JemmyRice crisis: Japan imports grain from South Korea for first time in more than 25 years
Jeena
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/22/japan-sou…
Japanese consumers who used to treat foreign-grown rice with scepticism have been forced to develop a taste for it amid domestic shortage
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250422183342/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/22/japan-south-korea-rice-import-crisis
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I heard about this from my wife (who is Japanese), and it's mostly a bad harvest along with few secondary reasons. If you're like me and thought it's the USs fault, it probably isn't helping with trade but Japan can still very much import rice from the US. Korea just makes more sense right now, probably.
In fact, ironically, tarrifs might actually help-- less US demand for Japanese rice means very slight increase in domestic supply. But it's likely not a lot.
I had seen mentioned the japanese government did something in the last few years that disincentivized rice growing.
Cid ViciousEr, I seem to recall reading that calrose rice (as pictured in the preview) is the most popular variety in Japan, and the "cal" is California. Is this just about a subset of people who prefer domestically grown varieties?
It's very unlikely that a non-domestic cultivar would be the most popular variety in Japan. Anecdotally I hear Koshihikari mentioned often, but I don't have actual hard figures on what's the most popular.
Huh I can't find a reference so perhaps what I read was a "in taste tests most people prefer" rather than being based on sales volume. I remember it mostly because it seemed like an odd fact to me.
Calrose is pretty good when you get the water ratio right but Japanese pearl rice is far superior. Unfortunately, there's not as much of it cultivated and it's expensive.
partly due to a rise in consumption caused by record numbers of tourists
Even the guardian getting in on the foreigner-bashing. Don't blame the gov or the JA, blame those damned dirty foreigners (but also come spend your money here but don't because it annoys people)!
So fucking dumb as a guy living in Japan for a decade now.
How is it tourist bashing if it's a single throwaway line in the article? I'm unclear on just how many tourists Japan gets, so I have no idea if their contribution is a drop in the bucket or potentially a significant percentage.
It's more because this is the line touted by the far right here and appeared in several publications as the reason for the shortage. The failure of the government and JA to plan for weather, harvests, and tourists (at a time when the yen is super weak against other currencies and things are open post-corona and they've known they're coming) ends up just getting blamed on the tourists in a number of places. Seeing it get touted elsewhere pokes a sore spot.
There were about 32 million tourists pre-corona and about 37 in 2024 per https://www.tourism.jp/en/tourism-database/stats/inbound/
That's not a huge jump and follows the trend (less the anomaly of the corona times). The idea that we would have such a rice shortage for those conditions is absurd to me yet, at least last time I looked, that was the one a bunch of domestic media focused on.
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