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The story
On August 31, 2026, Teikoku Databank released survey results showing that 4,923 food and beverage items are scheduled for price hikes in September. The roughly threefold jump compared to the same month last year sparked both shock and backlash on 5channel’s Newsplus (Breaking News+) thread. Some viewed it as cost-push inflation driven by soaring crude oil and raw material prices, while others repeatedly pointed out that corporate internal reserves and shareholder returns are being prioritized over wage increases. Opinions clashed over the Takaichi administration’s performance and who’s to blame for the weak yen, with reactions ranging from economic analysis to political criticism.
August 31, 2026, 9:06 AM, Kyodo News
Teikoku Databank announced on the 31st that 4,923 food and beverage items are scheduled for price increases in September, a roughly threefold jump compared to the same month last year.
Source: 47news.jp / Original article here
What people said
Even if another 10 years pass without /Newsplus/ posters realizing that "the deflation our country wants to solve is prices going DOWN, and the inflation our country is promoting is prices going UP," that doesn't mean Abe-chan should be the one to take the blame. 🙆 SAFE!
Got you.
That was my trap set on Re: #9. 🤭
the BOJ says inflation is under 2%.
More like 200%.
> July's crude oil import value rose 87.8% year-on-year to ¥1.4089 trillion.
> Import volume only rose 5.5%, showing procurement costs are ballooning.
> With the weak yen too, the customs-cleared yen price per kiloliter rose 78.0% to ¥116,382.
This is way too scary because they're forcibly holding it down with subsidies.
There's no way that ballooning cost just disappears conveniently — it comes back around and ultimately becomes a burden on the public.
I figured a massive wave was coming in September. 😟
Crouch down, then jump! lol
We really haven't, though.
Big companies raise prices citing "stock prices," and all that profit goes to shareholders.
Then retailers can't sell at that price, so they buy high and sell low.
Cut it out already.
Naphtha prices are about to double.
There's nothing BUT reasons to raise prices.
The whole "overseas, dissatisfaction with inflation (rising prices) turns into dissatisfaction with the government 🌏" narrative doesn't apply to our country. 🙅
Originally, about 10 years ago, what people wanted from Abe-chan when he took back power was to "do something about the strong yen and deflation (falling prices)." 👈 THIS
And the weak yen and inflation our country has been promoting were welcomed with lines like "the era of the strong yen and deflation was a nightmare 👿" and "we can't go back 🙅 NO WAY" — which fueled Abe-chan's popularity and became the direction our country has kept heading in. 🙆 WELCOME
The smaller portions and price I can live with, but changing the taste is the part I hate.
It won't happen.
Food companies aren't performing well,
and the money's just flowing overseas because of the weak yen.
It's cost-push inflation, so no, that's not happening.
Besides, profits belong to shareholders, not employees.
Employee salaries only go up a few percent while companies' net profits balloon like crazy —
the ones celebrating are the shareholders.
Internal reserves are over ¥630 trillion — the highest in the world.
Yet Japanese wage levels are far below Germany's or France's.
Is Japanese labor productivity really equal to or worse than Germans' or French people's?
In reality, Japanese labor productivity is nowhere near low.
The root cause of Japan's decline is stingy, penny-pinching Japanese corporations.
They're the ones entirely to blame.
And then there's the LDP taking political donations from those very companies.
There's no way Japan gets better like this.
For companies, the top priority is to keep posting record profits for their shareholders.
To pad those headline numbers, they're fudging the books in all sorts of ways.
Everyone around Takaichi is fiercely resisting that,
and the garbage media is piling on to bash her too.
In a country like this,
ordinary Japanese people are basically just slaves.
Everyone's pinning it on her, but still.
That's dead wrong.
The yen weakened massively just from switching from Ishiba to Takaichi.
so companies figure they'd better raise prices now while they still can.
For Takaichi too, it's probably better to encourage price hikes now
rather than have opportunistic hikes ride on and dampen her big consumption-tax-cut moment later.
Actually, since the government and the BOJ don't want to "fall back into deflation (falling prices),"
having "the inflation (rising prices) promoted since Abe-chan's time continue" is a GOOD thing. 👍 OKAY
Doesn't that just mean the tax cut is pointless, then?
Background and key points of this topic
The count of food items with price hikes is a metric Teikoku Databank compiles every month, and September’s figure of 4,923 ranks among the largest of any month this year. The main drivers cited are soaring raw material costs — crude oil and naphtha in particular — along with rising import costs driven by the historically weak yen. The thread had plenty of criticism that these hikes are simply padding corporate profits, but it’s often overlooked that a price increase doesn’t automatically become net profit; many companies are still passing costs on to consumers because they can’t fully absorb the rise in raw material expenses. There’s also a distinction between cost-push and demand-pull inflation behind why rising prices don’t necessarily translate into higher wages — since the former is driven mainly by raw material costs, even when corporate profits rise, that money doesn’t easily become a source for wage increases. Criticism of the administration was prominent too, but it’s worth noting that exchange rates and international commodity markets don’t shift instantly just because the government changes, so drawing a simple cause-and-effect conclusion here may be premature.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Newsplus) thread “[Breaking] September Food Price Hikes Hit About 5,000 Items, Triple Last Year.”
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