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When you are the Japanese Minister of Agriculture and millions of citizens conditioned from birth to revere rice are agonizing for record prices and shelves of exhausted supermarkets, you have a couple of options.
You can assure you that your pain is completely recognized in the highest levels of government, that effective relief measures will be activated soon and that the fundamental reform is rushing to repair decades of wrong policy. Or could presume, in the manner of Scarface extended in his mansion, about the amplitude of his stash of personal rice, his surplus large enough to be sold and the political gifts that built their mountain of white things.
Taku Eto, the Minister of the Farm, was with the last option in a weekend fund collection. And, after quickly winning the hostility of all those who pay for Rice, he left his post on Wednesday. “I have never bought rice, to be honest, because my followers give me a lot of rice. I have so much rice in my pantry that I could sell it,” was the precise formula that sealed the fate of Eto.
At a glance, the “ricegate” sounds familiar with the deaf Japanese political errors of endless tone over the years. But the moment and crisis of empathy that this remains exposed makes it unusually revealing and disastrous. And, notably, it was only the second worst rice of a Japanese politician with rice theme of a Japanese politician in recent weeks. The line of Prime Minister Shigeru ishiba in the US tariff negotiations: “I will not sacrifice the rice industry to protect the automotive industry,” he may have caused less Klaxons, but he was in his most alarming substance.
To take the comments of Eto first, the problem is not the boasting per se, but the implicit failure of the ishiba cabinet to treat the inflationary and inflationary daily experience of the ordinary Japanese as the head of the basin is really. Rapidly increased prices can be politically ruins anywhere; In Japan, where approximately 20 years of stagnant or falling prices are followed and dying wages, its power is even greater.
When the financial year ended in March, Japan had completed its 36th consecutive month with the main inflation on the 2 percent objective of the Bank of Japan. Salaries adjusted by inflation fell into each of the first three months of 2025. The word “normalization”, beloved of monetary political leaders, does not capture how delay you feel all this for the average home.
And, highlighting that feeling of the average and amazing rice prices that have doubled since this moment last year, the national strategic rice reserves have taken advantage of due to the distribution problems for the first time, and even the buyers have repeatedly experienced temporary shortage of a grain that remains fundamental for the Japanese diet and mentality.
Behind the increase in prices, for example, some experts, there are decades of policy that encouraged farmers to plant less rice as a means to support prices. The LDP of Ishiba was the same part that attached to that plan, instead of encouraging Japan to become a global superpower of rice. The fact that the same policy was accompanied by limitations of access to the market in foreign rice imports has provided a reminder of why Donald Trump is so convinced of the historical iniquities of Japanese protectionism.
But it could be said that it is more condemnatory for Ishiba, their comments flatly rejected the idea that Japan should consider offering greater access to the market for US rice as an incentive for the Trump administration to prevent Japan from the current 25 percent tariff on automotive imports.
The comment was perhaps an attempt by Istiba to affirm his credentials of people of people and his unwavering support for the agricultural vote, on which the LDP has depended so much time. However, what it really does is reveal a leader who has completely lost where the true crisis in Japan is located. It is good to be emotionally defensive around a beautiful grain, and sensible protect food security in geopolitical and environmentally tormented times. But agriculture uses approximately a quarter of the number of Japanese who owe their jobs in some way to the automotive industry, which greatly produces the most important export in the country.
Even greater than the importance of the automotive industry as an income generator is its centrality as a propeller of innovation, competitiveness, risks and productivity, the only qualities, realistically, which can see Japan through a demographic crisis and the forced rewriting of Trump of the global rules. Rice can, and must be sacrificed, if that is what is needed. And if the shortage persists, we all know a former minister with much plenty.