Bananas don’t grow in Tokyo. That hasn’t stopped them from becoming a symbol of the city anyway

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You can’t visit Tokyo without seeing them. These pale-yellow boxes of individually wrapped bite-size cakes are emblazoned with images of the capital’s most famous tourist attractions and, sometimes, with some of Japan’s most recognizable animated characters.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of gold-ribbon-wrapped packages of Tokyo Banana are sold around the Japanese capital’s transportation hubs and tourist districts and branded as the city’s official snack.

But what does Tokyo Banana actually have to do with Tokyo, a city that doesn’t have any banana trees?

Unlike many Japanese treats, which are made with ingredients native to various regions and connected with millennia-long manufa