Japan may be famously crazy about cherry blossoms, but the sakuranbo of Sagae City, Yamagata Prefecture, don't attract attention until long after their white flowers have fallen off. Sakuranbo are fruit cherries, and Sagae and neighboring Higashine cultivate more of them than anywhere else in the country.

A drive through the city reveals cherry orchards at every turn: next to a video store, behind a convenience store. Where other cities have parking facilities, rows of vending machines or vacant, rubble-strewn lots, Sagae has neat rows of trees. All told, there are some 400 hectares of sakuranbo producing more than 2,000 tons of fruit annually.

"Around 2,200 people are directly employed in the cherry industry," explains Akihiko Karube of the Sagae branch of the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives. "And that, in turn, supports subsidiary industries such as tourism, the food and hospitality industry, and manufacturers of farm machinery."

But if that sounds like big business, think again. Despite its vast turnover -- all of which is processed in just six weeks, from early June to mid-July -- Japan's cherry farmers are engaged in a cottage industry that has remained essentially unchanged since 1872, when 25 varieties of cherry were first imported from America as part of the Meiji Era settlement of Hokkaido -- from where cherry-farming spread south to Tohoku.

Tadashi Onuma's 1,000-tree farm was started by his grandfather 90 years ago, and some of those first trees are still standing, although they are long past their most productive years. Onuma, 64, rises at 4:30 a.m. each day to inspect his orchards and decide which trees are ready for picking. Beginning at 8 a.m., the picking is carried out by six or seven people (around 20 at the peak), many in their 70s, using equipment no more sophisticated than stepladders and baskets.

Once gathered, the fruit is transported to a simple stall area in front of Onuma's home, where his wife and a few helpers sort and grade it by hand. On their farm, cherry-growing is still very much a family business. Administration is handled by his daughter-in-law; his 6-year-old granddaughter helps out by folding cardboard boxes; and this year is the first that Onuma's 86-year-old mother has not joined her son in the field at 4:30 a.m. every day.

It's a personalized approach that goes down well with customers, many of whom come back year after year. The Tokyu department-store group also buys a portion of Onuma's output, and the front page of its May-July mail-order catalog shows the smiling family in an orchard, with a warm testimonial to the 20-year business relationship between store and small farmer.

Onuma doesn't know, though, how much longer his farm will remain a family business. "It's not so easy to get the younger generation interested," he says, explaining that his son is a salaryman. "You never know, I might end up renting half my fields. This is an unpredictable business -- though I suppose that's what makes it interesting. It's like gambling!"

Hoping to improve the odds of continuing their way of life, Sagae's farmers have become adept at promoting their farming activities as a leisure activity. Tourism is now a major source of revenue, as day-tripping families and Hato Bus-loads of sightseers pull into orchard pit stops to learn more about the rural lifestyle and, of course, to do some cherry-picking of their own.

Over at the headquarters of the Mi-izumi Kanko Sakuranbo co-operative, tour bus arrivals are scheduled like clockwork. A sheet of paper pinned to the wall details arrival times and numbers of visitors from as far away as Kansai and Kyushu; day-trippers come from Tokyo by overnight coach. The co-op's head, Toshiyuki Watanabe, runs a finger down the list: "Forty-seven people at 11 a.m.; 102 people at 1:45 p.m.; 223 at 3 p.m. . . . Not too many today!"

Watanabe and his staff are also kept busy by a constant stream of drop-in visitors. Like most of Sagae's eight co-operatives, Mi-izumi recently upgraded its facilities to cope with increased visitor numbers. Weekends see more than 1,000 people passing through the small orchard, where they can pick and eat cherries of several varieties, including the small, dark Napoleon and the sweet, pinkish Sato Nishiki, developed in 1928 by a Yamagata farmer after whom it is named.

"Different varieties of cherries have to be grown together," comments one of Watanabe's assistants, Yumi Suzuki, "in order to produce a viable crop."

Suzuki says that she loves welcoming visitors and introducing them to the agricultural lifestyle, and explains that she herself was drawn to rural Japan, where she married and settled, from her native Korea. (Yumi is the Japanese reading of the kanji of her Korean given-name). Suzuki is not alone -- a number of farming regions in Yamagata and other Tohoku prefectures are home to women from other Asian countries drawn to Japan and welcomed by communities fearing depopulation.

Nonetheless, the absence of helping hands is little felt, as older family members every year step into the breach. In the sorting room attached to Watanabe's house, his elderly sister-in-law squats on the floor dexterously gathering cherries into a cardboard scoop. "Things have changed all right," she says, nodding vigorously. "You used to pack cherries sitting on the floor. These young folk" -- she gestures toward a 60-something lady kneeling upright at a low table -- "prefer to sit at a table!"

The changes there have been seem to assure the future of Japan's domestic cherry industry. Yields soared -- and with them profits -- when protective vinyl housing was introduced two decades ago. Today's farmers are also more market-savvy than their forefathers -- Onuma's farm now boasts a colorful and informative Web site.

And though the younger generation continues to move away, "U-turners" disillusioned with city living are heading back to rural areas to discover the satisfactions of farming life. "Even 20 or 30 years from now, Sagae's cherry farmers will be doing just fine," says JA's Karube.