A coloring page of a single large strawberry, drawn with its small white blossom and a spray of leaves beside it. The surface is dotted all over with the tiny seed-like achenes, so there is a lot of fine detail here to work through slowly, and the outlines are open enough for torn-paper collage (chigiri-e) as well as pencils. Free to download and print as a PDF, no registration needed.
PDF (line art) and PNG (line art and color sample)
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you like strawberries? How do you prefer to eat them?
Have you ever been strawberry picking? What do you remember about the trip?
For anyone fond of strawberry shortcake — when did they usually eat it?
Is there a variety they look for? (In Japan, Amaou and Tochiotome are the names most people know.)
When did strawberries reach Japan?
The strawberry most of the world eats is a young plant. The garden strawberry is a hybrid of a Chilean species and a North American one that were brought together in European gardens in the 18th century, and it reached Japan through Dutch traders late in the Edo period — the 1830s are the years usually given. That is why its Japanese name is still oranda-ichigo, “Dutch strawberry”. It was grown as an ornamental at first, and cultivation for eating only became serious in the Meiji era. Tochigi Prefecture is usually reported at or near the top for production, with Fukuoka, Kumamoto and Shizuoka not far behind, and the variety names on Japanese punnets — Tochiotome, Skyberry, Amaou — belong to those regions.
What is in a strawberry?
Strawberries are a good source of vitamin C. Japan’s standard food composition tables put fresh strawberries at roughly 60 mg per 100 g — that is seven or eight medium berries — which is a useful share of the 100 mg a day the Japanese guidelines suggest for adults, though not the whole of it. They also carry folate, some potassium and a little fibre. The red colour comes from anthocyanins, plant pigments that are studied a great deal for their antioxidant activity in the laboratory; what that actually amounts to in the body after a bowl of fruit is much less settled. This is everyday kitchen and nutrition talk rather than medical advice.
When is strawberry season in Japan?
Greenhouse strawberries run from December through to about May, which is why strawberries are a winter fruit in Japanese shops and the standard topping on a Christmas cake rather than a summer treat. Fruit grown outdoors in its own season ripens in April and May. Pick-your-own farms are common in the Kanto, Chubu and Kyushu regions, and Tochigi, Chiba and Aichi are the prefectures people usually name. Varieties differ noticeably in size and sweetness, so farms often set out several to compare.
