Okinawa welcomes peak chrysanthemum season as supplier of the New Year’s staple

Okinawa welcomes peak chrysanthemum season as supplier of the New Year’s staple

Okinawa Flower Grower’s Co-op President Shigeshi Miyagi (far left) and Makoto Oda, sub-manager of ANA Cargo Okinawa Hub (far right) pose with the first shipment of the temporarily expanded delivery of chrysanthemum flowers on Dec. 18, at the Naha Airport Cargo Terminal.


December 19, 2019 Ryukyu Shimpo

Okinawa’s chrysanthemum flower producers have welcomed peak shipping season ahead of the New Year.

To accommodate the increased output, the Okinawa Flower Grower’s Co-op set up an expanded delivery schedule in partnership with ANA Cargo.

Each cargo plane will deliver 4,000 boxes or 800,000 stems of mums to Narita Airport.

From there, the flowers will be transported to flower markets in the Kanto and Tohoku regions.

The floriculture co-op is scheduled to ship a total of 175,000 boxes of flowers in December, of which 165,000 boxes will be chrysanthemum flowers.

The shipments are expected to total 1.4 billion yen.

Although 2019 brought bad weather and a typhoon during the crop’s planting period, the storm missed the growing period, which resulted in an overall good season.

Shigeshi Miyagi, president of the Flower Grower’s Co-op explained that local growers are struggling as competitors in South East Asia have captured an increasing share of Japan’s domestic floriculture market.

Miyagi said, “Competition with foreign growers is unavoidable. We’re focused on locally produced, high quality [flowers] that will win the market.”

(English translation by T&CT and Monica Shingaki)

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