Fresh Fish Set B Fresh Fish Box Assortment Direct Shipping Gift Gift Set Yamagata Prefecture Shonai Fish Seafood Shoku no Miyako Shonai

The Shonai region of Yamagata Prefecture is blessed with a well-balanced mix of nature, tradition, culture, and other elements, and with the diverse “food” these bring.
It is also a region blessed with “people” who have passed down crops suited to its climate, adopted new ones, and continued to make constant innovations and efforts to increase their value.

The Shonai General Branch Office of Yamagata Prefecture is working on the “Making Shonai a City of Food” initiative, which uses Shonai’s diverse ingredients and rich food culture as a starting point to promote revitalization of local industries such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries, the food industry, and tourism.
[Tsuruoka has been designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy!]
UNESCO Creative Cities Network
This program was established by UNESCO in 2004 with the aim of having member cities collaborate within an international network to promote creative local industries, protect cultural diversity, and contribute to sustainable development worldwide. Cities seeking to join the Creative Cities Network apply by selecting one distinctive field from seven creative industries designated by UNESCO (gastronomy, literature, film, music, crafts & folk art, design, and media arts).

Tsuruoka City aimed to join as a city in the gastronomy category, and alongside proactive activities to contribute to mutual development among member cities, it has worked to promote its food culture to the world, carry on and develop the diverse food traditions protected and nurtured by the region, and revitalize a wide range of food-related industries—from production to processing, distribution, tourism, dining, and tableware. On December 1, 2014, it was approved for membership in the network, becoming Japan’s first UNESCO Creative City in the field of gastronomy.

Tsuruoka’s Food Culture
Tsuruoka City in Yamagata Prefecture has a rich food culture blessed with bounties from the sea and mountains, within a varied landscape that stretches from majestic mountains to the vast Shonai Plain and on to the Sea of Japan, and it continues to pass down its distinctive food culture through the wisdom and passion of its predecessors.
The sacred site of mountain asceticism, the “Dewa Sanzan,” which has attracted faith for more than 1,400 years, still preserves the blessings of nature and the mountains as “shojin cuisine for living,” and many “festival foods and traditional foods” that share festivals and spirituality in the home have also been passed down. A distinctive food culture closely tied to Tsuruoka’s spiritual culture, rooted in its local climate, remains strongly. In addition, more than 50 types of “traditional local crops,” whose “seeds” have been protected and handed down by farmers for hundreds of years, have been confirmed; these crops, inherited together with their cultivation methods, captivate visitors as “living cultural assets.”
Against this backdrop of history and food culture, Tsuruoka was designated a “UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy” in December 2014, and its treasured, inherited food culture took a step toward becoming an “ideal place of food” that reminds Japanese people of the richness of food they originally possess, and its very roots.