Lisa left a corporate job in Japan at 30, moved to Kigali with her young son, and ran a restaurant there for eight years. Now she hosts guests in Sapporo, shows visitors around, and has opinions about Japanese schools.

For eight years, a Japanese woman ran a Thai restaurant in Kigali, Rwanda. Lunch cost about ten dollars, which put it out of reach for a lot of locals, so roughly two-thirds of her customers were Americans and Europeans who worked for the United Nations or an embassy.

The woman is Lisa (Chisa). She now lives in Sapporo, where she runs an Airbnb and takes small groups around Hokkaido through personal referrals. She came back to Japan almost five years ago without a firm plan, and she ended up in the one city where her father had been transferred.

She told us before the call that she isn't a tidy one-story guest. That turned out to be true, and it made for a better conversation. We talked about Rwanda, her first winter on Sapporo's roads, what hosting really earns, and what her children learned at two very different kinds of school.

Lisa grew up moving around: Kobe as a small child, before the earthquake, then Kyushu and Chiba. She says she's from Tokyo, because that's where her family settled and where she lived longest. She went to work for a big Japanese corporation and stayed until she was 30.

By then she was a single mother, and the hours were punishing. "It was like eleven years ago, so it was very tough," she said. "You have to work so long." She felt stuck. Friends of hers, a couple, were already running a business in Rwanda, and they told her to come visit. She went with her son, who was four, and found Rwanda "surprisingly very nice place to live." She decided to move. "So I quit the company and I moved there," she said. "And I have to do something, right?"

Keep reading online: what she cooked for UN staff in Kigali, how she ended up in Sapporo, what hosting really earns, and what her kids learned in two kinds of school.

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Nikka’s founder, Taketsuru Masataka, wanted a cool, damp place like Scotland for his distillery. Which Hokkaido city was his first choice before flood risk ruled it out?

A) Ebetsu
B) Asahikawa
C) Tomakomai
D) Furano

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

In western New York, fall tastes like apples. Growing up there, we went apple picking most years at orchards nearby. We often avoid the starchy varieties, so Fuji and Honeycrisp are often our go-to. Many of those orchards also sell cider donuts and hard cider, which is half the reason to go.

That's not just us. New York is the second-largest apple-growing state in the US, behind Washington. About 600 commercial growers farm roughly 55,000 acres, and the average crop is about 29.5 million bushels a year. Western New York's Niagara Frontier is one of six official apple regions, and the New York Apple Association even puts it on its website: "New York really is the Big Apple."

The Big Apple, for the record, was never about the fruit. The nickname comes from horse racing. In the early 1920s, John J. Fitz Gerald, a racing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, heard stable hands at the New Orleans Fair Grounds call New York's racetracks "the big apple," the big time, where the biggest prizes were. He named his column "Around the Big Apple." Jazz musicians spread it in the 1930s, and a 1971 tourism campaign made it the city's calling card.

So the nickname is about prizes. For a place where the orchards are the story, and where New York turns up in surprising ways, we looked to Hokkaido.

In 1871, Kuroda Kiyotaka, the 31-year-old deputy head of Hokkaido's development commission, went to the United States looking for an expert. He won over the sitting US Commissioner of Agriculture, 67-year-old Horace Capron, who resigned to advise Hokkaido. Capron assembled some 78 specialists. One of them, a German-born horticulturist named Louis Boehmer, was hired on the recommendation of a New York plant dealer who knew Capron. (The Tokyo Yoichi Association names the dealer as Peter Henderson.) Boehmer arrived around 1872 and ran a government garden in Tokyo, where he taught a simple, reliable way to graft apple saplings.

Meanwhile, Yoichi, on Hokkaido's west coast, was being settled by about 600 people from 185 households of former Aizu samurai, who had lost the Boshin War and were branded rebels. They sent men to learn from Boehmer in Tokyo. In 1875, the commission gave Yoichi farmers about 1,500 apple and Western pear saplings. Few took fruit growing seriously.

Then, in 1879, two farmers' trees in Yamada village bore fruit. The trees carried numbers, 19 and 49, that Boehmer had assigned to keep track of imported saplings. Akabane Genpachi named No. 19 Hi no Koromo, "scarlet robe." Kaneko Yasuzo named No. 49 Kokko, "glory of the nation." According to the Boehmer Society, whose president wrote a four-part history on the orchard's website, the names carry the pride of men who were driven from their homeland and held their ground in a cold country. The next year, Yoichi apples won praise at an exposition in Sapporo, and more farmers took them up.

Here's where it gets personal for an apple snob. Kokko is the Japanese name for Ralls Janet, an American apple from Virginia. In 1939, researchers at a government station in Fujisaki, Aomori, crossed it with Delicious. The result was named Fuji in 1962, and it's now the most widely grown apple in the world. If Fuji is one of your favorites, you're eating Kokko's child.

Kaneko Yasuzo kept studying under Boehmer, taught at farms in Sapporo, Teine and Shizunai, and became a government official in 1881. Then the commission closed in 1882, and his trail went cold. In 2008, the Boehmer Society's president, Kaga Minoru, noticed that the founder of a shrine in Otofuke, in Tokachi, shared Kaneko's name. He visited and concluded it was the same man. Kaneko had managed a large farm in Otofuke from 1898, founded the shrine, served as the town's first postmaster, and died at 72. The small shrine he built still stands.

In 2017, the Society unveiled a monument to Boehmer, a see-through "transparent apple," on a hill looking out over Yoichi's landmark Mount Shiriba. Among the messages on the orchard's website is one from astronaut Mohri Mamoru, a Yoichi native. He writes that Yoichi's is the only Japanese apple that has flown in space. Christa McAuliffe, the Massachusetts teacher chosen as America's first civilian astronaut, planned to use an apple from her home state as the symbol of her space lesson, and the Challenger accident in 1986 ended that. In 1992, Mohri's own space lesson opened with a scene of him catching, in orbit, an apple that pupils at Yoichi's Kurokawa Elementary had tossed toward the sky. The apple that flew was shipped from Yoichi to Florida. "Apples were relayed from Massachusetts to Hokkaido," he writes.

Massachusetts keeps turning up in Hokkaido's story. It's also the state whose capitol inspired Sapporo's red-brick government building, as our October 13 trivia showed.

Hard cider has a solid following in the US, and New York leads the country in making it, with more than 5 million gallons a year, according to Cornell. It has always sat awkwardly between genres. People compare it with beer, or with sparkling wine, and it's neither.

Japan has the same problem, with different labels. Hokkaido Wine's cider, made from 100% Yoichi apples at 5.5% alcohol, is classed as fruit wine. Japan's cider (cidre) story runs through Aomori: Hirosaki calls itself the birthplace of Japanese cider, where a postwar company, Asahi Cider, was the country's first. Nikka Whisky inherited its know-how and has made cider at its Hirosaki plant. Nikka's Yoichi roots are apple roots, too. The company that became Nikka went national in 1935 by selling apple juice. (I’m inclined to have more of a Hokkaido hard cider deep dive at some point)

Here's the part that surprises people. Hokkaido is still a small apple producer. It grew about 7,300 tonnes in 2025, around 1% of Japan's crop and seventh among prefectures. Aomori grew 351,400 tonnes, about 61%. By our rough conversion, New York's average crop weighs about as much as all of Japan's apples combined.

Climate change is the reason people are now watching Hokkaido, though. Warming hurts apples at the warm end. After the record heat of 2023, Aomori's apples came in poorly colored and sunburned, its harvest has stayed under 400,000 tonnes for three years running, and the prefecture has applied to register a heat-tolerant variety. Japan's government and JA Zen-noh project that the temperature zone suitable for apples will shift north. By the 2060s, under a medium-emissions scenario, parts of northern and eastern Hokkaido are expected to become newly suitable.

But that's a projection, not a boom. Hokkaido's output has hovered around 7,000 tonnes for years.

The Nitori Tourist Orchard in Yoichi, formerly the Yamamoto Tourist Orchard, is where the history above is told on its own website. Its October 19 report says apples, grapes and pears are in season now. Fuji comes on in early November, with an early Fuji in the second half of October, according to its calendar, which warns that timing shifts with the weather. The orchard closes for the season on November 15, then keeps selling apples. Where New York orchards have cider donuts, this one has apple pie made from its own apples, and its dinosaur park, opened in July, closes November 8.

Look at the grape list and you'll spot two names from western New York: Niagara and Buffalo. Niagara was bred in 1868 in Niagara County, New York, and it's still the leading green grape in the US. Buffalo was released in 1938 by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva. The orchard also sells a unique Niagara grape soft-serve you can't get anywhere else.

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

Road salt is one of those things nobody thinks about until plow trucks come back empty, and this year that's happening before the first snowfall. Some cities haven't gotten a single bid for winter supply, while others are paying nearly double last year's price. 

North America doesn't mine enough of its own, which is why it ships in 8 to 10 million tonnes from places like Egypt and Chile, two weeks away by boat.

Atlas Salt (TSXV: SALT | OTCQX: SALQF) is building a mine in Newfoundland near a deepwater port where ships can reach Boston in three days. With salt, the real cost is in shipping, and CEO Nolan Peterson says the difference is so big that overseas producers could give their salt away and still come out more expensive than Atlas. The project is shovel-ready and projected to generate roughly C$188 million a year in free cash flow.

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🎯 Trivia answer: A) Ebetsu

Taketsuru left Suntory in 1934 to make Scotch-style whisky in Hokkaido. His first plan was a site in what’s now Ebetsu, next to Sapporo, but it risked flooding, so on an investor’s introduction he chose Yoichi. Its cool, damp coastal climate, river water and nearby peat suited the job. Whisky takes years to age, so his company, Dai Nippon Kajuu (“Great Japan Fruit Juice”), sold apple juice from Yoichi apples first. Nikka is short for that name.