The US has spent six years asking Japan to lift its ban on fresh, table-ready potato imports. As of this month, that request just moved further than it ever has, but it still hasn't passed yet.

Some context first: Japan already imports potatoes for processing, the ones destined for potato chips and similar processed products. What's still banned is fresh potatoes meant for direct eating, sold whole in a shop. The US first formally requested this change back in March 2020. It sat for years going nowhere. Then 2026 moved fast: Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries published a draft list of 21 candidate pest and disease species in late August, the specific risks under evaluation before any import decision. On September 18th, the ministry held a nationwide briefing and confirmed the process had entered the final of three procedural stages. The US government used the same occasion to push, again, for Japan to move faster.

Even having reached that final stage, actual liberalization is still expected to take several more years. This isn't close to finished. But it's a lot closer than it's been in six years of asking.

There's a detail in here that doesn't get much attention outside of Hokkaido, and it changes just how important this story is: Hokkaido doesn't just grow a lot of Japan's potatoes. It grows almost all of the country's seed potatoes, the stock every other potato-growing region depends on to plant its own crop. Estimates put Hokkaido's share at roughly 80% of Japan's table potatoes and something close to 97% of its seed potatoes.

That second number is the one that really matters here. A pest introduced through imported produce doesn't have to wreck Hokkaido's table-potato harvest to cause national damage. If it gets into seed-potato fields specifically, the risk isn't regional, it's the foundation every other prefecture's potato farming sits on.

This isn't hypothetical concern masquerading as caution, either. Potato cyst nematode, a soil-borne pest, is already established in parts of Hokkaido and has been complicating the search for clean fields to grow seed potatoes in, a real, ongoing problem before any import decision has even been finalized. It's a reasonable bet this pest is one of the 21 species on the ministry's current risk list, though the published list doesn't break down which specific pests are driving the most concern.

There's a political layer here worth knowing about too. Some figures within Japan's ruling party have reportedly floated approving potato imports as a concession in broader trade talks with the Trump administration, tied more to tariff negotiations than to the actual pest-risk science. Whether or not that ends up shaping the final decision, it means this isn't purely an agricultural safety question being decided on its own timeline. It's tangled up in a much bigger negotiation that has nothing to do with potatoes at all.

Nothing here is decided yet. But given how much of the country's potato supply chain starts in Hokkaido fields, this is worth watching closely, not as a national trade abstraction, but as something with a very direct line back here.

Japan's most common potato variety, Danshaku ("Baron"), is named for what?

A) A disease it's naturally resistant to B) A real Meiji-era baron who introduced it to Hokkaido C) The mountain range where it was first grown D) A samurai family crest it resembles

Keep reading. The answer's waiting for you at the bottom of this issue.

Ask anyone what Hokkaido's signature potato dish is, and you'll hear jaga-bata before anything else: a whole potato, split open, a slab of butter melting into it. The name comes from jagaimo (potato) and butter. It's a real, well-earned classic, found at izakaya across the island, sometimes topped with salted fermented squid for good measure. That alone is pretty far off from all of the memories I have of family get-togethers in rural Pennsylvania, where the dry, starchy baked potato seemed to make its way to every meal somehow. Hokkaido definitely does it better.

It's not what we keep ordering, though. What we go back for, more than once, in more than one place, is potato wedges or fries, hot, with a butter sauce poured over the top or on the side to dip into. Same core idea as jaga-bata, split into something you can share off one plate. But the crispiness adds a nice texture with fries. (see below for the Butter Sauce recipe)

Torikizoku, the yakitori chain, isn't a Hokkaido original, it's a national chain from Osaka but you'll find all over Japan. But their Hokkaido sourcing shows up on the menu in more than one place: their potato salad specifically calls out Hokkaido-grown potato, the Sayaka variety, and separately, their fries, made with Hokkaido-grown potato too, come with a dedicated butter sauce as a named feature of the dish. The menu doesn't specify which variety goes into the fries themselves, just that it's Hokkaido-grown. Either way: a national chain, sourcing and marketing local, on purpose.

Miso Kitchen, inside New Chitose Airport, is worth knowing about for a different reason: it's a genuinely good last stop if you're flying out and want one more real Hokkaido meal before you go. It's an izakaya-style spot built around Kō-itten miso and Hokkaido ingredients, easy to find, easy to eat quickly before a flight, and exactly the kind of place worth remembering if you're passing through the airport with time to spare.

If you're making this at home, the variety matters more than people think.

Best for frying, according to the people who actually test this: Hokkai Kogane. It's the variety specifically called out for giving fries the best color and flavor, and it's not just enthusiast opinion, it's the exact potato Freshness Burger uses for their own Hokkaido-grown fries. If you can find it, use it.

The familiar, reliable choice: Danshaku, sometimes labeled "Baron" potato. It's the most commonly grown variety in Japan and the base of most jaga-bata you'll eat, floury and starchy, and it fries up with a genuinely good balance, crisp outside, soft and fluffy inside. Kitaakari behaves almost identically and works as a direct substitute.

The contested one: May Queen. A lot of general cooking advice recommends it for a crispier fry, since it holds its shape well in cooking. But it's waxy rather than starchy, and at least one careful side-by-side test found it genuinely underwhelming for frying specifically, the inside went soft and limp rather than staying crisp, better suited to stews and simmered dishes where holding its shape matters more than crisping up. Worth knowing before you commit a whole batch to it.

Skip entirely: fresh, new-season potatoes (shinjaga). Too much water, too much sugar, they go soggy and burn before they crisp.

This recipe section comes from my wife Satomi, who's taking over food and flavor for us going forward, and might turn this into a regular weekly feature if enough of you want it.

Satomi is the executive chef at our family's Japanese restaurants in Buffalo, New York (Sato Restaurant Group), but her actual training started long before that. She grew up in her father's ramen shop in Fukui, a place called Ichiryu (一龍), learning the business from the inside before she ever ran her own kitchen. Her father's since retired, but the name lives on: her cousin now runs a second Ichiryu (一龍) in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, same family, same name, different city. Hokkaido's food scene is one of the best in Japan, and having someone with her background covering it felt overdue.

First up, she made the Torikizoku copycat recipe below herself. Verdict: the family was thrilled with it, kids included.

This one isn't our own invention, it's a home cook's copycat attempt at recreating Torikizoku's actual fries, developed and shared by a Japanese food blogger who set out specifically to reverse-engineer that butter sauce. We can't verify it's the real formula, no chain hands that out, but it's built by someone who clearly ate a lot of orders trying to get it right, and the technique holds up.

Copycat Torikizoku-Style Butter Fries

Serves 2 as a snack

For the butter sauce:

For the fries:

Method:

For the fries themselves: frozen pre-cut shoestring potatoes work in a pinch, but starting from raw potatoes and double-frying gets you much closer to the real thing.

Plate the fries with the butter sauce alongside for dipping, and a squeeze of ordinary ketchup on the side, that's how the original gets served (although we skipped the ketchup because there was so much flavor even without it). Eat it hot.

In 1908, Baron Kawada Ryūkichi, a shipbuilding executive educated in Scotland, imported English "Irish Cobbler" seed potatoes to his farm in Nanae, near Hakodate, while testing which varieties suited Hokkaido's climate. It thrived. When it came time to sell the crop, the original English name wasn't well known, so it went to market under his title instead: Danshaku, "Baron." Nanae still marks itself as the birthplace of the variety today. Kawada himself was something of a serial modernizer, he also owned what's recognized as Japan's oldest surviving privately owned automobile.

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

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