In Hungry World, Japan's Farmers Are Stuck With High-Priced Rice

Hiroto Endo and son Ryoshi are preparing to plant, though a quarter of last fall's crop sits unsold, in part because of Japan's changing diet. (By Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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"As far as our rice is concerned, we would like all the world to have some," said Masaaki Edamoto, director of rice policy planning at the ministry. He noted that Japanese rice has outstanding flavor, exceptional quality control and is raised mostly on family farms, which use less insecticide and chemical fertilizer than most farms elsewhere in the world.

"Unfortunately, we are not at a price level where we can sell it abroad," he said.

The reasons: small farms, expensive machinery and costly labor. Japan's rice problem, however, has little to do with price.

As in much of Asia, rice is much more than a food to the Japanese and it is not really intended for export. It is a traditional symbol of plenty and a cultural touchstone.

As Japan grew rich in the second half of the 20th century, the exorbitant cost of domestic rice (as measured by world standards) did not bother most Japanese. "I have not heard consumers complaining about the price of rice in this country," Edamoto said.

In fact, the price of Japanese rice is considerably lower than it used to be, having fallen by two-thirds in the past 14 years largely because of the surplus production of Japanese rice paddies. But again, cost is not what matters here.

What matters is what Japanese consumers want to put in their stomachs.

In 1965, 45 percent of all the calories in the Japanese diet came from rice, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. By 2006, 23 percent of those calories came from rice. In that time, per-capita annual consumption of rice fell from about 261 pounds to 134 pounds. The Japanese still eat six times as much rice as Americans, but considerably less than Filipinos, Indonesians or the Chinese.

Americans are partly to blame for the Westernization of the Japanese diet, according to Yoshio Yaguchi, a professor of agricultural economics at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

"After Japan lost the war, the Americans provided surplus food -- bread and milk -- to many young Japanese," Yaguchi said. "There were rumors in those days that rice made you stupid. School lunches included bread and the nation's taste buds were nurtured on a new kind of food."

More important, Yaguchi said, decades of rising incomes broadened and diversified the country's food culture. Japan now imports more of its overall food supply -- 61 percent by volume -- than any of the world's advanced economies.

The Japanese love of bread has made this country the world's fourth-largest importer of wheat.