A 5 kg carton comes off the pallet at our cold room, still cold from the flight. Corrugated card, a colour photograph of the fruit on the side, and then a printed panel covered in Japanese: a row of boxes, a hand-drawn circle around one of the numbers, a farmer's number where you would expect a farmer's name, and a red stamp pressed slightly off-centre. Most people in Hong Kong open a box like this, admire the fruit, and never look at the panel. It is the most useful thing on the whole carton.

We open these every week, so we have learned to read them out of self-interest — when you buy a sealed carton sight unseen, the label is the only thing you have. The good news is that it is not a marketing sticker. It is a document, written to a published prefectural standard, and once you know its six fields you can walk into any shop in this city, glance at a box of Japanese fruit, and know more about what is inside it than the person selling it to you.

This post is deliberately not another peach-picking guide — we already wrote those. If you want the peach ladder explained in full, start with our Japanese peach buying guide; for how the varieties differ in the mouth, the peach texture map; and for the difference between a bruise and a genuine defect, this one. What follows is the carton itself — and grape, which none of those posts covers.

Read the box. Then read the fruit.

There is no national grade law in Japan. What there is, in the producing prefectures, is something more interesting: a licensed inspector who is personally answerable for the print on the panel.

Start with the honest part, because it changes how you read everything after it. Japan has no national fruit grading law. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries abolished the national standard shipping specification in 2002, on the reasoning that a single country-wide ruler had stopped being useful once buyers wanted different things; today's shipping specifications are set by each producing region for itself. MAFF also notes, drily, that competition between regions has pushed some of those specifications into being over-subdivided.

So when someone tells you a Japanese grade "means" something absolute, it does not. What it means is that a named region, with a published standard and its reputation attached, has certified this box against that standard. Which turns out to be a far stronger promise than a national rulebook, because of who signs it.

The red stamp is not decoration

Yamanashi Prefecture — the largest grape prefecture in Japan and a major peach one — publishes its fruit standard together with the implementing rules that govern how the standard is applied. Those rules are unusually blunt. Produce that has been graded must carry an inspection stamp — 検査印 (kensa-in, inspection stamp) — and the stamp must identify who did the grading: the individual inspector, the shipping group, or the inspection association. And in the other direction: produce that has not been graded by a Governor-certified inspector may not display an inspection mark at all.

The inspectors themselves are not co-op volunteers. They are certified by the Prefectural Governor, registered with the prefectural produce inspection association, and hold a licence valid for five years that can be revoked if grading is not carried out properly. A shipping group with no inspector of its own has to contract the association instead. Inspection is carried out per container — and where that is genuinely impractical, on a sample of at least 10% of the lot.

The co-ops guard the mark themselves. Our own Shine Muscat carton prints this line, in Japanese, right on the panel:

共選 and 個選 — and a fair word for both

共選 (kyōsen, co-op joint selection) means the growers of a district bring their fruit to a shared grading facility, where it is sorted, graded and packed against one published standard by a licensed inspector, and shipped under the co-op's name. One standard, one inspector, one traceable stamp, box after box.

個選 (kosen, the grower's own selection) means the grower sorts and ships on their own standard, direct. This can be superb, and some of the finest fruit in Japan leaves the farm exactly this way — we are not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is only where the guarantee lives: with 個選 it rests on that grower's own reputation, and with 共選 it rests on a third-party inspection system that can revoke a licence. For a buyer opening a sealed carton on the other side of the sea, the stamp is what makes the printed label enforceable.

This also solves a small mystery on our boxes. Under the same rules, when fruit has gone through 共同選果 (kyōdō senka, joint grading) and the shipping organisation's name is printed, the individual grower's name may be left off and replaced by a 農家番号 (nōka bangō, grower number) or 荷印 (nijirushi, lot mark). That is why our cartons carry a number exactly where you would expect a farmer's name — not anonymity, but a reference back into the co-op's records.

The panel, field by field

Here is the panel as it reads on the Shine Muscat carton in our cold room this week. The peach cartons carry the same fields, with 玉数 in place of 房数. Grades and counts change with every shipment — this is a worked example of how to read a label, not a promise of what we will ship next month.

Reproduced from the panel on a carton received this week. Field values change shipment to shipment.

One field says how good. The next says how big. They are two different ladders, and confusing them is the most common mistake in this whole category.

If you take one idea away from this post, take this one: 等級 and 階級 are independent axes. 等級 grades quality. 階級 measures size. A big fruit is not automatically a better fruit, and a small one is not a lesser one — a 3L bunch and an L bunch from the same co-op had to clear exactly the same quality bar to be marked 秀.

The ladder prefectures actually publish is 秀 (shū) / 優 (yū) / 良 (ryō) — three rungs, best first. What Yamanashi's standard certifies at 秀 for a peach is worth listing precisely, because it tells you what the grade is not about: correct varietal shape, superior colour, uniform size across the box, superior appearance, no pest or disease damage, and fruit that is correctly and evenly ripe. Read that list again and notice the absence — sugar is not in the peach 等級 definition at all. Sweetness is certified somewhere else entirely, which we come to in §05.

And then there is 特秀 (tokushū), the tier everyone in Hong Kong recognises. Here is the thing nobody says out loud: 特秀 is not in the Yamanashi prefectural standard. The official ladder stops at 秀. 特秀 is an extra top tier that individual JA and co-ops add above it and define themselves — the Yūbari melon co-op, for instance, publishes its own four-step 特秀 / 秀 / 優 / 良 ladder for joint-selection fruit, applied by its own inspectors — the same joint-selection machinery we unpacked in our Japanese melon buying guide. The consequence is straightforward and worth knowing: 特秀 from one co-op and 特秀 from another are not automatically the same fruit. It is a real distinction made by a real inspector — but it is that co-op's distinction, not a national one.

Two thresholds from the standard are worth carrying in your head. First, colour: a peach needs 40% or more colouring from the tip to reach 秀 — but for easy-colouring varieties, a group that explicitly includes 川中島白桃 (Kawanakajima Hakutō), the bar rises to 60% or more. Second, cracks: 裂果 (retsuka, splitting) is prohibited outright at both 秀 and 優; only 良 tolerates a hairline crack, and only if there is no rot.

The single most misread number on a Japanese peach box — and the easiest one to get right, because it is not a score at all.

玉数 (tamasū, fruit count per box) is exactly what it says: how many peaches are in the carton. What makes it powerful is that on the Yamanashi standard the count is the size class — the standard states plainly that the 階級 division shall be the number of fruit packed in one box, and that the size class shall be displayed as that count. Since the box weight is fixed, this gives you a rule rather than a tendency:

Yamanashi does not leave it at that. The standard publishes the actual fruit diameter each count corresponds to, because the peaches sit in moulded pockets and the pocket has to fit:

Count → fruit diameter, from the Yamanashi Prefecture standard shipping specification for open-field peach. Circles are drawn to relative scale, not life size.

The standard gives diameter, not weight. But since a 5 kg carton is a fixed 5,000 g, you can do the other half yourself — and we want to be clear that the figures below are our arithmetic (5,000 g ÷ count), not a JA-published number. Treat them as "roughly":

Now put it to work on the boxes in front of us this week. Two peach cartons, both reading 特秀, one at 13玉 and one at 12玉. JA Tsugaru Mirai (JA津軽みらい) in Aomori already describes its 川中島白桃 as a large-fruited peach at 300–350 g. Run the arithmetic and a 12–13玉 box works out somewhere around 385–417 g a fruit — packed at the large end even for a variety the co-op itself calls big. That is what the count field tells you before you have opened a single flap.

Say it out loud once and it sticks: the number is a count, not a score.

Everyone assumes 3L means big berries. It does not. It measures something else entirely — and once you know what, the whole label starts checking itself.

Here is the correction that surprises most people: on the Yamanashi standard, the L / 2L / 3L letters denote the weight of one bunch, not the size of a berry.

Yamanashi Prefecture 階級 (weight) bands for シャインマスカット, house-grown and open-field. The same banding applies to seeded 巨峰 and ピオーネ. The prefectural standard stops at 3L.

Berry size is graded, but on a different line of the same table — under 玉張り・粒揃い, which covers berry plumpness and evenness. For seeded 巨峰 (Kyohō) the per-berry target at 秀 is 12 g or more, and for ピオーネ (Pione) 14 g or more. So a bunch can be big with uneven berries, or modest with immaculate ones. Two fields, two questions.

Then there is 房数 (fusasū, bunches per box), which behaves exactly like 玉数: in a fixed 5 kg carton, fewer bunches means bigger bunches. Again our arithmetic, again "roughly" — but notice where it lands against the letter bands above:

Swipe the table sideways on a phone

That hand-circled number is our favourite detail on the whole panel. The row is printed with every option the co-op ships, and someone at the grading shed draws a ring around the one that applies to this box, in pen, on the day. A document made by a person, not a printer.

Grade, size class and 房数 vary by shipment — ask us what this week's carton reads and we will tell you exactly.

For peach, sweetness is not in the grade at all. For grape, it is written into it. The difference tells you how much a printed Brix number is really worth.

We flagged it in §02: the peach 等級 definition says nothing about sugar. That is not an oversight — sweetness is certified on a parallel track, by machine. Yamanashi runs a 光センサー (hikari sensā, non-destructive optical sensor) guideline that measures 糖度 (tōdo, Brix) through the fruit without cutting it, and sorts on the result:

The prefecture also reports the optical sensor's correlation with a conventional refractometer at around 0.9 — the number on the box is a real measurement, not a slogan.

Crucially, the guideline lets co-ops raise the bar for mid- and late-season varieties. Which is exactly why co-op sugar brands sit above the floor rather than at it: JA Green Nagano (JAグリーン長野) ships peaches at Brix 13 and above under its 「輝々桃」 (Kirakira-tō) name, while JA Tsugaru Mirai will only put its 「津軽の桃」 (Tsugaru no Momo) name on fruit reading Brix 11 or higher. Two different numbers, two different varieties and seasons, both genuine.

Grapes work the opposite way round. Yamanashi writes the Brix floor into the 等級 table itself. Shine Muscat cannot be 秀 without reading Brix 18 or above on a refractometer. And seeded 巨峰 / ピオーネ at 秀 must clear Brix 17 or above and pH 3.2 or above — an acid floor standing right beside the sugar floor.

So how much should you trust a printed Brix number?

Trust it as a floor, not a promise. A 糖度 figure on a JA carton is the minimum the lot had to clear to ship under that name. It is not a measurement of the particular peach in your hand. And because the threshold is variety- and season-dependent — and co-ops are explicitly permitted to raise it for later varieties — "Brix 13" from a late-variety co-op and "Brix 13" from an early one are not the same claim. A number with a co-op and a variety attached means something. A number on its own means very little.

One more sentence from the grape standard that earns its place in your pocket. Shine Muscat harvest begins at Brix 18 and above, 「果粒がやや黄色みかかった頃」 — when the berries have taken on a slightly yellowish cast. So that faint golden-green on a Shine Muscat is the co-op's own harvest cue. It reads ripe, not old.

Selected on sugar by the shipping co-op before it left Japan.

The graders read ripeness with their eyes, not their thumbs. So can you — and the fruit will be better for it.

The official ripeness test for a peach is a colour reading, and it is not the red. Yamanashi defines 熟度 (jukudo, ripeness) at 秀 as 「品種固有の地色が50%程度抜けた」 — the variety's own ground colour has faded by about 50%, without being overripe. 地色 (jiiro, ground colour) is the background colour underneath the blush, easiest to read up on the shoulder near the stem.

And do not press it. JA Green Nagano's own advice to shoppers is to choose peaches without touching them, because the fruit is that delicate. Three cues that require no contact at all:

Worth saying why we care so much about the no-touch part: a pressed peach bruises for whoever buys it next, and that bruise did not come from the grower. It came from the last pair of hands. The whole inspection system upstream is undone by ten seconds at a display table.

Aroma comes with eating-ripeness rather than ahead of it — Yamanashi's own description of superior-eating peaches includes the variety's characteristic perfume, alongside the softening and the juice. If you can smell the peach before you pick it up, it is talking to you.

有袋 and 無袋 — bagged or bare on the tree

Our Aomori carton reads 川中島白桃〔有袋〕. 有袋 (yūtai) means each fruit was grown inside a paper bag on the branch; 無袋 (mutai) means it grew bare. This is a cultivation choice, not a grade — bagging appears nowhere in the 等級 or 階級 tables, and neither method is ranked above the other anywhere in the standard.

What it does change is the look and the keeping. Bagged fruit tends to come out with cleaner, smoother, paler skin and keeps better — JA Tsugaru Mirai states that contrast plainly for its 黄金桃, where the unbagged fruit runs red and the bagged fruit yellow with better keeping quality. Unbagged fruit tends to colour up more strongly and run a little sweeter. Both go through exactly the same inspection. The value of the label is that it tells you which one you are holding, so you know what the fruit should look like before you start judging it.

The two late varieties on our boxes right now, one line each — and for how they actually differ in the mouth, the texture map goes deeper than we will here:

Grown in the bag, graded on the same ladder, and carrying the higher colour bar for its variety.

Start with the question we are asked more than any other about grapes — and answer it with a government document.

Is the white powder on the berries pesticide?

No. And the proof is better than a reassurance, because it comes from the grading table itself.

果粉 (kafun, bloom) is a graded quality item in Yamanashi's official prefectural shipping standard. The 等級 table for 巨峰 and ピオーネ carries a 果粉 row, and it reads: 秀 = 「よくのっているもの」 — well covered. 良 = 「劣るもの」 — poor.

The mechanism, from JA Zen-Noh Nagano: bloom is a wax the fruit produces itself. It repels rain and morning dew, and it slows moisture loss from the berry — and because it rubs off at a touch, it works as a freshness indicator. JA Hare-no-Kuni Okayama puts the buying rule in one line: the more bloom a bunch carries, the fresher it is; a bunch with none left should be eaten sooner rather than later.

Which reframes the whole thing. That dusty bloom you were tempted to polish off is the grape's own packaging, and it is on the co-op's grading sheet.

The stem is the real freshness tell

Berry colour barely moves after harvest, so it is a poor clock. The 果軸 (kajiku, stem) is the part that visibly ages, and JA Zen-Noh Nagano's advice for choosing a good bunch is to check it first: green, springy and still moist means fresh. Browned, dried and brittle means time has passed. Then check the berries for that taut, filled-out look — 張り — and you are essentially done.

The varieties you will actually meet in Hong Kong

Swipe the table sideways on a phone

One honest note to carry out of that table: Queen Rouge's open-field season does not open until late September. A red Japanese grape on sale in August is therefore either a different variety — several red varieties do run in late August — or held stock. Neither is a problem. It is just worth asking which, and a shop that can answer is a shop worth buying from.

A short, specific window — and one of the few stretches in the year when both fruits are at their best at the same time.

Japanese fruit runs on a relay, region handing to region, variety handing to variety. Here is where we are standing today.

Peach

Grape

Put the two strips side by side and you can see why this fortnight is worth paying attention to. The late, large, well-keeping, crisp-textured peaches and the first open-field Shine Muscat of the year overlap — and the overlap is short. Nagano's entire grape line-up is still weeks away, and the peach relay is about to hand off to its final region.

Which is the sourced argument for buying an Aomori peach specifically, right now. JA Tsugaru Mirai grows late-maturing varieties on purpose, so that it can ship into the 端境期 (hazakaiki) — the gap that opens after the main producing regions have finished and before the next thing starts. Aomori is not late by accident. It is late by design, and this is the fortnight the design pays off.

A Hong Kong kitchen in late August is not a Japanese one. Three habits protect what you have just paid for.

Peach — finish it warm, chill it late

Japanese growers advise letting a peach finish ripening at room temperature, and chilling it only 1–2 hours before you eat it. Over-chilling flattens perceived sweetness and mutes aroma — JA Hare-no-Kuni Okayama makes the same point about grapes in one line: 「冷えすぎると甘みを感じにくくなります」, when it is chilled too much, the sweetness becomes hard to taste. The fridge is a serving step, not a storage step.

Grape — unwashed, bagged, and only briefly cold

Store the bunch unwashed, bagged, in the crisper drawer. Unwashed matters: washing on arrival strips the bloom that is currently slowing moisture loss out of the berries, so an early rinse actively shortens the bunch's life. Chill for about 30 minutes before serving and no longer.

If you are taking berries off the stem to store them loose, do it the way the Okayama co-op does: snip each berry off with scissors leaving about a 2 mm stub of stem attached, then bag them. The stub seals the join. Pull a berry off bare and it weeps from the scar.

Washing — late, briefly, and with nothing but water

Rinse under running water immediately before eating. That is also the advice of Hong Kong's own Centre for Food Safety (香港衞生署食物安全中心): rinse produce thoroughly under running water; where suitable, scrub firm-skinned items with a clean brush; and use no soap, no detergent and no commercial produce wash — the CFS notes the concern that these become a new source of chemical residue themselves. Long soaking is no longer considered necessary either.

Which lines up neatly with everything above: wash late, not early. An early wash costs you the bloom that is keeping the grape fresh, and buys you nothing.

Everything above that is stated as fact comes from one of these. Where a figure is our own arithmetic rather than a published number, we have said so on the page.

• 農林水産省 (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) — 青果物の出荷規格, on the abolition of the national standard shipping specification in 2002 and regional specification-setting today: maff.go.jp/j/seisan/ryutu/engei/kikaku.html
• 山梨県青果物標準出荷規格（もも） — Yamanashi Prefecture standard shipping specification for peach: the 秀/優/良 definitions, the colour and 裂果 thresholds, the 玉数 count-to-diameter table, the 熟度 ground-colour rule, and the 光センサー Brix guideline: pref.yamanashi.jp/documents/24527/02_momo.pdf
• 山梨県青果物標準出荷規格（ぶどう） — for grape: the L/2L/3L bunch-weight bands, the per-berry targets, the Brix and pH floors inside 等級, and the 果粉 grading row: pref.yamanashi.jp/documents/24527/01_budou.pdf
• 山梨県青果物標準出荷規格 実施要綱 — who may grade, and the rule that ungraded produce may not display an inspection mark: pref.yamanashi.jp/documents/24527/shukkakikaku_youkou.pdf
• 山梨県青果物標準出荷規格 実施要領 — label content, the compulsory 検査済印, naming the inspector, per-container and 10%-sample inspection, and the 農家番号・荷印 substitution: pref.yamanashi.jp/documents/24527/shukkakikaku_youryou.pdf
• 農研機構 NARO — シャインマスカット variety record: skin edibility, texture, Brix, resistance to splitting, and shatter and keeping quality versus 巨峰: naro.go.jp/collab/breed/0400/0411/001262.html
• JA全農おかやま — 晴王, confirming 晴王® as a registered trademark for Okayama-JA Shine Muscat: zennoh.or.jp/oy/product/fruits/hareou/
• JA晴れの国岡山 — シャインマスカット: bloom as a freshness indicator, the 2 mm stem stub, the 30-minute chill, over-chilling and perceived sweetness, and eating a bunch from the bottom up: ja-hareoka.or.jp/specialty/shine_muscat.php
• JA全農長野 — ぶどう三姉妹: what bloom is and why the fruit makes it, the stem as the freshness check, the 共選所 grading-shed route, and Queen Rouge's late-September open-field shipping: nn.zennoh.or.jp/fruits/three_grape_sisters/
• JAグリーン長野 — もも: choosing peaches without touching them, the suture line, the late-season variety calendar, and the 「輝々桃」 Brix 13 brand: ja-grn.iijan.or.jp/food/fruit/peach
• JA津軽みらい — 桃: 川中島白桃 at 300–350 g, the 「津軽の桃」 Brix 11 threshold, the bagged and unbagged colour and keeping contrast, and the deliberate late-maturing strategy: ja-tsugaru-mirai.or.jp/tokusan/tokusan_momo_dtl.html
• 夕張市農業協同組合 — a worked example of a co-op publishing its own four-tier 特秀/秀/優/良 joint-selection ladder and the inspector who applies it: yubari-melon.or.jp/arekore/
• 香港衞生署 食物安全中心《食物安全焦點》第128期 — Centre for Food Safety, Department of Health, Hong Kong: rinsing produce under running water, brushing firm-skinned items, and avoiding soap, detergent and produce washes: cfs.gov.hk/tc_chi/multimedia/multimedia_pub/multimedia_pub_fsf_128_02.html

Sources last reviewed 25 August 2026. Carton readings quoted in this article describe shipments received in the week of 25 August 2026; grades, size classes and counts change with every shipment. Published by iBuddies, Hong Kong.