I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice.’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.
Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …
… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe,” i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.
But the Conservative opposition tried to make something of it and got nowhere. The circumstances were different. Carney was running for office, and did it successfully, as a globalist plutocrat who understands the world, has helped run it in various roles, and has never had the time to go scuttling about with coupons, flyers and loyalty cards like some wage-earning schmuck.
This was just what the voters wanted, and Carney didn’t get Kinsleyed. (It should be added that the SRC gotcha question wasn’t actually about grocery prices or inflation, but about trade with the U.S.; Carney was being asked, for Quebec-specific reasons, if he still buys American strawberries.)
Mindful of Carney’s impressive layer of Teflon, I spent some time looking into the Taku Eto story. The quote that landed Eto in trouble was an offhand remark made in the midst of a talk at a Liberal Democratic Party seminar: “I have never bought rice myself. My supporters give me quite a lot of rice. I have so much rice that I could sell it.”
Eto, who comes from the island of Kyushu, tried to play this off as a mis-timed joke with a regional/idiomatic angle: in the Japanese context he is literally a southerner (with a charming accent and conservative politics to match). What I wondered is why the reaction to the remark was so powerful and immediate. Was it because “my supporters give me rice” savours slightly of corruption, or just because the Japanese are that angry about grocery prices?
As far as I can make out, it’s the latter. Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
The government depends on the cooperatives to get the additional Japanese rice to the market, and they’re taking their sweet time. The emergency imports are coming from South Korea, and, as you might expect, there’s some culinary prejudice against the nasty foreign stuff.
The obvious answer to these perpetual headaches is market liberalization and free trade — but the “strategic” argument for rice supply management in Japan really does have force. News flash: the Japanese live on an archipelago, in Asia, next door to China and a stone’s throw from North Korea. Blockades and bombardments justifiably loom large in their imagination. Japan is a highly homogenous national collective. It will probably take a real long time for them to shake the thought that they can survive anything, outlast any enemy and endure any tribulation, as long as they’re able to keep growing their own rice.
No doubt they regard all this as common sense. But absolutely none of it is true of us, and that makes me wonder what excuse we have for tolerating analogous food policies that have the same dismal effects.
National Post
AloJapan.com