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TOKYO — Rice is a staple in Japanese culture and cuisine, so much so that the word for “meal” is synonymous with “cooked rice.” But demand for the grain is rapidly outstripping supply, causing prices to soar, and the country is now taking the rare steps of releasing rice from its emergency stockpile and turning to imports.

The shortage is affecting daily life in Japan, where rice’s myriad uses include sushi and alcohol as well as ancestral ceremonies.

Restaurants are hiking prices and no longer giving free rice refills. Bags of rice are disappearing from grocery store shelves; many stores now limit purchases to one bag per customer. Some Japanese tourists are even buying rice on their trips to other Asian countries.

An 11-pound bag of rice cost on average about $30, including tax, in the second week of April — more than double the price during the same period last year, according to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

“It’s expensive,” Kaori Wataya, a 45-year-old mother of three who cooks rice for two meals a day, said outside a supermarket in western Tokyo. “But what else can we do? … I’m trying my best to buy.”

Rice imports, which could leave Japanese farmers vulnerable to competition, are quickly rising. In February, the volume of rice imported by private companies exceeded 551 tons — surpassing the total import volume in the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

South Korea’s national agricultural cooperative this week confirmed its plans to export up to 24 tons of rice to Japan by early June, the largest such shipment in at least 25 years.

These exports are a sliver of the overall rice consumption in Japan, which the Ministry of Agriculture places at 7.8 million tons between July 2023 and June 2024. But they underscore the country’s rice crisis, which began in summer last year after a heat wave in 2023 led to a smaller and poorer-quality harvest that fall.

Over the past two years, Japan has also seen a massive influx in international tourists, who had been unable to enter the country during the coronavirus pandemic — driving up rice consumption nationwide, experts say. A record 36.9 million international tourists visited in 2024, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Then, in August last year, the government issued its first warning for a potential “megaquake” after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of southern Japan, triggering residents to panic-purchase rice in preparation.

Some experts also say that government policies have exacerbated the shortage.

As food options became more diverse and eating habits changed with the rise of working parents and people living alone, rice consumption in Japan has been steadily declining since its peak in the 1960s.

The government sets rice production targets to account for this drop as well as the shrinking population, experts say. Government officials have long encouraged farmers to move away from rice by offering subsidies for other crops, which reduced rice production even more.

Keeping supply and demand tight means even the slightest changes in demand can trigger shortages or price hikes, according to Nobuhiro Suzuki, a professor of agriculture economics at Tokyo University.

“The real root of the issue lies in what I’d call a policy failure — cutting production too much and leaving farmers unable or unwilling to grow rice, without doing anything about it,” Suzuki said. “That’s why it escalated into such a major problem.”

There is no official move to immediately increase domestic production as planting season unfolds. A Ministry of Agriculture spokesman said Thursday that the government’s official stance is to “produce the amount that meets the demand.”

The ministry has previously said there is plenty of rice being produced and that the rice going “missing” along the supply chain stems largely from distributors hoarding rice as a speculative measure.

“The producers have done their job and grown the rice properly,” Taku Eto, Japan’s agriculture minister, said in a news conference in February. “There is definitely enough rice within Japan to meet demand. However, the distribution system is stuck, and as a result, rice can only be offered to consumers at high prices.”

Although the government says there was an increase in rice production in 2024 from the prior year, farmers have been skeptical about that claim, said Kazuhito Yamashita, agricultural policy research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, a Tokyo-based think tank. He added that it hasn’t been enough to make up for the shortage and the ministry has not done enough to ensure supply.

Retailers are feeling the strain, especially small and independently owned establishments such as Kurihara Store in the Mitaka area of western Tokyo. Owner Kazuo Kurihara, 86, said the rice he used to purchase directly from farmers with whom he has a contract has run out and he now has no choice but to buy from wholesalers, whose prices keep rising.

“The wholesale prices on the market are going up more and more every single day,” Kurihara said.

The rice shortage is also an acute problem in a nation that is already dependent on food imports — but imported rice may be the most viable short-term solution for now, experts say.

The government is considering expanding imports of rice from the United States as a part of its negotiations over the Trump administration’s tariffs, according to Japan’s Kyodo News agency. President Donald Trump has also criticized Japan’s tariffs on rice imports.

Like many countries in Asia where rice is a pillar of the national diet, Japan maintains an emergency stockpile of the grain. The government began this practice in 1995 after a rice crop failure sparked panic buying.

In March, the Ministry of Agriculture took the rare step of tapping into that emergency supply — a move typically used in response to natural disasters — and releasing more than 231,000 tons of rice to ease the strain on the market.

The government has about 1.1 million tons of rice stored at any given time. This month, the ministry held an auction to sell another 110,000 tons from its reserves. It plans to continue releasing more rice regularly until the summer.

But this measure has not made much difference for consumers, who are still grappling with eye-popping prices.

Eto, the agriculture minister, said supply chain challenges such as transportation problems had created a bottleneck in distributing the rice, especially to smaller grocery stores.

“Even though we are releasing rice from government stockpiles, retail prices are not falling,” Eto said in a news conference this month.

For families, the price increase also means changing shopping habits, like switching from a farmers market to a supermarket, or buying imported rice for the first time despite their preference for Japanese rice.

Naoko Nakayama, a 46-year-old mother of one who was shopping at a Tokyo grocery store this week, said she would be willing to accept the higher prices if it meant farmers would be paid more and that the money would help sustain Japan’s rice farming industry for future generations. But for now, she feels frustrated that policymakers have no clear solution on how to address the shortage for customers or help farmers.

“Rice is the most important food for the Japanese people — it’s like a soul, really — and it’s so frustrating to see politicians who have absolutely no understanding of how deeply the people feel about it,” Nakayama said.

Source : msn