Kinki and Tokai Honey

The Kinki and Tokai region runs along Japan’s warm Pacific coast from Wakayama and Mie in the west through Aichi and Shizuoka in the east. It is the warmest part of Honshu, warmed by the Kuroshio current, and it is Japan’s citrus belt – terraced hillside orchards of Satsuma mandarin descending toward the sea from Wakayama’s Arida district to Ehime across the water in Shikoku.

The spring honey calendar here opens earlier than anywhere else on Honshu. Sakura blooms in late March and early April. The ten-day Satsuma mandarin bloom follows in May. Between these two brief windows, the beekeepers of Kinki and Tokai produce two of Japan’s most celebrated and hardest-to-obtain domestic honeys – both called phantom honey, both dependent on weather and timing, both gone before summer arrives.

The deeper story of this region is a biological relationship that predates both honeys. In February, before either the sakura or the mikan opens, the plum orchards of Minabe-Tanabe bloom white across the hillsides. Ume – the plum whose pickled fruit and blossoms are among Japan’s oldest cultural symbols – feeds the bees through the coldest weeks of the year, rebuilding the colonies that will work the spring honeys when May comes. The Minabe-Tanabe agricultural system, a UNESCO World Agricultural Heritage site, has operated this way for 400 years: ume, mikan, charcoal forest, and bees as a single integrated landscape. The mikan honey is only possible because the ume made it possible first.

Kinki and Tokai is also where some of Japan’s most respected honey specialty retailers are based. Dorato in Kyoto and Kobe sources seasonal domestic lots including sakura from Aichi and holds the mikan honey within its catalog when available. The region sits at the intersection of Japan’s most concentrated citrus production and its deepest honey retail culture.