10-07-2025
VOX POPULI: Soichi Yamashita knew the value farmers provided even decades ago
What should rice farming be like in Japan?
The perfect time to face this crucial question head-on would have been when rice disappeared from practically all stores from last year through this year—a phenomenon that came to be dubbed 'Reiwa no Kome Sodo' or 'Reiwa rice shortage.'
The crisis seems to have been somewhat allayed since the government began releasing stockpiled rice, but that's nothing more than a temporary fix, really.
Unfortunately, the timeless and universal adage of 'the danger past and God forgotten' is apparently firmly ingrained in human nature.
Once rice prices began coming down, it appears that people lost interest.
I wonder what farmer-writer Soichi Yamashita would have said about this situation, were he alive today.
He died on July 10, 2022. He was 86.
I can almost hear him lament, 'Don't you get it yet? In times of emergency, you people are the ones who are going to starve.'
Yamashita consistently asserted that Japan's agricultural issues are not the problems of farmers, but the problems of consumers who have no means of production.
Born a farmer's son in Saga Prefecture in 1936, Yamashita inherited his family's terraced rice paddies and farmland.
He was in his 30s when the government's rice production curtailment policy came into effect. This forced him to switch to mikan farming, but the mikan market tanked due to the import liberalization of oranges.
Still, Yamashita resolved to remain a farmer.
'The land I'm working on has been entrusted to me by my ancestors,' he said. 'It's mine, but it's also not mine.'
I believe that is how many farmers feel. But they obviously have their limits.
In the last five years, the population of rice farmers decreased by as much as 30 percent and the average age of rice paddy owners reached 70.
The 'Koe' (letters to the editor) section of The Asahi Shimbun recently ran a comment by a man who sold his paddies when a person he had relied on for years to manage the paddies told him bluntly: 'Rice farming doesn't pay.'
This could hardly be an isolated case.
Yamashita once wrote that farmers keep people alive by growing farm produce. And he continued, 'It's really unbearable that in our era, those who are working to keep people alive are themselves unable to survive.'
Those words were written more than 30 years ago.
—The Asahi Shimbun, July 10
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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.
