Posted by PaulHoule 10 hours ago
But as someone who's tried many varieties of Japonica, there is a difference between the best Japan-grown rice and non-speciality rice grown elsewhere, as well as a difference between fresh (Japanese enjoy eating new rice, which is different from many rice-eating cultures) and old rice.
I pay somewhere around AUD$14/kg for Japanese rice in Australia, but I also don't eat it that often and I'm not that price sensitive.
But also, the average Japanese eats around 1kg of uncooked rice per week. That's ¥800 at the rates in the article (~USD$300/year). Japan's cost of living is generally pretty low, but I doubt +/- $100/year is effecting many people.
Also as an East Asian I can somewhat understand reluctance to change rice. It’s just such a staple in your daily life. If I had eaten one type of rice for my entire life (and the price of the rice has remained stable for the last 40 years) and suddenly I can’t afford that type of rice, it would be a shock.
On asking them where it comes from and it's always either local to the restaurant, or to the prefecture the owner grew up in.
There's a lot of local patriotism for rice in Japan, I even find it admirable most of the time.
Rice price is obviously important and probably linked pretty highly with inflation numbers in Japan. It's price is currently being artificially manipulated higher by JA, and that sucks. But I think ultimately most of these articles and even the local discourse with other Japanese is just a socially acceptable topic to grumble about.
I bet Japan's going to be internally forced to expand rice exports, not imports. Farmers must pay bills or else they go away, and people aren't going to eat imports. So farmers has to stay by either completely subsidized a la defense production, or by scaling out at paces permanently exceeding inflation. Maybe both. Extra production has to go somewhere but population is on decline, so it has to go somewhere beyond the seas.
Unless iPhone moment happens and the country's hit by vastly superior rice, which iOS was - iPhone had worse hardware with worse integration than any of local phones back then, but UI/UX was literally 5-10 years ahead of everything else, and it completely replaced the entire Japanese phone market helped by blatantly illegal marketing tactics. That's not happening so far with rice.
Perhaps one strategy would be to find some economic use for the byproduct biomass from rice farming. Bioplastic is going to be the highest value-add; biofuel, except possibly aviation fuel, has a low price ceiling. This could effectively subsidize rice production without drawing from the public till.
It's not, it's a consequence of some land reform policies that made sense after WW2 to take power away from the rich, but has meant that economies of scale for rice farming has suffered later on.
The median rice farm owner in Japan only is in charge of single digit acres, whereas in EU/US it's like tens or hundreds of acres. So it's harder to justify mechanisation since the economies of scale don't work out and the children of farmers don't want to continue working the farm after their parents are no longer able to because the ceiling of what the farm can produce is low and economic and social prospects are better elsewhere.
That's without even getting in to the JA and the fact that a lot of these farmers are part time.
It's a really complicated issue without a simple fix or cause like labour costs. Realistically these farms are going to have to get consolidated, which is something that is happening, but slowly.
Imagine you have exactly 1 newborn in the latest generation. Then the prior generation must be composed of 2 ~20 year olds, 4 ~40 year olds, 8 ~60 year olds and 16 ~80 year olds. So you end up with a total ratio of 24:7 old (defined as 60+):young and a 24:6 or 4:1 retirement:working age (after we remove the 1 newborn). By contrast a fertility rate of 2 means each generation is the same size as the one prior so you end up with a 1:1 retirement:working ratio. And with positive population growth you have an exponential system with more workers than retirees
This is one of the main mechanisms through which fertility collapse drives economic collapse. Not only does your population shrink far more quickly than most realize, but you end up with the overwhelming majority of your remaining population being elderly. So yes - you have fewer people consuming resources, but you also have exponentially fewer people working those resources.
less farmers, hardly any automation, people moved to cities
That sounds interesting - what did they do?
I have deep Thai roots, and I don't think the same thing really exists there. Rice is just rice, and there are both old[0] and new[1] types of popular rice that are substantially different from the "standard" steamed white rice.
Maybe someone who’s Thai-Thai could chime in
Interesting to find out Thai doesn’t have something similar.
Domestic rice is a national security concern, not a financial one. Being fed by another country, even an ally, can turn pear-shaped very quickly. Is it that hard to imagine Trump threatening to starve Japan if they don't bow to his demands?*
> But also, the average Japanese eats around 1kg of uncooked rice per week. That's ¥800 at the rates in the article (~USD$300/year). Japan's cost of living is generally pretty low, but I doubt +/- $100/year is effecting many people.
Why the doubt? The average price of rice literally doubled YoY. For families that can be hundreds of dollars per month (yen equivalent) that they have to pull out of thin air, and that's in a country where the median wage is half of Australia.
* Yes, Japan already imports over half of its food, but rice is where the government decided to draw the line in the sand.
a 10kg bag of (AU-grown) koshihikari at Hanaromart (some Asian supermarket) is around 43 AUD right now IIRC. Could I tell the difference in blind tasting between it and just "normal" koshihikari off the shelf off a Japanese supermarket? Maybe, but maybe not. Not an argument for removing trade barriers, but the gap right now seems pretty stark.
I do feel like it's worth thinking about how you're saying 800 yen, but that might be per person. So for a 3-person family that's almost ~120k JPY per year. If you could cut that down to 90k JPY per year thats an extra 2500 JPY per month you can spend on food.
If you're the kind of person who only goes to the discount shops, an extra 2500 JPY per month can go a decent way on food. If you are on a pretty strict/limited food budget that 2500 JPY could go a long way.
Though of course like with eggs, etc, all food prices are just more obvious as well. And Japan has had really nasty inflation with energy + the weakening yen as well, so this is yet another thing that saps away at a budget where you're probably not saving that much to begin with.
But as I also said, I can afford to pay more. I don't think the average Japanese is going to be effected. But as I mentioned, if you're budget conscious, not even considering non-Japanese rice is ridiculous.
Can you tell the difference between Japanese brands or only between Japanese and non Japanese origin rice?
Is rice a significant percentage of food cost in Japan? Coming from a culture that uses less rice, the cost of price verses the cost of protein makes it just about a rounding error when cooking.
Now butter on the other hand has just about become a luxury good in New Zealand when it was once cheap, plentiful and extremely high quality.
But in general, I’ve not found non-Japanese rice that tastes as good, although we don’t have much variety of non-Japanese Japonica around (I won’t get into the general homogenization issue of products in Australian supermarkets).
In the context of someone who is budget conscious typical meat prices likely place the vast majority of it entirely out of the question. Similarly a much larger proportion of calorie intake is likely to be made up by a nonperishable staple under those circumstances.
At the height of rice prices, rice cost about the same per kg as domestic chicken thighs. That's a problem when rice is meant to be an affordable staple food.
Since 1995 Japan has been forced by the WTO to import a certain amount of rice tariff-free every year. Much of it doesn't even go to Japanese consumers, but rather to animal feed and strategic reserves. Prior to 2024, virtually all imported rice in Japan was imported to satisfy this requirement. Presumably that also includes the $63M of rice imported from Australia in 2023.
The tariffs do indeed have a massive impact, and until recently it was very difficult for consumers to even find imported rice in supermarkets.
That's gonna be crunchy
I live in Japan, and my girlfriend is an atypical Japanese that doesn't like rice that much. For her, the madness is that people here won't even consider other sources of carbs like pasta, potatoes, or bread.
I love Japanese food culture to bits, but figuring out when a bowl of rice is vital for a meal to even be considered a meal and when it is not is still a mystery to me after observing my wife and in-laws for more than a decade. Having been taught the "food pyramid" [1] line of thinking as a child, it just makes no sense to this gaijin how we can not substitute one source of carbohydrates with another, but I suppose that is what culture is for you.
If you told me to eat rice instead of bread I would probably be just as horrified
But it's Japan, so I imagine there's plenty of Showa who think all change is to be valiently fought and that not eating rice prevents you from being "proper" Japanese.
There's no absence of non-rice main meals in Japan; Wafu pasta is an entire category of Japanese pasta dishes whose name literally means Japanese Style Pasta. Udon, Ramen and Soba abound, and Kansai in particular has a large number of Konamon, flour-based meals and snacks (resulting from Allied food aid after the bombings).
In some ways, the reaction to suggestions of swapping out rice are like that redneck uncle of yours who is mad his Cardiologist told him to cut down on red meat because "what else am I supposed to eat?!" even though his wife does all the cooking and they already have pork/chicken/fish 3 nights out of 7. It's an identity thing; in some ways to eat rice is to _be_ Japanese.
PS -- We nearly always have rice with lunch and dinner, though. Japanese-grown. IMHO, it tastes very different from imported rice, and we HAVE tried.
I used to buy the rice grown in Fukushima prefecture because it was sold at a significant discount, during the short and financially disastrous period where I tried to immigrate there.
the rice demand in Japan is extremely inelastic, they would rather eat less than consume foreign brands, and a lot of this comes from the trust they have in their industries.
hardly something to ridicule Japan or suggest they depart from their cultural values.
The equivalent is like French wine fans saying no good wine could be produced in California. Obviously that wasn't true, and there was a lot of propaganda trying to lead people to believe that it was.
Calrose does but its not as good as the japanese rice I've had. Though I dont live in Japan and its possible only the better quality rices are exported?
I actually appreciate Japan's strong preference for domestic foods; the positive health aspects, the cultural ties, the community building, and so on.
But when the average bowl of rice is smothered in curry, demi-glace or egg, soy & sugar I don't think you could tell.
Yes, but it's like somewhere between mineral water and coffee. That is, most can tell the difference when directly compared, and may even prefer one over the other, but in many cases they are interchangeable.
> Is one generally considered better tasting than the others?
IMHO, no, but you tend to prefer the type you eat most often. Going back to the coffee analogy, most people have a roast / style they prefer, but few would claim that it's better.
Granted familiarity itself can play a role when considering something unfamiliar. But when it comes to both rice and coffee I purchase what I do because I significantly preferred it to the variants I tried before it.
I'd used coffee as an analogy, because it's something that almost everyone drinks, has many varieties, but most generally aren't too picky about it. Alas, I'd underestimated the population overlap between HN readers and picky coffee drinkers. :-P
I don’t know if that is a drop in the bucket compared to their total consumption but their does appear to be an increasing appetite for foreign rice at the price points Japan is currently experiencing
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Agriculture/Japan-s-May-ric...
This rice in Japan is cheap because it's coming out of storage.
In Hawaii we get a lot of imported Japanese rice mainly due to prevalence of Japanese daily groceries here. The typical grocery store (eg donki) carries more than a few strains of rice - koshihikari, hitomebore, nanatsuboshi, hatsushimo, etc. These make a noticeable difference for your spam musubi's, but especially for sushi. We usually rotate between whatever's the cheapest Japanese imported rice, around $30-40 for ~15lbs, but I would say most people here eat Japanese rice.
At the start of the War on Trade, we noticed marginal price increases on Japanese rice, but especially noticed steep discounts on California calrose, like $15 for 25lbs, which to me felt insane. The local specialty rice store just had to issue a price increase notice last week (https://the-rice-factory-honolulu.square.site), though this seems like it's more the rice shortage than tariffs.
Thoughts and prayers though to the Japanese who will have to eat South Korean rice, once the national reserve stock dwindles. Hope they make it through this struggle period.
Why are rice prices still high? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44126639 - May 2025 (16 comments)
Japan plans to sell rice from emergency stockpiles to cut prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42915690 - Feb 2025 (11 comments)
Why has Japan been hit with rice shortages despite normal crops? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41366304 - Aug 2024 (179 comments)
I'm not sure this amount of price control is needed for that outcome. From TV I get the impression Japanese rice production is pretty intensive, but also small plot focussed so not as efficient as Australia where it's miles and miles of field to the horizon.
Maybe Japanese rice farmers are a protected species?
But yes, surely with some combination of taxes, subsidies and there being no better economic use for the land, you can get people to grow soy or barley and feed cattle with it.
It helps, reducing most of the need for government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be enough.
Also, it's wasteful, at least from some point of view. You stabilize the price by consuming the excess, but you would still need to survive an eventual shortage. It may not be a huge problem worldwide, but Japan in particular doesn't have a lot of excess capacity.
You could give direct income support to rice farmers and not recover it by insane pricing for Japanese rice.
If memory serves, the whale meat was virtually given away but by no means cost nothing to hunt, flense and store.
The minister of agriculture right now, Shinjiro Koizumi, is the son of Jun-ichiro Koizumi with now-unpopular legacy of deregulating and wrecking the Japanese postal service among few other government functions. The minister is now advocating for deregulating rice anyhow in response to the ongoing situation, and the situation kind of stinks.
Sorry that it's probably not the kind of content appropriate at HN anyway. It's more of "uncovering Cold War history podcast" style of content except it's in live.
Unpopular with who? In hindsight, the post office was a bandaid that needed to be ripped off before it became the next JNR. If he didn't do that, the tax payer would be on the hook for its final implosion, which is happening right now.
Otherwise USA rice is imported in Japan, as well as other countries' and is indeed way cheaper, but not desirable and people aren't literally starving either.
In fact the US produces plenty of Japanese rice (Japonica)
Indeed, I bought some and it was good. Italy also grows Japanese strains and it also of pretty good quality. Those are not cheap either, though. I'm assuming that's not the Costco rice parent was referring.
> This is why prices remain high.
It's complicated, and no single factor explains it all. Even singling out importing rice, Japan has better options than the US (the SEA region is a much more logical source for instance)
On the "it's complicated" part, believe it or not, Japan gov is/was actively restricting rice production as a long term strategy.
> Do you think someone who is poor would not buy cheaper rice that had 90% the quality if they could?
That's ignoring all the other options, in particular wheat (bread, pasta, noodles etc.), which can be cheaper than cheap rice. It doesn't match the cliche, but Japan has steadily included wheat as a staple over the years.
Costco’s basmati rice is excellent quality and can be ordered online 20lb for $27 delivered.
So that’s only about double the unit price for top end, premium rice.
It's sushi rice, grown in CA, and it's very good. Same stuff we used to buy from our local Japanese grocery store in CA.
Another example could be wine sold at US Cosco vs French Costco. It would be an indicator of something, but I'd personally be lost if I had to interpret it in regards to wine trends in France in general.
It is O. s. subsp. japonica
Surprising, because while its widely available in California it seems to be a tiny minority of available rice. A search I did says it is 80% of California's crop, so presumably a lot of it is exported?
There is no "best rice" any more than there is "best pants".
in fact, jasmine rice smells and tastes better, and stickier!
Jasmine top, Japanese bottom
They have a completely different consistency when cooked and are used for different things.
it's has a similar stickiness, the taste is a bit different, but better imo.
it pairs well with asian dishes as opposed to american rices and can be used for sushi.
it's not 1:1, but it's certainly a good substitute when you can find japanese rice.
maybe it's how it turns out in the rice cooker.
either way, I've done it and it tastes good /shrug
Cheapest rice I am actually willing to eat, ~3000JPY/5kg: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/293247162
Shortgrain rice, such as Japanese rice, tends to be even more expensive than that.
That said, no idea where whatever it is the article is quoting the price of falls on that scale.
I can buy rice at Costco in the US for $25 for 50lbs, which is equivalent to 854 yen for 5KG. A bit less than 1/4 the cost of Japanese grown rice.american white rice is only good when it's transformed into spanish rice, fried rice or creamy rice.
otherwise it's too bland because it's stripped. brown rice is better but still not as good.
both japonica and jasmine rice are good on their own.
love jasmine rice over all of them, it makes your mouth water when you cook it.
edit: who downvotes a comment about rice? lol.
I think they’re deliberately talking only about rice people actually want to buy.
Golden Rice 2 was on the market for about five years in the Philippines before it got banned. If anybody had wanted to grow it or eat it it could have been a different story. I was talking to a genetic engineer a few weeks ago who said that the sensory qualities weren't that great. Nothing would have stopped advocates in the US from planting a few acres and selling bags of it (it's approved and all) but had they done so it would have put the lie to the idea that the developers were being persecuted like Prometheus. I don't think it was anywhere near the threat that its opponents said it was but it was nowhere near the boon that its promoters said it was.
Good side by side https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Koshihik...
The "problem" is that you won't find rice like Yumepirika, Akitakomachi, Tsuyahime, or Nanatsuboshi (just a few example of my favorites) anywhere outside of Japan. Even Italy has japonica rice fields but it's a different class all together.
Calrose is medium-grain, but Koshihikari itself is grown in California as is a short-grain hybrid with Calrose called Calhikari. Sasanishiki is also being grown.
So this price isn't surprising or unusual at all.
For perspective, it's about 2x what you'd pay in a UK supermarket. What's the big deal?
