title: Hokuriku Tales vol.3

Summary

A book of five stories about Fukui, Ishikawa and Toyama with useful data vol.3

Chapter IIHokuriku: The spring-time floral corridorPart 2. Spring flowers: the kinds you only see in Hokuriku(left) Bunzo Mizuno who pioneered the tulip growing in ToyamaPrefecture(right) Even the flower picking work has been mechanized.Bunzo Mizuno and tulipsTulips, the prefectural flower of Toyama, were firstgrown in 1918 (the 7 th year of Taisho). A farmer namedBunzo Mizuno in Shoge Village (today part of TonamiCity) grew some tulips by way of trial. The flower wasso little unknown in Japan that people rushed to buy itat good prices. The bulbs enjoyed good prices as well.Following this initial success, Mizuno explored themethod of larger-scale cultivation and found out thattulip bulbs could be grown in rotation with paddy rice.The temperature, sunshine, fertile soil of the TonamiPlain, abundant good-quality water and other naturalconditions of Toyama were suited to tulip bulb growing.Farmers in the region found it attractive to grow tulipbulbs as specialty farm products after the rice is harvested and the paddy driedeventually tulip growing spread to other regions of the prefecture. By the late1930s, an export business was started; 25,000 tulip bulbs were exported to theU.S. from Toyama.Tulip cultivation had to be interrupted by WWII, but was revived after thewar. In 1964 (the 39 th year of Showa) when the Tokyo Olympic Games wereheld, Toyama exported more than 19 million bulbs. Toyama Tulips became aglobal brand. The tulip farming that Mizuno began with only ten bulbs has madeToyama Japan’s leading tulip growing prefecture in terms of area grown and thenumber of bulbs shipped.The plum blossoms in Kenrokuen tell the Kanazawapeople spring has comeFlower picking cannotbe skipped in order toproduce large bulbsChapter II Hokuriku: The spring-time floral corridor When nature and people shine most brightlyIn Kanazawa one sees plum blossom designs everywhere: the city logo,Japanese traditional sweets called Fukuume (literally, fortune plums), and eventhe sewage manhole covers have a mark shaped after a plum blossom. Whyplums? The reason traces back to the pre-Meiji Restoration period. The MaedaFamily, the daimyo of the Kaga Domain claimed that the family was descendantsof Sugawara-no-Michizane, a Heian Period state official and man of literature who,after his death, came to be worshiped as the god of learning. He loved plumblossoms and the Maeda Family used the shape for the family emblem.Fukuume, designed after a plumblossom, is a special sweet onlyserved during the New YearHokuriku Tales vol.3 15