The number of the week

The agriculture ministry’s weekly supermarket survey put the average price of a five-kilo bag of rice at 2,837 yen for the week of October 5-11: the ninth straight weekly fall, and 31.5 percent below the same week last year. Shoppers are responding to the cheaper shelf. Sales volume was up 22.8 percent on the year. The survey covers roughly 1,000 supermarkets and has only run since March 2022, which matters for what the word “record” means below.

Upstream, the break is sharper. The September average for collector-to-wholesaler trades, the first month to price the 2026 harvest, came to 21,293 yen per 60 kilos of top-grade brown rice: down 42 percent from the September that priced last year’s crop. New-crop trade volume for the month was the second-lowest for September since comparable records began with the 2006 crop, with last year’s surplus still sitting in warehouses and long rain delaying harvests. Even after the fall, the price remains the third-highest on record.

What a year of expensive rice looked like

In May 2025 the same supermarket survey recorded 4,285 yen a bag, a record at the time and double the price of a year earlier. In November 2025 it set another: 4,316 yen, the highest since the survey began. For well over a year, households paid around twice what they had been paying for the staple. Wages did not double to meet it.

Who got paid

Someone did well out of the spike, and part of that someone was the farm gate. For the 2025 crop, the advance payments that JA, the agricultural cooperative group, makes to growers on delivery hit record highs across much of the country. Niigata’s standard Koshihikari went to 30,000 yen per 60 kilos, up 76 percent on the initial 2024 payment. Uonuma Koshihikari reached 32,500, Iwafune and Sado 33,000, each a record; the previous Uonuma record had stood since 1996. Tochigi’s initial payment was up 72 percent.

Two caveats belong here. These are advances, settled against final sales later, not proof of final profit. And growers’ input costs – machinery, fertilizer, fuel – rose 20 to 30 percent over the same period, as the growers themselves point out.

Who set the table

Why prices stayed so high for so long is contested ground. Kazuhito Yamashita, a former agriculture ministry official now at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, argues that JA Zen-Noh, the group’s national federation, won more than 90 percent of the government stockpile auctions and then slowed onward sales to wholesalers, defending the price its own advance payments had promised. That is one critic’s account, given in a Sankei Shimbun interview. JA Zen-Noh’s on-record response covers profit-taking on stockpile rice, not the release timing he alleges. What sits on the public record without dispute: a JA federation chairman in Fukui said openly in May 2025 that releasing stockpiled rice and lowering prices would sap growers’ will to produce; ministry distribution data showed released stockpile rice picking up 7,593 yen per 60 kilos in expenses and margin between collector and wholesaler, against 2,206 to 4,689 yen in a 2022 cost survey; and JA Zen-Noh, while pledging to take no profit on reselling stockpile rice, asked wholesalers not to label it as stockpile rice on the shelf.

The ministry’s own post-mortem, presented to the cabinet last August, spreads the blame differently: it had underestimated demand – inbound tourism, higher per-person consumption, poor milling yields – been complacent about tracking distribution, and released the stockpile late. Production then responded to the price signal. The ministry projected the 2025 harvest up as much as 10 percent, plantings expanded, imports rose, and 590,000 tonnes of stockpile rice reached the market.

The turn

By the end of June 2026, private rice inventories stood at a record 2.21 to 2.34 million tonnes, against the 1.8 to 2.0 million considered appropriate. And so the same payment system that posted records last year is now cutting deep. For the 2026 crop, Aomori’s advances came in at roughly half of last year’s, the largest drop on record there. Yamagata’s fell about 40 percent, the biggest cut since the current method began in 2015; one Tsuruoka grower, who farms 22 hectares, called the figure below cost and warned that nobody will keep growing rice at it. Tochigi’s Koshihikari fell 45 percent.

JA Zen-Noh Yamagata’s own comment captures the bind: the market needs “a price level consumers accept and producers can keep farming at.” Last year it managed one half of that sentence.

Did consumers walk away?

Not in the way the industry sometimes tells it. The ministry’s review found households actually bought more rice than forecast during the shortage, and now that prices are falling, volumes are up again – that 22.8 percent. What consumers would not do was absorb 4,300-yen rice indefinitely at full price: by May this year 85 percent of supermarket rice was selling on discount, and volumes stayed sluggish even so. The long-term trend, a population eating a little less rice each year, never went away. The surplus has several parents: a record production response, imports and stockpile rice all landing at once, alongside demand that flattened rather than vanished.

The view here

Everything above is the record. What follows is this site’s view of it. The organizations now lamenting the crash are the ones that defended the spike while households paid double for a staple, and the same system is passing the bill to its own growers, the people it paid record advances to twelve months ago. Rice farming in Japan is publicly cushioned through specific programs: the narashi income-loss scheme explicitly covers rice – farmers pay in alongside the state, and payouts cover 90 percent of a verified shortfall – while a separate income insurance scheme covers every farm product for blue-return tax filers; and the paddy-utilization direct payment subsidizes converting fields to feed rice, wheat, soy and other strategic crops under a stated aim of food self-sufficiency. If the public underwrites the downside, the public is entitled to say the upside was mismanaged. The high prices that squeezed household budgets cannot be explained, and were never going to be resolved, without the decisions that managed supply: the forecasts that missed demand, the stockpile that moved late, the prices defended in public. Those decisions were made by people, and the people who made them own what follows.

Sources: agriculture ministry weekly supermarket survey (Oct 16 release), via Jiji and FNN; September trade prices via Sankei and Jiji; 2025 records via Mainichi and Yomiuri; 2025 advance payments via Niigata Nippo, Asahi and JAcom; 2026 cuts via NHK, Yomiuri and Asahi; the Yamashita interview in Sankei; JA Zen-Noh’s stockpile pledge in Asahi; distribution margins and the Fukui chairman’s comments as reported by Sankei Business; the ministry review via MAFF council minutes; discounting data via Nikkei; subsidy programs via MAFF program pages.