Japan’s long-standing efforts to protect domestic farmers from outside competition, including limiting imports of foreign rice
Here’s the why in case anyone is wondering. It’s not a global issue.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Japan seems hell bent on not taking any steps to improve things. They have serious issues with population demographics and they are really shit about allowing immigrants in to work in the likes of agriculture.
Was gonna say… Every local store near me has literal pallets of rice available.
Of course part of that is the fact that Western diets don't really involved anywhere near the quantity that the Japanese consume it at.
After all rice pudding was invented to try and use rice up, because no one was eating it.
Maybe they should have had a plan B for situations like this. It's great to take care of your own, but this is a perfect example as to why you can't put all your eggs into one basket.
They do, of course. There's plenty of rice of other kinds.
Clarification: They are queuing for cheap rice.
I can go to any supermarket in my city and buy rice. I just have to be willing to pay four times what I’m used to for it. It is getting harder to find supermarkets still selling 10kg bags because those things are approaching ¥10,000.
Japan has had a more severe shortage of potato chips than this.
for cheap rice
But isn’t this just the definition of a shortage? The thing becomes scarce and so what IS available becomes incredibly expensive? I don’t see the differentiation you are trying to make. Wild price inflation happens when there is in fact not enough of the thing to go around.
Isn't it not just cheap rice, but cheap Japanese rice? People in Asia are very particular about rice. They should be, rice from Japan, China, Cambodia, Taiwan, etc. all have a different taste. Nationalism plays in to it, but they are different. I think rice might be the ultimate Terroir crop.
Not just Asia, Italians and Spaniards are also quite particular about rice.
Look, I'm not particular about rice, but if I see long rice on the risotto, what I'll do isn't even covered in the Geneva conventions.
...that's exactly what I mean. All the broken bits and pieces get shipped to Germany to make Milchreis because it really doesn't matter what the grains look like if you're soaking them to smithereens anyway. Into pudding, that is. Which you should totally try on a cold day: Dump into sweetened milk (vanilla if you want), quick boil, 30-40 minutes of soaking at falling/low heat, add cinnamon, maybe some coarse raw sugar for texture variation, eat as-is or with apple sauce.
Only got Jasmin or such at home and still crave the stuff? Well, prepare it. Nothing's stopping you.
10000 yen is 60 EUR.
Or 69 freedom buckaroos for 22 pounds of rice
That's insane to think about. I usually buy a 20 lb bag of Thai Jasmine rice for a little over $20 her in the US. I think I would seriously break down and cry if I had to pay almost $70.
Did I mention they have massive tariffs on foreign rice specifically so it doesn't outcompete more expensive Japanese rice?
so basiclaly they shot themselves in the foot. much with cheaper EVs,.
1kg bags in Germany cost 2.50 Euro for Jasmin, 3 for Basmati. One Euro for cheap parboiled. All discounter store brand. Risotto 2 Euro, that stuff is grown in Italy.
...10kg prices are practically identical, or better put if you shop at a place than sells 10kg bags suddenly the 1kg bags are expensive.
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Equivalent to 48 toonies for those of us up in cobra chicken land
cobra chicken
I've never heard them called that before, but it's so perfect. I call them little dinosaurs, because if you piss one off, it becomes very clear that they are descended from terrifying ancient beasts.
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That's 22lbs for $69. Yikes
Oh so it's only poor people who are struggling. Not to worry then. Back to it lads.
That is wild! In Denmark I buy rice for 15 kr (~2€) / kg. Granted, it's probably nowhere near the quality of Japanese rice. But still, what a price difference.
Setting aside the rice shortage, the Japanese government has laws in place to keep rice prices high for... I have no idea why. A big part of the shortage is that blowing up in their faces.
I'm guessing it's to protect the rice farmers, since if the price decreases enough, they'll have to either produce other crops or do something else entirely. They're already having enough problems with people moving to cities, so I doubt they want to create even more incentive.
Farms in Japan are likely disappearing as they are elsewhere. Attempting to protect domestic supply isn't a bad idea. Doing it in a way that is not detrimental to the population would probably be helpful.
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Self-inflicted crisis
Not quite, because the reason they don't want to buy from overseas is because they've had three decades trapped in a deflation crisis. So every time they buy anything from overseas it shows the weak buying power of the Japanese yen (which is a product of the deflationary "lost years").
...so there's a unique economic context for why they're acting this way.
I guess when your currency is weak you need to focus on domestic independence and be very judicious about foreign purchasing.
Well they stagnated abd everyone else went up. It actually a really interesting case study in how a stagnated economy can run and why it can't.
The average consumer doesn't care about that aspect though.
Deflation makes currency stronger, not weaker. That's part of the issue with it when it comes to a domestic economy, because it means this start becoming drastically cheaper over time, but it's only a problem if people keep waiting for prices to drop. It also devalues stocks, so large corporations don't like it either, and if you have a lot of money, it's not as competitive anymore locally with the average person's money either. Landlords also lose out because real estate value stalls (btw this is part of the reason for why Japan's mega cities exist - deflation has made it so nearly everyone can afford to live in the main city rather than needing to spread out to cheaper areas because inflation causes rent prices to increase via real estate value also increasing).
Buying overseas helps prevent deflation, but Japan has a protectionism type economy in general. Currency reserves from other countries buying exports heavily is what keeps things stable.
In the rice case, it's purely to protect the local rice economy because deflation has made the yen strong, and allowing cheaper rice from a country with a weaker currency would make local rice unable to ever have the hopes of competing for any profit whatsoever, probably not even at break-even.
There's a lot of out of date info in there making your conclusions a bit innacurate. The yen is super weak right now, compared to USD and EUR especially.
Rice grown in California should not be cheaper than rice grown in Japan, just purely based on a currency analysis. Almost all other domestic foods in Japan are much cheaper in real terms than in California.
A huge currency reserve of Japan is the dollar, which is why there's now some economic instability, as the dollar has lost a lot of value due to Trump's market manipulation.
It doesn't mean the yen is weak, it means the commodities markets will be in flux, as that's what things tend to fall back onto when things like these happen.
It's also why cheap rice specifically has a shortage, and why Japan has found itself in a catch 22 for the importation of rice. What they could do is go from importation restriction to tariffed but allowed if they want to increase the rice supply and stabilize the price of domestic rice. But that would require some flexible legal framework that's hard to write because you can't keep rice imports opened now while deflation is still strong without killing most domestic production. Best solution is to allow import from somewhere where rice isn't as cheap but still competitive, plus a very small temporary tariff that could over time be dissolved slowly, in my opinion at least.
There's a whole lot of cascading effects happening right now because of the unstable US economic policy and much of the world having their currency either pegged to the US dollar or having it as a primary currency reserve. Some major economies like the EU are benefitting, but the closer the economic ties are to US the worse the effects are.
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Hey, it's that thing that contributed to the French revolution!
Rice shortage?
Failed wheat harvest which caused a bread shortage.
Bread was a staple food in 18th century France.
I'm not quite sure if it is similar to the rice shortage in Japan today however. When the French couldn't eat bread in the 18th century they went hungry, but when the Japanese today can't buy rice they can just buy a different carb.
Its the difference between barely scraping by on bread, and being inconvenienced by not being able to buy cheap rice.
let them eat rice cakes
Staple carb. It's supposed to be the bare minimum in cheap and regularly consumed food. After that society's just a few missed meals away from people rioting.
Protectionism. Louisiana makes plenty of rice.
Rice grown in former plantation states tends to be very high in arsenic, a holdover from the cotton-growing days.
For US-grown rice, my understanding is that California-grown is much safer to consume.
Yeah, but that's all for local gumbo production, oh and Zataran's.
/s
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