Miracle Apples

Chapter 8

Until varieties began to be improved in England in the eighteenth century, apples were a fruit which grew at most to the size of satsuma oranges. As noted earlier, they were used solely as an ingredient in cooking, or to make alcoholic drinks. They were sometimes eaten as they were, but that was probably because in those days they didn’t have the abundance of sweet fruits we have today. The modern palate would find it lacking in sweetness, overly acidic and sour, and anything but the sort of thing you could eat.

In the nineteenth century, this close relative of the wild varieties was called the crab apple, to distinguish it from other apples. Simply saying ‘apple’ would mean you were talking about the improved varieties of larger, sweeter apples. The varieties which had been improved were the ones which became ordinary apples. They may have been larger, but only relative to the crab apple. Europeans tend not to slice apples up and share them as they do in Japan. They prefer smaller varieties, ones they can take whole bites out of. Perhaps eating habits from the days when they ate small crab apples remain largely unchanged in Europe today.

Variety improvements that started in England developed rapidly in the New World. It was the immigrants from Europe following the Mayflower who carried apple trees to the American continent. As it was the seventeenth century, they would have been crab apples. They were probably a fruit which reminded them of their much missed homes in Europe, but they were most highly prized as a fruit that provided juice in place of drinking water, and as the main ingredient in cider. Securing safe drinking water was of paramount importance in the unexplored territories. A pioneer’s garden would always have apple trees, and as they moved westward, the apple producing area spread from east to west with them.

The character Johnny Appleseed then appeared on the scene. Appleseed is a legendary hero known to all Americans. His real name was John Chapman. He planted apple trees. He assisted pioneers, planting tens of thousands of apple trees in the areas they settled. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the time when Appleseed was going about his work, new varieties of apple appeared one after the other in America. Most of the ancestors of the eating apple varieties directly linked to today’s apples appeared at this time. People who had only ever known small, sour apples, must have been astonished at these big, sweet apples. New variety seedlings were re-imported into Europe, the home of the apple, and the American-born, large apples, enjoyed a worldwide boom.

The consequences of this also reached the shores of the recently colonized islands of the Far East. It was in 1853, eight years after Appleseed died, that Perry arrived in Uraga with four steamships.

Seven years later, Niimi Buzen no Kami, who had travelled to America as special envoy heading a mission to ratify the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan, brought seedlings of these Western apples back to Japan from America. We do not know if they were a gift from someone in the United States government, or if Buzen no Kami had bought them himself, but there is no doubt that these Western apples were foreign fruits meant as souvenirs for high ranking shogunate officials. These large, sweet, improved variety of apple, would be the pride of a civilized America; a cutting edge, high tech product as we would say nowadays.

Once we enter the Meiji Period, growing of this Western apple started all over Japan. The Japanese government’s Ministry of Home Affairs Industrial Promotion Board and the Hokkaido Development Commission imported Western apple seedlings from America as part of a national policy to develop agriculture and, after propagation by grafting at agricultural experiment stations around the country, distributed them to prefectures throughout Japan.

Japanese horticultural techniques had been very highly advanced since the Edo Period. In the hands of an Edo gardener, propagating the fruit trees from America by grafting would have been a simple matter.