Overflowing with Tosa Buntan 'Love'! Vol. 4: The Story of How They Were Planted

Please note that the content of this story may not necessarily connect to the previous installment. I am writing this as I please, so I appreciate your understanding.

“Why were Tosa Buntan planted?”

This goes back a little while, but the first Tosa Buntan trees were planted at Shiraki Orchard about 70 years ago, around 1950.

At that time, my great-grandfather, the first-generation owner Yoshiyuki Shiraki, planted about 10 Tosa Buntan trees.

Later, after the second-generation son, Yoshiki (my grandfather), passed away in the Pacific War, and when my mother was still only five years old, Yoshihide (the third generation) joined the Shiraki family as an adopted son-in-law to my grandmother, Moriko. Yoshihide was originally a carpenter, but to protect the farmland, he grew citrus fruits such as Satsuma mandarin, Hassaku, and kumquat while continuing his carpentry work.

Furthermore, when Yoshiki's daughter, Hisako (my mother), was 19, my father, Takeo (the fourth generation), joined the Shiraki family as a new adopted son-in-law in 1961.

The Shiraki family at that time was not a wealthy farming family, but merely one of many very small, poor farming households. However, the two adopted sons-in-law—Yoshihide and Takeo—worked together, driven by the desire to make the family prosper now that they had joined the Shiraki household.

They began focusing on Tosa Buntan in earnest around 1961. My father and my grandfather-in-law cleared the mountains, built terraced fields, and planted Tosa Buntan saplings one after another. With the limited land available to the Shiraki family, the two adopted sons-in-law, who were only ten years apart in age, worked with true “double horsepower” to rapidly expand their Tosa Buntan cultivation.

A few years later, an orchard of about 1.5 hectares was completed. Fruit cultivation, centered on Tosa Buntan and Hassaku, began in earnest.

So, why did they choose Tosa Buntan instead of Satsuma mandarin?

There is a reason for that.
When my father inspected mandarin orange production areas within Shikoku, he saw that in other prefectures like Ehime and Wakayama, large-scale mountain development was underway due to the national “Pilot Project,” with mountains being cleared by bulldozers to plant massive quantities of Satsuma mandarins.

Seeing this, my father felt a sense of crisis, thinking, “If Satsuma mandarins continue to be mass-produced like this, there will eventually be an oversupply, and Kochi, being a small production area, will be swallowed up by price competition and weeded out.”

Therefore, while searching for a citrus fruit with future potential, my father, who loved the taste of Tosa Buntan, sensed its possibilities and decided that Shiraki Orchard would focus its efforts on its cultivation.

---To be continued

20251012