Vietnamese grapes that a South Korean employer handed over seedlings and all: is Japan next?

On 26 July 2026, Vietnam's VietnamNet reported that a man born in 1986 who had worked for five years at a grape farm in South Korea returned home and, in Thanh Hoa province where his wife's family lives, started a 1,200-vine grape orchard projected to earn 4 billion dong a year (at about 162 VND to the yen as of July 2026, roughly 24.7 million yen). The seedlings were sent directly from his former Korean employer's farm, which also answers his questions when he runs into trouble growing them. It is a case of a migrant worker bringing home not just wages but "a full set for creating a production region," and it squarely overlaps with the structure in which Japanese agriculture takes in people from this same Vietnam every year. For Japan's sourcing managers, the issue is not when this one hectare becomes a supplier, but what is left in hand when the same thing happens starting from a Japanese field.

The starting point of Thanh Hoa's 1,200 vines, with seedlings handed over by a Korean employer

According to VietnamNet, the protagonist is Nguyễn Hữu Huân, from Dan Phuong in Hanoi. From 2019 to early 2024 he worked at a grape orchard in South Korea. After returning, rather than going back to Hanoi, he chose Nguyen Hanh village in Dong Tien ward, Thanh Hoa province, where the family home of his wife Trần Thị Nhung is, and leased more than one hectare of low-yielding land to start the orchard.

The distinctive point lies in how the seedlings were sourced. When the Korean farm owner learned that Mr. Huân would be striking out on his own in Vietnam, he personally supplied seedlings of milk grapes (nho sua) and the BK variety (nho BK), and has continued to answer his technical questions since, VietnamNet reports. The 1,200 vines came from there. The greenhouse is built from steel frames bolted together, so it can be dismantled and relocated without welding. The fertilizer is homemade organic material made with earthworms plus fermented banana liquid, a design that relies on no chemical fertilizer, according to Doanh nghiep & Kinh te Xanh.

"If you don't overwork them, a single vine can be harvested for 30 to 40 years." That is what Mr. Huân told VietnamNet. Of the more than one hectare, 5,000 square meters are currently in operation, with two harvests a year. Around the first and eighth months of the lunar calendar he thins the bunches to concentrate nutrients in the grapes he leaves, Mr. Huân explains.

What is really behind the grapes Vietnam calls "milk grapes"

The large green grapes called nho sua in Vietnamese markets often refer to the lineage of Shine Muscat, bred by Japan's NARO. According to NARO's published materials, Shine Muscat was bred by crossing "grape Aki Tsu 21" with "Hakunan" and was registered as a variety in 2006 (registration number 13891). The original article, however, describes this orchard's varieties only as nho sua and nho BK and does not identify the lineage. Whatever the lineage, Vietnamese consumers receive them as "grapes that came from Korea."

The chain has not ended with a single round. The Japan Agricultural News reports that, as a result of Shine Muscat spreading to China and South Korea without permission, MAFF estimates the lost licensing-fee income reaches just under 20 billion yen a year. The cultivated area the paper cited as of 2022 was about 73,700 ha in China and about 6,067 ha in South Korea, the two countries combined being 30 times Japan's. A Japanese variety crosses the sea, and a third-country worker who worked there carries it home, seedlings and all. Thanh Hoa's 1,200 vines sit at the third stage of this flow.

From the standpoint of the Vietnamese party involved, this is not a story about exports but about import substitution. South Korea views Vietnam heavily as a base for selling its own food products (South Korea makes Vietnam a K-food logistics hub: how will Japanese sourcing move?), and domestic equivalents are moving to take a share of the shelf space that those Korean and Japanese premium grapes had held.

The 1,200 vines in numbers: investment, yield, unit price

Multiplying 15 tonnes by 250,000 dong gives 3.75 billion dong, which matches VietnamNet's estimate of "close to 4 billion dong." Yet the yield figures differ between outlets. VietnamNet puts it at about 15 tonnes a year, while Doanh nghiep & Kinh te Xanh reports about 6 tonnes at a unit price of about 290,000 dong (about 1,790 yen); on that basis annual revenue stays in the 1.7-billion-dong range (about 10.7 million yen). VietnamNet writes of an outlook of 15 tonnes a year from the 5,000 square meters in operation, while the 6 tonnes from Doanh nghiep & Kinh te Xanh is presented as the projection for this season. On top of that, in 2025 a storm tore the greenhouse and that year's harvest came to only about 60 kg. In the early stages of assessing a production region, setting the sense of scale by the lower figure is the practical approach.

Who is making the assessment, and from what position

Lê Thị Vân Anh, vice chair of the Dong Tien ward farmers' association, positions the orchard as a model "with the potential to bring in tens of billions of dong in sales a year," while describing it as sustainable production that covers its inputs with homemade materials. At the same time she notes that the condition of agriculture being vulnerable to natural disasters does not change, so the local authorities too are not praising it in one uniform note.

Mr. Huân's own words lean toward the weight of the process rather than the profit. In an interview with Doanh nghiep & Kinh te Xanh he said, "Clean farming is harder and costs more. Even so, I am making something my own family can eat with peace of mind." That he grounds the 250,000-dong unit price in his own family standard rather than in certification also means, from a buyer's point of view, that the yardstick for evaluation is not yet fixed.

The former Korean employer also appears as a silent party. VietnamNet reports that this farm owner not only supplied the seedlings but continues to provide technical support when Mr. Huân runs into difficulty. It looks like the side that sent out the worker is nurturing the seed of a competitor, but South Korea's domestic premium-grape market and Vietnam's domestic market do not compete at this point. As long as the distance remains, spinning off a protege is not a cost.

The reaction on the Japanese side is the same structure seen from the other side. As Kansai TV reported in October 2025, MAFF is considering a direction of licensing overseas production to collect royalties, while the governor of Yamanashi prefecture pushes back, arguing that "granting a license first in an environment where you cannot even export in the first place damages domestic production." Protect, or open up with conditions and recoup. The matter is not settled.

You cannot buy the fresh fruit. Even so, there are three reasons to go and look

First, There is no sourcing route to Japan for fresh grapes. The Vietnamese fresh fruits permitted for import to Japan are limited items such as white-flesh and red-flesh dragon fruit, Cat Chu mango, lychee and longan, and grapes are not included. Because each item requires bilateral plant-quarantine talks and the designation of a treatment facility, even if talks started it would be a matter of years. Even if you see them locally and like them, you cannot just load them into a container.

Second, the price band tells you the character of the market. Wholesale at 250,000 dong/kg is about 1,540 yen, a unit price on the same footing as Japan's domestic premium grapes. This is not a story about a cheap sourcing origin but about import substitution aimed at Vietnam's domestic wealthy class. It is closer to reality to read it as a candidate for when Japanese-affiliated retail and food-service set up local sourcing in Vietnam, or as a competitor for those selling Japanese grapes into that country. Japanese grape exports, by JETRO's tally, were US$35.38 million and 2,107 tonnes in 2023. The government has set a target of 38 billion yen by 2030, and the markets it aims to grow into include Southeast Asia.

Third, this person's profile itself becomes sourcing data. The group that works for several years at an advanced overseas production site and comes home with a variety, a cultivation system and the personal network of a former employer will keep growing in Vietnam's emerging production regions. South Korea took in more than 11,600 Vietnamese workers in 2025, and the intake cap for seasonal work (E-8) was set at 75,000 that same year. With a base that large, returning home to farm like Mr. Huân stops being an exception. Those developing new production regions are entering a phase where they should hold candidates not by region name but by "who worked where, and for how many years". Like the dragon-fruit farmers in the north who earn by combining nighttime LEDs with tourism (800 million dong in profit from nighttime LED and tourism: the design of northern dragon fruit), orchards that are small in area but high in technical density have begun to scatter across the country.

In 2027, Japan moves to the "giving" side

The Technical Intern Training Program switches to the Employment for Skill Development program in April 2027. It is a system premised on training people up to the Specified Skilled Worker (i) level over three years of work in principle and moving them straight into Specified Skilled Worker status, and it is expected to coexist with the old system until around 2030. The more the "development" character deepens, the more people there will be who have learned the whole run at Japanese farms, from variety selection through training to shipping standards. When they return home and plant grapes, strawberries or melons, what is left for Japan?

What the Thanh Hoa case showed is that the lever for stopping technology transfer actually lay in the seedlings. Because the Korean farm owner handed over the seedlings, the Vietnamese orchard got going in its third year. Put the other way, without the seedlings it would not get going at the same speed. For Japanese production regions too, there is already a reported case of a Japanese mango variety fruiting near Ho Chi Minh City (Miyazaki mango bears fruit on the outskirts of Saigon: can the Japanese brand be protected?), so leakage is not a hypothetical.

There are two roads to choose from: securing breeders' rights overseas and tightening them, or recouping through licensing fees and charges for materials, seedlings and instruction. What the Shine Muscat estimate drove home is that if time passes while the former is neglected, not even the bargaining power for the latter is left.

Practical note: items to check before engaging with this production region

Summary

Thanh Hoa's 1,200 vines are not a story that goes straight onto a Japanese supplier list. The reason it does not is equally clear: no quarantine route to Japan is open for the item of grapes. What still makes the article worth following is that the speed and route by which a production region gets going are concretely visible, and once four elements line up (five years of migrant work, seedlings from a former employer, a dismantlable greenhouse, and homemade organic materials), even after losing a year's worth to a storm, by the third year it recovers to the point of speaking of an outlook of tens of billions of dong in annual revenue.

What the sourcing side does next narrows to three. Managers at Japanese-affiliated retail and food-service handling premium fruit inside Vietnam should go and check the actual goods via the ward farmers' association, as a candidate for import substitution. Those involved in exporting Japanese fruit should rebuild their pricing on the premise that price competition inside that country has started from the domestic side. And agricultural corporations on the receiving side should, without waiting for the 2027 shift to Employment for Skill Development, put clauses governing the handling of varieties and seedlings into their employment and training documents. Whether to hand things over or not is decided before handing over, never after.

References: VietnamNet／Doanh nghiệp & Kinh tế Xanh／NARO／The Japan Agricultural News／Kansai TV／JETRO／Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Plant Protection Station／International Manpower Development Organization of Japan