Mother’s Day is upon us again and in Japan, flower orders are blooming, especially for carnations! In Aochi Village, a part of Kusatsu City in Shiga Prefecture, Hiroo Inokuchi is a farmer who grows many flowers. Over 2000 square feet of his greenhouses are devoted to carnations just for Mother’s Day, which makes for 18,000 carnations to be shipped to Kyoto. And, there are 5 kinds of carnations that are the most desired which he grows. The three most popular are Kiss, Charade, and of course, the INGU Sailor Moon Carnation (orange mutant). We have a new image of these orange carnations to share with you from the article today (they are on the left)! Due to less than favorable weather in March, Mr. Inokuchi says that he only got about 70% of what he usually grows since fewer buds grew. He noted that the same pale and bright colors from previous years continue to be popular, as he worked on the arrangements and packing them in special cases for transport. One site is taking online orders for the orange Sailor Moon Carnations – 1 single carnation will cost $1.23 USD (116 Yen), and a lot of 25 will cost $30.76 USD (2888 Yen). It is still too early to order the Happy Valley Sailor Moon orchid or the Sailor Moon sunflowers to order.

We also have some more information to share about this flower! Mr. Choutarou Inagaki of Hazu, Ishiki city, Aichi Prefecture, is this carnation’s cultivator! He has been cultivating different kinds of carnations since 1966. He is very interested in cultivating carnations that can adapt to the humid conditions in Japan. Any carnation breed name that has INGU in it, is one of Mr. Inagaki’s (and there are 35 of them). INGU Sailor Moon Orange is one of his most popular varieties, and is even featured on display at Chubu Centrair International Airport! Mr. Inagaki wants to do his part to keep flower production up in Japan, he believes that they are in a crisis and many carnations are being imported from China and Columbia. He believes that Japanese farmers can grow more carnations, and he is there to help find better ways to grow them in Japan.

This article brings a little more bad news, but there is a small ray of sunshine in this article to light some of the darkness of bad news earlier this week!

Back in August, we posted an article that featured a second orchid named for Sailor Moon with whatever we could find. One of our readers Lunchboxfox, did some investigating and found that Dogashima was not the name of a horticulturist – but of a famous Japanese Orchid Resort and Academy! Orchid Resort Dogashima is located In beautiful Shizukoka and is a huge park devoted to orchids. They have plant displays both inside and out and the park is built around a large suspension bridge! There are over 10,000 species on display, and many events are held here. They also have tours, a naturally-made playground, orchid planting and corsage-making workshops, organic and healing food restaurants, a forest, and an orchid zone. And of course, there is a store for orchids and related merchandise. It also looks like they have an academy there for orchid propagation and research. This place definitely looks like a lot of fun and if any of our readers are lucky enough to visit this region, please put this on your sightseeing list! For everyone reading this blog, before we hit the interesting (and the bad news about this orchid), here’s your ray of sunshine –please wander the Orchid Resort’s site and marvel at the pictures☺.

She emailed the resort to find out some more information about the orchid in question and learned from a Mr. Sato that this orchid was hybridized by this resort and registered to the Japanese Branch of the Royal Horticultural Society back in 1993. He also told us a little bit about the name – however his English isn’t perfect so we are trying our best to tell you what he said! He said that the meaning of gemstone was “Gem” that is shining and beautiful, and not shaped like a stone. They had hoped that in the future that this orchid would grow to be a lot more beautiful and that this variety could be used to create more hybrids. He also said that Sailor Moon was the most popular animation in Japan at the time back in 1993. She was a very cute character and they thought that this orchid’s image was just the same! Unfortunately, the orchid couldn’t make good hybrids, and the orchid is no longer being propagated or sold (we still think it must exist in some form in a private collection by the resort).

Thanks again to Lunchboxfox for all her hard work! So now I think Moon Chase has 99% of everything that is known about all of the flowers named after Sailor Moon! Check out our first post here!

Some of you may remember an older article about Sailor Moon Flowers that we posted a long time ago. The Happy Valley Sailor Moon sunflower blooms during July, and many bloggers have made the trek to Showa Kinen Park to see the many sunflowers there, and they have posted some beautiful shots of Sailor Moon’s floral namesake. We’d also like to think that they are a little late blooming this year so they could have coincided with all these major Sailor Moon announcements as of late. We thought we’d share a few of the best shots! This one in particular comes from Saccyon. Tanpopo-jyo features two shots of the field and a single flower (third and fourth pictures). The first photo on Kiyo1503 has a nice photo of a young flower! Saccyon has lots of great closeups of the sunflowers, including one with a bee! Pennginn Muranorimaki has a not-so-great shot of a part of the field that looks like it’s been trampled on. Yhanacomachi has one simple but wonderful hi-res closeup of the sunflower with a bee. Inkyotei begins and ends with Happy Valley Sailor Moon. Tachiaoi has one of a young flower in bloom, and there are plenty more closeups at Rin Hikari’s blog! To finish off, Nobutaka has posted a picture of the field and a closeup.

And, Finally We Report About That Other Orchid…

A long time ago, an anonymous commenter (or two) pointed us to a fourth flower named for Sailor Moon. We thought that this post would be a better place to talk about it! Sophrolaeliocattleya Gemstone ‘Sailor Moon’ is a hybrid orchid, the result of a cross between Sophrocattleya Batemanniana ‘Bette’ and Sophrolaeliocattleya Phillip Ho ‘Alisa’. The words under the picture tell us that this orchid is a souvenir, and we are inclined to believe that this flower is no longer commercially available. We searched a database of plant varieties in Japanese, and this orchid is no longer listed. It may lie in a private collection and sold privately, but despite our best efforts to search florists’ websites and other retail sites, we were unable to find this orchid. Most times you can hit up a database and type in a fraction of the name or the variety number (CM-1975-1) and find some trace of it, but we had no such luck :(. If any of our fans know anything else about this orchid (like how it got it’s name or whatever happened to this Dogashima horticulturist) please let us know!

If you’re a guy in Japan, and you are dating a gal who is a fan of Sailor Moon, why not give her some Sailor Moon namesake flowers? In Japan there are not one but three strains of flowers that have been named for Sailor Moon. These flowers are very popular and sometimes sell out pretty quickly.

#1 – Happy Valley Sailor Moon Orchid!

This orchid has been mentioned on other fansites before (such as Genvid and The Oracle) under the name “Happy Barry’Barrie” but we learned from quite a few growers’ sites that the name is actually “Happy Valley” (which makes more sense than Barrie when you think about it). This hybrid flower comes from the Genus Cymbidium, which has around 50 species of orchids with a distinct form to the base of the orchid’s lips (the center of the orchid). This orchid was named for Sailor Moon because its yellow color reminded the scientist (Shigeru Makoto Kono) of her hair. The species was officially registered October 9th, 1997 and like the Sailor Moon licenses won’t last forever; the registration will expire in 15 years.

#2 – Sailor Moon Carnations (Orange or Yellow)

In a terribly odd twist of irony, this carnation is naturally yellow, but the orange “mutant” is just as popular. Otaku should recall that Sailor Venus (who had an orange fuku) has on occasion played Sailor Moon’s decoy – so it seems only fitting that the mutation is orange! From what we have read this is a very popular carnation – especially when it is given on Mother’s Day. The INGU Sailor Moon Carnations were conjured by Inagaki Chotaro and were registered on June 8th, 1998 and will also expire in 15 years from that date. We’ve seen some growers do some interesting things with these carnations, and our favorite one is this poodle that was made with the orange variety of this carnation. Note: The yellow carnations used were of the LC Candle variety.

#3 – Sailor Moon Sunflower

On July 27th, 2004, a third flower was named for Sailor Moon. The Sailor Moon Sunflower is a hybrid of the Helianthus Genus of sunflowers. We were unable to find any horticultural registry information on this flower. We learned that this flower is grown in a special sunflower field in a park in Japan, and was named after Sailor Moon because of two reasons. The first being that sunflowers are popular among children in Japan, and that if they named the flower after a popular character it would attract more children to come to the park. The second is that the pale colour of the flower reminds the observer of the moon. This is a very popular sunflower in Japan. It is used in a variety of bouquets and it looks like many people travel to the Showa Memorial Park where this is grown (in the Barbecue Sunflower Garden) just to see it. This park says that this sunflower is unusual because of its yellow-green color and the low height makes it lovely.

So there you have it, men seeking that special flower for that special someone need not always resort to using roses, just like Tuxedo Kamen!

EDIT: We have recently learned through an email that some fans are dismayed or don’t believe the translation of “barrie” to valley. Quit calling us silly. Some Japanese words these days are written almost like their english equivalents, such as ハンバーガー (romaji: hanbāgā) which is the japanese word for, hamburger. Katakana is often used to “spell out” foreign words using the letters given in this writing system. These equivalents are pretty much loanwords in the Japanese language. In fact, later this week we hope to upload segments of a game show which feature several loanwords. See how similar they look and sound? Now most typically when one thinks of the word for valley in Japanese, the kanji 谷 (romaji: tani) is used. However in the case of the name of this flower, we’re going to break this down character for character and hopefully, this will answer any wondering fan’s question (oh yeah, and the next time there is a gripe against one of our articles, do give us a shout out, our email is at the bottom of this page). This is the title written in katakana: ハッピーバリー”セーラームーン”. The first three characters read out as happi – which is the word “happy”. This character ッ, is a special character called Soukon. This character is the smaller case of the character ツ (tsu), but is never pronounced. Soukon means that you double the following consonant, and the next character is pi, therefore “happi”. Now for the second word, バリ. This one spells out ba-ri. It’s not the word berry, because that is be-ri, or ベリー. But, ba-ri sounds a lot like valley. And a few people close to the language and in Japan told us バリ is best translated in this case to valley. In fact, many popular online translators translate the characters バリ to valley. But, this can’t be the only use of those characters to mean valley now, can it? Why not take a look here, here, or here? There’s several more instances where the characters バリ have been used to mean the word valley, but we’re not going to list them all. We hope this is enough proof for the dismayed fans who don’t believe what those two characters really mean in the name.