estebanana -> RE: Black Hole eats sun (Aug. 28 2017 2:16:57)
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The giant expensive watermelons are tasty, very tasty. But you have to see it like buying a brand, some melons are Fords and some melons are Ferrari's. If a farm wants to get a name for a certain high level brand they spend a lot of time a money on the growing the finalists, and a lot of effort culling out of the melons that are not top tier. They may have developed a special farm particular strain that they have grown for decades. A farm may charge a high price because they won a prefectural argriculture contest. That the equivalent of winning your statewide fair for best hog. If I had a blue ribbon hog on my farm, I'd charge more. This is the difficult part to wrap your mind around, in Japan a vegetable or fruit, watermelon is a vegetable by the way, can be grown as a luxury item the same as a car. To a Western person that is odd because you think food is food. Like why would I pay for a $70.00 melon? But if you think about, it's not radically different from selecting an expensive restaurant to take a VIP out to for a meal that honors them. Right? You don't take an important guest to the local deli. When was the last time you gave someone a $9.00 bottle of wine when you were invited to a dress dinner party? You probably picked the $35.00 Rioja, unless you're a cheap twit. ( My wine rule is that if I put on my best black dress shoes to go out, bottom line $30.00 on a red, never a white, and never champagne- I hate champagne. I always say 'Sham pain for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends - then open a bottle of red.' ) Often when a person is in the hospital or in an assisted living compound the relatives will visit the mom, dad, aunt, uncle who lives there. In Japanese culture it would be a slight (or a massive insult in some cases) to that elder persons rank or honored place in the family if you came with a $5.00 gift...so you bring something kinda pricey, and for a person who is 95 years old, if the gift is perishable like food, they can give it away to the next round of visitors and they don't have to worry about keeping it on display in their room and taking up space until the next time the melon givers show up. The fancy watermelon can be a good birthday gift for grandma at the old folks home because she can invite her pals over to the table to have the premium water melon her wonderful caring children brought her. And the children can be assuaged of guilt, for a few moments at least, for having to have mom in an assisted living house. The expensive watermelon is multi-purpose, it serves a myriad of social ends. The idea that you give a gift to someone and they can in turn redistribute that gift to subsequent visitors is one of the things that drives the Japanese obsession with micro packaging. If the Western person gave you a box of crackers that were specially baked you would like oh big deal....crackers whoopee...However in Japan if you give a gift box of crackers the product may be from a famous cracker maker in Kyoto and very expensive, $50.00 for a special box of individually wrapped sembe, (rice cracker) making sembe is a art form and there are hundreds of kinds of delicious sembe from very tiny ones to sembe the diameter of a dinner plate. There is even one sembe that is shaped like a clay roofing tile and is exactly the same size as a real tile. If you pick up a box of sembe for $40.00, which is about 4600 yen, you may give it to someone. They might open the box and take out a few artfully wrapped crackers and put them into a very fancy paper bag and take them to give to the lady who runs the coffee shop they like to hang out at. That is the reason why things are individually wrapped. They can be regifted. So if you spend mucho bucks on a gift, the person you give it to might redistribute it. And that makes that persons life a bit more graceful because they have a small but elegant gift to give a person they know casually. It's courteous as a gift giver to select a gift that the receiver can also offer to others. It's called sharing. Of course this can all backfire at various stages, but that's another story.
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