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The story
Prices for domestically grown rice have been gradually falling, with some 5kg bags now going for just over ¥2,000. On 5ch, users express surprise at how fast prices have dropped, reigniting complaints about JA (the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) and farmers from when prices spiked, along with debates over what counts as a “fair price.” Opinions are divided over the price gap with other countries and accusations of price-gouging resellers.
What people said
People are complaining because prices suddenly jumped 2-3x by exploiting panic-buying after a natural disaster. Are you dense?
If all of those had tripled too, I could accept rice tripling as well, but even at their worst those only went up about 1.5x. So shouldn't rice have gone up by roughly that much too? Why did rice that used to be ¥1,500 jump past ¥5,000?
I wouldn't complain about a roughly 3% annual increase. It's just that a +50% year-over-year jump is way too greedy — drop dead, basically.
10kg: ¥2,690
5kg: ¥1,345
That's the fair price. Anything above that is a rip-off.
Then just never eat it again. Ever.
🇯🇵 Japan: ¥4,000
🇺🇸 USA: ¥1,600
🇰🇷 South Korea: ¥1,500
🇦🇺 Australia: ¥1,100
🇪🇺 Europe: ¥900
🇹🇭 Thailand: ¥900
🇨🇳 China: ¥700
🇻🇳 Vietnam: ¥500
When sold in Japan, the price gets "corrected" to match this ↓
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/583afc1c4cba913c9bf8a520dc50dd7bff3bee34
Prices really should have come back down to around ¥1,300-something per 5kg. Households are already struggling with inflation, yet JA and the Ministry of Agriculture committed the grave sin of forcing consumers to buy rice at all-time-high prices.
JA, which wields huge influence over how rice prices are set, has reportedly been driving prices up by inflating stockpiles — isn't this a violation of antitrust law?
Some people seem confused, but JA mostly sells only to wholesalers/businesses — it isn't really dealing with the general public to begin with. The only JA product aimed at regular consumers is Pearl Rice. It's the rice trading companies that actually sell to the public.
The futures market's been busy manipulating prices one minute and playing fair the next.
You meant "rice," not "wheat," for Japan's staple food.
Japan's a high-cost country no matter what you do, so selling off its own labor is about all that's left.
Probably the difference in subsidies.
Fertilizer, fuel, and labor costs all keep rising, so of course farmers can't keep up otherwise.
If they'd said "fertilizer costs went up, fuel costs went up, please let us raise prices this much," the way Akagi Nyugyo (a confectionery maker famous for its price-hike apology ad) did, consumers would have understood and kept buying. But instead prices suddenly tripled and they ran newspaper ads insisting THIS is the fair price — that's what turned everyone against them overnight. People say the farmers aren't at fault, but if they're backing JA's tactics, they can't complain about getting lumped in with them.
Turns out that Akagi Nyugyo was actually running a full-on cartel… What was all that online praise for Akagi Nyugyo even about?
Farmers aren't backing JA by choice — they have no option but to do as JA says. That was national policy. Farmers only get paid the fixed provisional price JA sets.
Because it's an opportunistic price hike riding on rice's coattails.
Kind of like how prices didn't come down even when gasoline dropped sharply.
That's a well-known phenomenon in economics — once a price gets raised due to higher input costs, it almost never comes back down even after input costs fall.
Normally you could spin that positively as "that's how wages eventually rise," but Japanese companies just hoard the extra profit, so who knows.
It's you who's looking down on people — assuming consumers are dumb enough to keep buying even at triple the price. Buying and selling only works on trust between buyer and seller.
The moment you're driving a ¥10 million combine harvester or tractor, you're already in a different league than us poor folks.
All we're saying is: "farmers, go back to being slaves like before."
We're not asking for tax money to be poured in or for income support for agriculture, not even a little.
We're just saying farmers should go back to working like slaves who don't care about profitability. It's not a complicated request.
Kyushu switches over fast, nice.
Is this one any good? I've seen it before.
Whoa, Fukui rice, impressive. Obviously buying the new crop.
See, wholesalers have to cut their losses and sell or they're in trouble.
People really do forget fast, huh.
https://diamond.jp/articles/-/360463
Seriously, these scummy resellers are the worst.
Background and Key Points
Rice is Japan’s most politically sensitive food, and its price has never been a simple free market. For decades the government ran *gentan*, a rice-acreage reduction policy paying farmers to grow less, while a roughly 778% tariff wall keeps foreign rice out except for a small WTO “minimum access” import quota. JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) sits in the middle of this system, historically buying most of the harvest at a provisional price it sets, not the farmers. In 2024-25, a poor harvest, heat damage, and panic-buying after a Nankai Trough earthquake advisory triggered the so-called “Reiwa rice crisis,” pushing a 5kg bag from a historical norm near ¥1,300-2,000 up past ¥4,000-5,000. The government responded by releasing emergency stockpiles, and prices are now sliding back toward ¥2,000.
The thread doesn’t split over whether prices rose — everyone agrees they did — it splits over whether that rise was justified. One camp treats the old ¥1,300-2,000 range as the only “fair” price and calls anything above it gouging by JA or resellers; another argues input costs (fertilizer, fuel, equipment) genuinely rose ~50% and farmers, who don’t set their own prices, shouldn’t be blamed for JA’s or distributors’ decisions.
What the thread misses is the structural point: JA mostly deals wholesale, not retail (post 49 half-notices this), so the “villain” consumers pictured overcharging them at the register is usually a trading company or supermarket, not JA itself. Nor does anyone connect the price spike to decades of *gentan* deliberately shrinking supply — the policy that made today’s “return to normal” possible only because stockpiles existed to release.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from a 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo/”Everything Live” board) thread titled “Domestic rice is finally dropping to around ¥2,000 for 5kg wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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