'In one such work, the 1873 A Guide to World Customs, author Nakagane Masahira and his Tokyo publisher included an illustration of Newton’s discovery of gravity after he saw an apple fall from a tree. But, what was an apple, anyway? No such fruit was for sale in Tokyo. The publisher obviously thought it would be easier to replace the unknown foreign fruit with something more familiar, such as a Japanese plum.'
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-apples?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=twitter