I felt a jolt of surprise in an English supermarket, when I saw tangerines labeled as “satsumas.” Satsuma is the old name for a feudal domain in what is now Kagoshima Prefecture, at the southern tip of Kyushu—once again tying the fruit to the warm south of Japan.
Now, back in Japan, I think of citrus as a thread connecting landscapes and seasons. Shinshu, with its cold valleys and long winters, is known instead for its apples and peaches, and is not a region of citrus orchards, yet the roadside stands remind me of the diversity of what can be grown and gathered. And when I peel a mikan in winter, whether bought at a neighborhood shop or shared among family, I taste not only the fruit itself but the chain of memories it carries—from the wrapped jewels of childhood, to the Spanish groves at dusk, to the quiet surprise of finding yuzu on a roadside shelf.