Why So Much of Japan's Bottled Water Comes From Yamanashi

Yamanashi is landlocked and mountainous, ringed by the Southern Alps and Mount Fuji, and that geography does more than support vineyards. Rain and snowmelt filtering slowly through granite bedrock produces unusually clean, mineral-balanced groundwater, and the prefecture has for years been cited as one of Japan's largest producers of bottled mineral water by volume, a fact many visitors focused on wine never hear about.

Unlike Yamanashi's wine industry, its water bottling operations attract little tourist attention, but the underlying connection is the same geology. If a bottled water label lists a Yamanashi source, it's drawing on the same aquifers that feed the region's grape-growing, giving the prefecture two very different products from essentially one shared natural resource.