Japanese queue for hours as rice shortage deepens
Rising prices and poor harvest create political pressure for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba ahead of July poll
Within a few minutes of the doors opening, the farm produce co-operative in Atami, a seaside town south-west of Tokyo, had completely sold out of subsidised Japanese rice.
“This will only last us a couple of weeks,” said 46-year-old Yujiro Osaki, one of the dozens of people who had queued up for a 3kg bag just a few dollars cheaper than the supermarket price for rice of the same quality. “It’s a ridiculous situation for Japan to be in.”
For millions of consumers struggling with sharply rising food costs after years of stagnant prices, queues and the quest for better deals are now part of buying rice in Japan.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s government — an administration already unpopular after a near-doubling of domestic rice prices in 2024 — faces an upper-house election in July that analysts forecast will hinge on public dismay over inflation and the price of rice.
The average price of a 60kg bag of rice harvested in 2024 has reached an all-time high of more than ¥26,400 ($184). While Japan has not run out of supply, it has yet to recover from a poor 2023 harvest that coincided with an end to Japan’s long deflationary period and retailers’ greater willingness to raise prices.
There has also been some hoarding by individuals and deliberate stock withholding by wholesalers. The government has tapped its strategic rice reserve outside a natural disaster for the first time, and when part of that went on sale last weekend, immense, multi-hour queues formed at supermarkets around the country.
Ishiba is setting up a special cabinet committee to discuss urgent rice policy reform. He has also sacked his previous agriculture minister and appointed Shinjiro Koizumi, the charismatic and ambitious son of former premier Junichiro Koizumi, to resolve the crisis.
Japan’s long-standing efforts to protect domestic farmers from outside competition, including limiting imports of foreign rice, means solving the problem will not be easy, said Kazuhito Yamashita, a director at the Canon Institute of Global Studies and an expert on Japan’s rice market.
Decades of government policy have focused on shoring up rice prices to appease the critical rural vote, but rising prices have hit millions of urban families and made inflation a broader political problem for the government.
Many criticise the government’s so-called set-aside programme, which attempted to raise rice prices by incentivising farmers not to grow. The policy only ended in 2018.
“The set-aside programme was always the problem,” said Yamashita. “If Japan switched to subsidies, as in other countries, everything would change. Farmers would be able to afford to accumulate more farmland, lower their costs through scale and produce more rice.
“Japan could have been a global exporter of top-quality rice if its policies had not been pushing in the opposite direction for all these years,” he added.
Although Japan’s population of working farmers has fallen to less than 1 per cent of the total population from 4.4 per cent in 1976, they remain a powerful lobby.
“The reduction in numbers has actually made it easier for the farmers to reach a unified political consensus,” said Kunio Nishikawa, a rice expert at Ibaraki University. “Japan’s electoral system means that a relatively large number of seats in the Diet are allocated to rural areas, reinforcing farmers’ political influence.”
Ultimately, the declining farmer population will make a debate on wholesale agricultural policy reform easier, he added.
“Even in the short term, because this rice crisis has become a topic of discussion for the entire nation, including consumers, I expect that agricultural policy reform will now progress,” he said.
Given the size of the price increases, the government may feel more pressure to placate consumers, said Tobias Harris, a political analyst at Japan Foresight. “But clearly Ishiba and Koizumi are going to have to find some way of placating the producers ahead of the upper-house campaign.”
Tapping the rice reserves may provide some relief, but analysts expect it will only be temporary.
The knock-on effect of shortages and rising prices has been to create huge competition between the rice-buying co-operatives, which command roughly 40 per cent of the Japanese market, wholesalers and other large-scale buyers such as national restaurant chains and food producers.
Many co-operatives approached farmers directly, offering prices that were locked in at about ¥26,000 for a 60kg bag. The co-operatives cannot now sell rice much below that, said analysts, without making a loss.
In supermarkets across the country, meanwhile, prices of Japanese-grown grain are at record highs, shelves are empty or sparsely filled and many shops display signs suggesting cash-strapped customers seek cheaper carbohydrates from bread and noodles.
In Atami, an elderly couple walked away from the farm produce store empty-handed. The cheaper rice was sold out by the time they had got to the front.
“We asked them when the next sale would be,” said the husband. “They said they didn’t know.”