 The land resembles Holland about as much as a tulip does a turnip. Who would guess that Toyama Prefecture, banked to the south by some of Japan's tallest, snow-gripped mountains, is the country's biggest producer of the noble flower most people associate with the Netherlands?
Tulips — 50 million of them! — are grown in the region every year and shipped as bulbs to growers all over Japan, and the world. Yes, even to Holland.
And though the Dutch were among the few foreigners allowed to trade with Japan during the Edo Era, the first tulip to be seen in Japan came from France, around 1863.
Seeking ways to utilize fallow rice fields in the off season, a man named Toyozo Mizuno began cultivating tulip bulbs in Toyama Prefecture around 1918. Although quite unlike Holland, as mentioned, the sandy soil proved to have the good drainage and ideal chemical balance required — quite similar, it seems, to certain regions of Turkey, where the flower originated.
In fact, that's where the name comes from — a linguistic mixup involving a 16th-century Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who mistook a description of its shape for its name.
He thought his interpreter had called it t'lbent—the Turkish word for "turban."
In any case, an industry grew up around this treasure in Toyama, and it still prospers today. Local rice farmers began growing tulips enthusiastically in the 1920s, and now there are more than 250 hectares under cultivation here, producing about 400 different varieties.
The heavy snowfalls insulate the bulbs in winter, and come spring, the long daylight hours encourage blooming. This spring, however, don't expect to see miles and miles of flowers when you drive through the countryside: professional cultivators regularly "deflower" the plants as soon as they appear, the better to enlarge the bulbs and outwit predatory insects.
But drive about 40 minutes from Toyama Airport and you'll arrive at Tonami Tulip Park where approximately one million of the glorious flowers are left untouched during the blooming season. They are at their best during the annual festival held in the park; this year, the 48th Tonami Tulip Fair runs from April 23 to May 5.
You can also visit the Tonami Tulip Gallery, the Toyama Prefectural Flower Center and the Toyama Prefectural Flowering Plants and Bulbs Agricultural Cooperative — all in Tonami City. No one would dare "deflower" the Prefectural Flower in these horticultural sanctuaries. | 
