Top Japanese prune sellers visit Plumas Lake
The prune may earn smirks from many Americans, even in its heartland of Yuba-Sutter. But thousands of Japanese visitors have traveled halfway around the world to Yuba County to pay homage to a fruit that carries far more honor outside its own country.
A 1,000-acre orchard west of Plumas Lake began playing host last week to an unusual group of visitors — direct sellers of Miki Prune Extract, a popular Japanese concoction heavily promoted for the healthfulness of its main ingredient. Its maker, Osaka-based Miki Corp., has rewarded its most productive door-to-door salespeople with a trip across North America — a trip capped by visits to trees growing their product and bearing their names.
Chatter and the beeping of cameras filled the prune orchards on Thursday as hundreds of visitors, mostly women from their 20s to their 70s, searched out their fruit-laden namesakes. Among them was Hiroko Sato, a 20-year saleswoman from Nagasaki with two trees to her name.
"They're like my children," the 59-year-old Sato said through an interpreter moments after gently pouring a bottle of water at the base of a tree. "Every time I see them I almost cry — and I think everyone else here feels the same way."
Every August during what the company calls a "study tour," the guests learn about the growing and processing of prunes — then see for themselves at the Miki orchards, which the company bought 20 years ago. The first of this year's five company groups — totaling some 6,000 women and men — visited Yuba County on Tuesday, with the last two slated to arrive this week.
Along with a place on the tour, the travelers also have at least one tree named for them — a way to connect Miki sellers more intimately to the product they sell, according to Joe Serger, manager of the Yuba County orchard. The company also owns orchards in District 10 and south Sutter County.
Prunes' association with digestive health have given many consumers an uneasy relationship with the fruit — enough to cause the California Dried Plum Board to adopt its current name in 2000 to remove the word "prune" from its title in hopes of boosting sales. But the fruit's much more exalted reputation in Japan has made possible Miki's tours to the company orchards since it bought its Yuba-Sutter lands two decades ago, according to Serger.
"People in this country are too preoccupied with the stigma to appreciate the (healthfulness) of the product," he said. "For some reason it's been tied to older people and Metamucil and things like that."
"A lot of it has to do with Japan's awareness in health and nutrition," said Richard Peterson, executive director of the prune board. "In Japan the product has an extremely positive image — it's thought of as a miracle fruit."
Japan is the largest export market for California prunes with $27 million in sales last year, according to the board.
Introduced in 1972, Miki Prune Extract has built a chain of devotees through word of mouth and advertising that promotes it as an aid to complexion, the digestion and general health. Sold person to person much like Amway and Avon products — and kept out of retail and online channels — the concentrated extract in $20 jars has helped Miki Corp. expand its range over the decades to become a seller of health foods, cosmetics and nutritional supplements.
Buyers consume the food in numerous ways, including straight out of the jar, atop bread like fruit preserves, mixed into water or beverages, or as an extra ingredient in sauces and curries.
Miki salespeople and high-volume buyers of its namesake prune extract won invitations for the weeklong trip, which included visits to New York, Las Vegas and Vancouver before the travel parties arrived in the Sacramento area.
On Thursday morning a succession of motor coaches inched up a driveway into Miki's orchard off Feather River Boulevard, carrying nearly 1,700 Japanese visitors.
After a two-hour ceremony for the orchard's 20th anniversary, they boarded the buses and headed to the surrounding groves. Using printed charts to navigate through numbered rows of trees, the Miki sellers found their way to their trees to water them, taste a few of their purple-red fruit, or pose in front of the 15-foot-tall trees for one of the hundreds of snapshots in the orchard that day.
Tied around many of the tree trunks were white plastic placards scribbled with names, dates and messages — "S. Oba," "T. Usui, 25 Aug. 1990." A larger tag on one tree spelled out another owner's gratefulness, the Japanese characters reading "Thank you for producing a lot of fruit, and I'll see you next year."
Noriko Kasamatsu, 56, caught site of her prune tree for the first time since its planting five years ago, when she first toured the orchard. The Osaka native described her pride in seeing the tree — now towering over her and heavy with golf ball-size fruit — in words like parents might use for their children.
"For most of us, seeing our own tree is our dream," she said moments after posing for a snapshot with three friends beside her tree. "You get excited and happy — maybe a tear comes out."
Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune at 749-4708 or hyune@appealdemocrat.com.
