Sapporo, May 22 (Jiji Press)--A box of two Yubari melons fetched a record 5.8 million yen at this season's first auction held in the city of Sapporo in the northernmost Japan prefecture of Hokkaido on Friday. The winning bid came from Futami-Seika Co., a fruit and vegetable wholesaler based in the city of Kushiro in Hokkaido. The melons will go on display at Keio Store Co.'s Sakuragaoka supermarket in the city of Tama, western Tokyo, before tasting events begin next week. "We have the finest crop," Hirokazu Okubo, an executive of the wholesaler, said. "We want people across Japan to savor Yubari melons." A total of 912 melons went under the hammer at the day's auction at the Sapporo Central Wholesale Market. The famed cantaloupes, a specialty of the city of Yubari in Hokkaido, benefited from light winter snowfall and favorable spring weather, allowing crops to mature smoothly this year, according to the city's agricultural cooperative. The cooperative aims to ship 3,086 tons of Yubari melons this season and generate roughly 2.1 billion yen in sales. The city of Yubari is nearing the end of a long fiscal rehabilitation process after the once major coal mining hub collapsed under massive debt and became the nation's only municipality placed under a state-supervised fiscal reconstruction program. The city is expected to clear its liabilities by the end of the current fiscal year. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]