Japanese shoppers are hoarding supplies. Sake brewers are in an uproar. Store owners are limiting purchases.
What may turn out to be Japan’s worst rice harvest of the 20th Century has thrown the rice market into turmoil, inducing a minor panic among consumers and eroding public support for the continuing ban on imports of its staple food.
A poll just published by the Yomiuri Shinbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, showed 62 percent of the public now accepts the inevitability of importing rice. Support for farmers was down dramatically, with only 39 percent of the public now fearful that lifting the ban would destroy farm families and the cultural values they represent.
The government has already approved a temporary import program to relieve the shortage, the first time since 1984 that it has had to turn to foreign producers to make up for a poor domestic harvest.
Yet Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, despite pledges to make Japan a “consumer-oriented society,” refuses to go all the way and make imported rice a permanent feature in the Japanese marketplace. Coddling farmers has resulted in Japanese consumers paying five to seven times the world price for their staple food.
The magnitude of this year’s shortfall is only now becoming apparent to consumers, who have been fed a steady diet of government blandishments that the damage to the crop was minimal. The latest Agriculture Ministry survey released last week showed that cold, rainy weather last summer destroyed as much as 25 percent of the usual crop.
In the wake of that survey, newspapers speculated last week that Japan in the next 12 months will have to import as much as 2 million tons of rice, or 20 percent of its annual consumption, making it-for at least one year-the largest rice importer in the world. So far, the government, fearing a political backlash from the nation’s powerful farm lobby, has unveiled plans to bring just 200,000 tons into the country.
The confusion has set off a stampede at local supermarkets. Shelves usually stacked high with 11-pound bags of rice are being stripped bare. Several stores have limited purchases to two bags per customer.
“We bought the same amount as last year,” said a spokesman for Summit Superstores, a supermarket chain that is part of the Sumitomo Group. “We’re running out of rice because there are more customers coming to our stores to buy rice, and they are buying more.”
“I came back again today because when I came last weekend, there was no rice on the shelf,” said Mayumi Fukui, a 27-year-old homemaker, as she scooped up a 4.4-pound bag. The store was out of 11-pound bags.
“Once rice is imported, it will be tough to say we don’t need foreign rice anymore,” she warned. “I don’t mind eating foreign rice.”
Sake brewers also feel the pinch. Government managers of the tightly regulated market have earmarked scarce supplies of the high-quality “tasty” rice, the kind preferred by most consumers, for the nation’s supermarkets. That’s left rice-winemakers fearful they will have to use imported rice when current supplies run out.
“We have always made sake with Japanese rice, so we don’t know if we can do it with foreign rice,” fretted Tatsuo Yamazaki, managing director of western Tokyo’s Ozawa Brewery. “Rice has to be polished to brew sake, and long-grain foreign rice is hard to polish.”
The 300-year-old brewery, which turns out 1.3 million bottles of rice wine a year, only has a one-month supply of rice on hand. Yamazaki hasn’t been able to find out from the local farm cooperative whether rice will even be available in another month.
“We know it is a bad harvest; there is no stockpile, and there is little reserved for sake,” he said. “But we have no idea how much. Will we be reduced 10 percent, 30 percent, or what?”
The situation has badly split the nation’s 2,360 sake brewers. The purists say they will refuse to brew wine from foreign rice, thus denying consumers some of their favorite brands. Yamazaki said the Ozawa Brewery will use whatever rice it can get.
“We have a social responsibility to keep producing sake, so we cannot help but use foreign rice,” he said. “We’re not really sure foreign rice is inferior. We will do the best we can.”
The Japanese media has finally begun focusing its attention on the severity of the shortfall. Tokyo television this week interviewed an elderly farmer who said the current harvest reminded him of 1913, considered the worst of the 20th Century.
That summer’s bad weather, he recalled, had forced many impoverished farm tenants to sell their daughters into slavery. Farm tenancy didn’t end in Japan until after World War II, when the U.S. occupation forces distributed land to poor farmers and laid the basis for the country’s current prosperity.
With domestic supplies dwindling, the Asahi Shinbun, a national newspaper based in Tokyo, reported that Japan’s gray market for rice is growing. Japanese law requires that farmers sell their rice to government-controlled cooperatives at a fixed price, a system that results in the extraordinarily high prices paid by Japanese consumers.
Despite the law, farmers in most years will sell about 30 percent of their crop outside the government system, in a sort of spot market for bulk users of the commodity that benefits both the farmer and the consumer since it cuts out the middleman. The newspaper featured one farmer who now was selling two-thirds of his crop through the gray market.
While farmers were getting higher prices through the gray market, some organizations were pointing out that the temporary import plans could result in a windfall for the government. If the government imports 1.6 million tons, the Fuji Research Institute estimated, it will make a $3.4 billion profit on the difference between the world price and the government-set price. The Institute called for returning the windfall to consumers.
Meanwhile, government officials continued to waffle on the issue of permanently opening the rice market, which they will have to do if the Uruguay Round of trade talks is to reach a successful conclusion before a Dec. 15 deadline. Some legislators belonging to the Hosokawa reform coalition hinted last week that the prime minister was leaning toward opening the market a crack to satisfy the trade negotiators.
However, Agriculture Minister Eijiro Hata, a former member of the Liberal Democratic Party, rejected lifting the ban when he was in Brussels for talks with his European counterparts.
Domestic politics has paralyzed the new government. The opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which has always claimed the allegiance of farmers, opposes opening the rice market, as does the Social Democratic Party, which has the largest bloc of votes in the reform coalition.
