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The story
Heavy rain from Typhoon No. 25 breached a levee around Lake Inba in Chiba Prefecture, dealing severe damage to eel farms and rice paddies in the area. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, a body believed to be that of a man in his 60s who had been reported missing was newly confirmed dead in Kamogawa City on the 25th, bringing the combined death toll for Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures to 12. On the thread, posters worked through misconceptions about how eel “farming” actually works, expressed sympathy for farmers being pushed out of the industry, and clashed with those calling for large-scale consolidation of agriculture.
Sat, Sep 26, 5:00 AM JST
Yomiuri Shimbun Online
Around Lake Inba in northern Chiba Prefecture, where heavy rain from Typhoon No. 25 breached a levee and caused widespread flooding, the aquaculture and rice-farming industries have taken a severe blow. Producers are confronting a grim situation with no clear path forward. On the 25th, one more person — a man believed to be in his 60s who had been unaccounted for in Kamogawa City, also in Chiba — was confirmed dead, bringing the death toll across Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures to 12. (Reporting by Junichiro Takeda, Chiba Bureau, and Shoko Kaneko, Yokohama Bureau)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / original article here
What people said
Nobody's stopping you, just quietly quit farming already.
If I quit farming I've got no job to go to.
I didn't study for anything else back in school since I was supposed to take over the family business,
and there's no track in Japan today for hiring people with no work experience or qualifications.
I think I'm pretty much cornered.
Even Vietnamese workers are grinding away in agriculture under the "trainee" visa scheme — problem solved, just get yourself hired as a trainee on somebody else's farm!
Not my problem, honestly. That logic doesn't apply to everyone.
Sure, awareness is high now and you can look all this up,
but if someone right after the war told you "we've solved it technically," you'd just end up settling there anyway.
Here we go again, Tanuma Okitsugu… 😭
I used to eat it pretty often
Well, hopefully wild-caught eel gets cheaper 👍
Sure the ecosystem changes and fishing there is finished, but that beats central Chiba going under.
Even if it costs something like 200 billion yen, on the scale of the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, the total disaster-prevention payoff would definitely be worth it.
Chiba had the Narita Airport protests, so large-scale development there has always been politically difficult.
What on earth are you people? lol
It's unhinged.
The guy's just grieving that his family business got wiped out by a disaster — no idea what's supposedly so controversial about that.
If anyone deserves the slander, it's the rain clouds.
Japanese farms are small-scale and can only produce so little rice,
so the only way to stay in business is to pour in extra labor and cost to brand the produce and sell it at a premium.
Japanese agriculture ought to consolidate into large-scale operations, mass-produce with machines even if the output is a bit rough,
and stay afloat by selling cheap in bulk instead.
What agricultural policy should be doing is steering things toward consolidation so farm products get cheaper.
The farmland around Lake Inba should probably be redistributed among a smaller number of larger operators.
Giant rice paddies would stop producing crops in no time.
Given Japan's climate — right in the typhoon path, plus the autumn rainy season — going big isn't necessarily the right answer.
Tani Fish Farm said they'd have to talk it over with their son first
and you'll understand how hard it is
My uncle used to manage a Gusto restaurant for that one big family-restaurant chain,
and he said he only got 105 days off a year lol
( ∩ミ ta-da, here's your giant eel
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し ⌒Ｊ
Sorry, what was that about a water flea? 🦻
_, ,_ .・(U) wow
( ﾟДﾟ).;；.;∵ヽ('∀' ) zers
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| ★";'. /
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Background and key debates
Lake Inba is a low-lying area that has undergone repeated land reclamation and flood-control work since the Edo period, and both rice farming and eel aquaculture are long-established local industries there. This time, heavy rain from Typhoon No. 25 breached a levee, submerging fish ponds and paddies across a wide area. The thread also surfaced confusion over what eel “farming” actually means — posters clarified that it isn’t fully closed-cycle breeding, but rather catching wild glass eels (juveniles) and raising them to market size. The main point of contention was between sympathy for farmers being forced out of the business and calls for consolidating and modernizing agriculture at scale, with pushback specifically around how paddies would need to be managed at that scale. Some posts mocking disaster victims and off-topic political flame wars also appeared in the thread but have been omitted here as unrelated to the core disaster reporting. The death toll across Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures has reached 12, with the damage now extending well beyond agriculture and fisheries into a serious human toll.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (News Speed+) thread “[Lake Inba Levee Breach] Farmed eel “probably wiped out” — Fourth-generation rice farmer: “I have no choice but to consider quitting the business”… Major blow to agriculture and fisheries.”
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