Vanilla is an essential ingredient in many beloved desserts, from cakes and pastries to ice cream. Its sweet, rich aroma is almost universally adored.
When we think of vanilla production, tropical regions such as Madagascar and Tahiti often come to mind. Yet, surprisingly, a small amount of exceptionally high-quality vanilla is also grown in Japan.
Vanilla is notoriously difficult to cultivate, requiring considerable time and painstaking labor. And the work does not end at harvest. The beans must undergo a process of fermentation and aging before they become the final product.
We met with one of the few farmers in Japan who has taken on the formidable challenge of growing and producing vanilla beans domestically.
“Some of Japan’s top chefs have travelled all the way here to Nagasaki. Because I chose to grow such a unique plant as vanilla, I’ve had the opportunity to meet people I would not have otherwise encountered as a farmer. I find that incredibly rewarding.”
Yamato Shimizu, founder of Yamato Vanilla Beans, grows vanilla in his hometown of Ōmura City, Nagasaki Prefecture. Before becoming a vanilla farmer, Shimizu worked as a speech-language pathologist, professional musician, composer, and producer.
Following Shimizu through the challenges and discoveries of producing vanilla in Japan, we explore not only what it takes to cultivate vanilla domestically, but also the possibilities it holds as a shikohin (luxury) product.
The ethereal vanilla flower, which only blooms for a few hours in the morning
After taking the first flight out of Tokyo, we arrived at Nagasaki Airport and drove just 15 minutes to the Yamato Vanilla Beans farm. Perched on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, the farm was filled with a refreshing sea breeze. Shimizu greeted us and immediately led us toward the vanilla greenhouse.
Vanilla is a tropical climbing plant belonging to the orchid family and is highly sensitive to temperature and humidity. Because the plants cannot tolerate temperatures below 15°C, they are cultivated in greenhouses in Japan. We visited in late May, just as the flowering season was coming to an end and a particularly busy time for vanilla growers.
As Shimizu worked among the plants, he smiled and said, “What a relief. The vanilla flowers are still in bloom.” The delicate flowers of the vanilla plant bloom for only a few hours each morning.
When the flowers first bloom, they are almost completely odorless and have none of the sweet aroma we associate with vanilla. Their green color also makes them easy to overlook. By the afternoon, the delicate flowers have already wilted and fallen.
In Japan, vanilla plants must be pollinated entirely by hand. Each flower is carefully pollinated one by one, every day, making it an incredibly time and labor intensive process. And because each flower remains open for only a few hours in the morning, the pollination must be completed quickly within this brief window.
The vanilla flower has a remarkably complex structure, with the reproductive organs concealed beneath a delicate membrane. To pollinate the flower, the membrane must first be carefully lifted using tweezers or a thin bamboo skewer. The pollen is then transferred from the stamen to the pistil by hand.
In Mexico, where vanilla cultivation originated, pollination is believed to be assisted by a small native bee known as the melipona bee. However, even in its native habitat, natural pollination is said to be very rare and difficult.
The most difficult process of determining timing of harvest
After a successful pollination, the base of the flower gradually swells and after October in the autumn season, long pods resembling large green beans begin to form in clusters like bananas.
Harvest season arrives in winter. Although it may seem quick to harvest them by the handful, Shimizu looks at the growth of each pod and harvests only those who have reached peak condition one by one.
“Since the flowers bloom sequentially, I determine the pollination period for each flower over a period of about one month and a half. Each pod matures differently. When the tip of the pod begins to turn yellow and is just about to burst, that is when I harvest it. The most difficult thing is to determine this timing. If you get the harvest timing wrong, no matter how hard you work on the fermentation process, you will not have a good result.”
Developing the best drying and fermenting methods that determine the final aroma
Harvesting the vanilla beans is not the end of the process. To transform the freshly harvested pods into the finished product, they must undergo a crucial process known as curing, a process of fermentation and aging that ultimately determines the vanilla’s aroma and flavor.
Shimizu showed us his custom-built curing room, where the vanilla beans are carefully fermented and aged. Resembling a mysterious, multi-faceted planetarium, the unusual structure is actually a sunroom that Shimizu designed himself, incorporating specially ordered parts from England.
The structure is designed to harness sunlight and efficiently raise the temperature inside. As Shimizu showed us the vanilla beans undergoing the curing process, we were immediately enveloped by their rich, sweet aroma.
“I started curing these beans in February this year, so they’re now in their fourth month. At this stage, we’re encouraging enzymatic reactions while maintaining just the right amount of moisture. As the process continues, the aroma will gradually become more intense.”
Shimizu has developed his own unique methods for fermenting and drying the beans. Arriving at this process was no easy feat. From cultivation through curing, he experimented with more than 200 different combinations of methods and conditions before developing the approach he uses today.
The curing method Shimizu developed involves creating tiny, almost imperceptible holes in the vanilla pods, allowing moisture to escape gradually while maintaining an internal temperature conducive to enzymatic reactions.
To maximize the development of aromatic compounds, he carefully controls temperature and humidity throughout the process, slowly drying and aging the pods while preserving their moist, supple texture.
After approximately 10 days to two weeks, much of the moisture has evaporated, and the pods take on a deep brown color. It is also at this stage that they begin to release the unmistakable sweet aroma of vanilla.
From pollination to harvest takes around nine months. Including fermentation, drying, and aging, it takes approximately a year and a half for the vanilla to reach completion. Each bean is, in a sense, a fragrance shaped by an extraordinary investment of time, patience, and care.
Shimizu’s vanilla beans are characterized by a pure and sweet vanilla aroma that comes up to the forefront.
Many people associate the aroma of vanilla with vanilla extract, but much of the familiar scent in commercial products comes from synthetic vanillin. Natural vanilla, by contrast, offers a fresh, almost transparent fragrance reminiscent of flowers, with the deep complexity that develops through fermentation and aging.
The sensual aroma of vanilla that has always captivated people
The history of vanilla stretches back more than 1,000 years before Christ, to the indigenous peoples of ancient Mesoamerica, spanning what is now southern Mexico and Central America. Vanilla was first cultivated and used by Indigenous communities, and later became an important ingredient in the Aztec Empire, where it was used to flavor chocolatl, a cacao-based beverage.
After vanilla was introduced to Europe during the Age of Discovery, its sweet, sensual aroma quickly captivated European royalty and nobility. Marie Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI of France, is said to have been among its admirers.
However, although vanilla plants could be grown in Europe, they would flower without producing fruit. The reason was that vanilla relies on a very small number of natural pollinators, most notably the Melipona bee, native to Mexico, as well as certain hummingbirds.
This was because vanilla is a plant that can only be pollinated by a very limited number of pollinators, hummingbirds and a small Melipona bee, both native to Mexico.
It is said that in 1841, on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, a 12-year-old boy devised a method for the artificial pollination of vanilla. This technique brought about a major transformation, and vanilla cultivation spread across the seas to countries ranging from Madagascar to India, Tahiti, and Indonesia.
With a natural pollination rate of only about 1 percent, which is an extremely low figure that could easily lead to the plant’s extinction, vanilla beans have been produced and cherished despite the immense effort and time required. The reason it has endured such a long history is undoubtedly because its one-of-a-kind fragrance has captivated humanity for centuries.
The path from a musician to a vanilla farmer
Shimizu comes from a long line of farmers. His family produces Sonogi Tea, a renowned tea from Nagasaki, while his grandfather grew grapes and his father cultivated orchids.
Although Shimizu often helped out on the family farm, he says that as a child, he had no interest in becoming a farmer.
“Actually, I kind of hated it. Our family could never go on vacation, and my parents were always too busy to spend much time with me. I was determined not to become a farmer. I had always loved music, but I knew it would be difficult to make a living from it, so I wanted to learn a practical skill. I became certified as a speech-language pathologist and went on to work at a hospital specializing in brain and speech rehabilitation.”
While working at the hospital, Shimizu continued to pursue music on the side, gradually saving money until he eventually resigned three years later. He then moved to South Korea to pursue music professionally, spending the next decade working as a musician.
As a musician, he traveled the world and performed in musical festivals. During his travels in tropical regions, he saw the cultivation of many tropical plants, including vanilla.
“Perhaps it’s in my blood as the son of a farming family, but whenever I traveled around the world on tour, I found myself paying attention to the different crops and produce being grown in each region. (laughs) From around my late 20s, I gradually became more interested in farming as a career.”
Then, as mandatory military service in South Korea led some members to leave his group, Shimizu began to reconsider his own future. Just before turning 30, he felt that he had given music everything he could and had “no regrets left.” It was then that he decided to leave the music world behind and embark on an entirely new path of growing vanilla.
Utilizing the know-how his father and grandfather collected through grape and orchard farming
“Because my father had built a facility specifically for cultivating orchids, I wondered whether I could apply that knowledge to growing vanilla. So I spent about a year and a half researching it. Phalaenopsis orchids are relatively large as commercial products, which makes shipping costs high, and we couldn’t avoid the impact of rising oil prices.
“Vanilla, on the other hand, can be stored for two to three years once it has been processed, and because it is lightweight, transportation costs are relatively low. I could apply many of the techniques used to cultivate orchids to vanilla, while the pruning and branch-management techniques my grandfather used in grape cultivation have also proved to be useful.”
Shimizu also found a vanilla grower in Fukuoka who took him on as an apprentice. He lived on the farm and learned the trade firsthand. “He is like a researcher, and he is still my mentor today.”
Because Shimizu entered farming later in life, he drew on the knowledge and techniques of those who had come before him, adapting them across different areas to accelerate his learning. His willingness to look beyond conventional approaches and experiment with new ideas proved to be a major advantage.
But while the cultivation itself went relatively smoothly, Shimizu soon encountered a much bigger challenge. There was virtually no precedent for commercially producing and processing vanilla in Japan.
Simply drying the freshly harvested beans did not produce the sweet, familiar aroma of vanilla. And although he searched for information from producers around the world, very few processing techniques or recipes were publicly available. The information he needed was rarely shared in detail.
He scoured YouTube, and watched videos of vanilla production from around the world, studying them frame by frame. But the crucial parts of the process were often hidden from view. Whenever he noticed what appeared to be someone working just out of frame or behind the camera, he would zoom in on that part of the screen and watch it repeatedly, piecing together clues one by one.
Vanilla cultivation demands meticulous attention to detail and an extraordinary amount of patience. Yet Shimizu laughs when he compares it with his former career.
“For me, making vanilla is 100 times easier than making music.”
“Music is invisible. Even when I’m confident that I’ve created something good, it doesn’t necessarily get recognized. Vanilla, on the other hand, is tangible and much easier to evaluate. The goal is clear.”
“Something that vanilla and music have in common is that if you pursue excellence, you naturally meet all kinds of interesting people. I enjoy the process of trial and error and exploring something thoroughly. Maybe I just like struggling hard to reach my goals.”
Motivated by the feedback from chefs around Japan
Seven years after beginning his vanilla cultivation journey, word of mouth had spread about Yamato Vanilla Beans with orders now coming from customers across Japan and inquiries even reaching him from overseas.
“Top chefs from all over Japan come all the way to Nagasaki. Because I chose to grow such a unique plant, I have the opportunity to meet people I would never encounter if I were simply farming ordinary crops. It’s really fascinating.”
“Feedback from chefs and other culinary professionals is invaluable. I can use their insights to refine my cultivation methods and find new ways to improve the quality of my vanilla beans. I always find our conversations both stimulating and enjoyable.”
Chefs and pastry chefs who have worked with Shimizu’s vanilla beans have praised their remarkable aroma. Some have commented that “the aroma is so pronounced that you can bring out the sweetness with less sugar,” while others have found that “honey alone is enough” to complement the vanilla.
Shimizu customizes the finish of the vanilla beans according to the requests of the chefs. This is something that is possible only because it is domestically produced.
Some chefs prefer beans that are green and fresh, while others request beans that are brown but retain a moist texture, or they specify a particular moisture content. For Shimizu, each request presents a new challenge.
“Every request is like a new experiment that we conduct together, and I find that incredibly rewarding. Some chefs even send me prototype dishes made with my vanilla. One patisserie created an incredibly delicious vanilla ice cream using my beans, with no concern for the cost of ingredients. Although I work alone on the farm, I feel encouraged knowing that I’m supported by so many people.”
Looking ahead, Shimizu hopes to produce even higher-quality vanilla beans by continuing to refine his skills while also collecting and analyzing data at every stage, from cultivation through processing. His goal is to systematize the techniques he has developed through years of trial and error and, eventually, share that knowledge with others who want to take on the challenge of producing vanilla in Japan.
Japan has a long tradition of meticulous craftsmanship and producing high-quality goods. By developing cultivation methods suited to Japan’s climate and introducing systems that improve efficiency, there is potential to establish a stable domestic supply of vanilla that can stand proudly on the world stage.
Shimizu also has ambitions that extend beyond Japan. One day, he hopes to provide technical support to vanilla-producing regions in other parts of the world.
Vanilla cultivation and processing methods in many producing regions have remained largely unchanged for centuries, even as producers face growing labor shortages and the challenges of maintaining large-scale production.
“I want to use the unique know-how we’ve developed over the years to support vanilla-producing regions around the world. At the same time, I hope to make vanilla more accessible to ordinary consumers, so that they can enjoy high-quality vanilla more easily. Right now, I’m working hard to build the foundation that will make that possible.”
An ice cream bar made from domestic vanilla beans
After speaking with Shimizu, we visited Toshihiro Matsuo, pastry chef at R Cinq Famille, who was the very first chef to use Yamato Vanilla Beans.
His shop is located in Kohama Onsen, in the Unzen area, where he creates and sells ice cream bars and baked goods.
The shop’s colorful, creatively designed ice cream bars, available in some 50 varieties, are a feast for the eyes. Made generously with local ingredients, including bananas and peaches from Shimabara and salt produced in Kohama, each one is as delicious as it is visually appealing. We couldn’t resist trying them one after another, quickly becoming completely absorbed in the experience.
“When I heard there was someone growing vanilla in Nagasaki, I went to meet him right away. Here, we make ‘Yamato Vanilla Ice Cream,’ an ice cream bar that allows you to fully appreciate the pure, rich flavor of vanilla itself.”
Created to showcase the true essence of vanilla, this ice cream bar had a crisp, almost transparent aroma that seemed to evoke the freshness of the living plant itself. Its gentle, soothing flavor lingered beautifully.
“I also use Mr. Shimizu’s vanilla beans in my fruit compote. I really appreciate that he’s willing to customize his products to suit my needs. Lately, I’ve been particularly enjoying a smoky vanilla with subtle notes of cherry blossom. He’s incredibly dedicated to his research, and I feel that the quality of his vanilla keeps getting better and better. I’m also a big fan of him as a person, which is another reason I’m happy to support him.”
The domestic vanilla beans cultivated by Shimizu have earned the trust and high expectations of pastry chefs and chefs across Japan.
With only a handful of producers currently cultivating vanilla domestically, the crop still holds enormous untapped potential.
Just as he once devoted himself to music, Shimizu continues to pursue ever greater quality in his vanilla. His relentless curiosity, experimentation, and passion suggest that the story of Japanese vanilla is only just beginning.
Advisor to corporations, and local governments on promoting local tourism. Published work includes, “Aomori & Hakodate Travel Book” (Daimond), “San’in Travel: Craft and Food Tour” (Mynavi), “A Drunkard’s Travel Guide: Sake, Snacks, and Tableware Tour” (Mynavi). Her life work is to explore towns in her travels, drink at different shops and visit the workshops of different crafts. Interests include tea, the Jomon period, architecture, and fermented foods.
Editor. Born and raised in Kagoshima, the birthplace of Japanese tea. Worked for Impress, Inc. and Huffington Post Japan and has been involved in the launch and management of media after becoming independent. Does editing, writing, and content planning/production.