For immediate release September 21, 2026 Media contact: Shawn Beck | 815-757-2825 | shawnkbeck@gmail.com
Photo: Sabii Ishida speaks about pawpaw in Japan. Courtesy image.
PAW PAW, Ill. (Sept. 21, 2026) — An obscure native fruit drew an estimated 5,000 people to this village of fewer than 1,000 residents last year. Now it is bringing visitors from Japan who want to learn how a small town built a festival around it.
Sabii Ishida, a community revitalization worker from Jinsekikogen in Hiroshima, will join local volunteers at the Third Annual Pawpaw Festival on Saturday, Sept. 26. She hopes to take what she learns home and establish an annual pawpaw festival in her own mountain town.
“I fell in love with the taste of pawpaw,” Ishida wrote to organizers. She began Popomo, a project that encourages residents to grow pawpaws and develops foods and activities around the fruit to bring people together in a community facing population decline.
The pawpaw is North America’s largest native tree fruit, with soft, custardlike flesh and a flavor often compared to mango and banana. In Japan, Ishida’s project calls it the “phantom fruit” because it rarely reaches shops.
She first contacted Paw Paw organizers by signing up to volunteer. The festival’s local scale appealed to her: she wants to learn how volunteers divide the work, how the event is funded, and how it keeps going from one year to the next. Her goal is a first festival in Jinsekikogen in 2027.
“I would rather it be small and happen every year than large and happen once,” she wrote in background materials shared with organizers.
Her Sept. 23–29 visit is being coordinated by festival volunteers, the Pawpaw Foundation and Northern Illinois University faculty. NIU is welcoming her as a guest. Plans include visiting Red Fern Farm in Iowa to see pawpaw growing and harvesting, helping prepare the festival in Paw Paw, and visiting NIU’s DeKalb campus.
Joining part of the visit is RYU, a friend whose community revitalization work includes Yamakoshi in Niigata, Japan.
Festival visitors can hear about Ishida’s work during “Phantom Fruit: Pawpaws in Japan,” scheduled for 3:30 p.m. in the Pawpaw Foundation Education Tent, with Japanese-English interpretation.
The free festival begins at 10 a.m. Sept. 26 at Paw Paw Veterans Park, 314 Chapman St. It features fresh pawpaws, tastings, local vendors, children’s activities, tree tours and live music. The Paw Paw Lions Club hosts the festival with support from Pizzo Group. The full schedule is at pawpawfest.org/schedule.