Japanese food prices, people“Basket” load
Japanese consumers are looking for bargains as food prices rise, forcing them to tighten their belts because their purchasing power is declining, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Recently, the prices of rice, eggs, cabbage and other daily food on the market in Japan have risen sharply. Statistics show that in March 2025 alone, 2,343 food items are scheduled to increase in price, the average increase was 17 per cent. As a result, many consumers and business owners have been forced to change their daily spending plans. So how much has the current rise in food prices affected Japanese consumption? “Global Times” special correspondent visited Japan to investigate.
Spending is less frequent, but spending is the same
Japanese residents have been affected by rising prices in recent years. Following the“Rice shortage” led to rice prices, the recent Japanese vegetable prices are gradually out of control. A vegetarian friend has cut her visits to the supermarket in half and given up the habit of eating one or two pieces of fruit a day. Still, she found little difference in spending in February. Another well-paid friend now opts for a detour to the corner store rather than the supermarket. “The fruit in the high-end supermarket is really beautiful and delicious, but an ugly orange costs more than 500 yen (100 yen) and a Fuji apple costs more than 400 yen,” she told reporters. “It’s better to go to the grocery store and buy something ordinary but cheap.”
On the Amazonfresh platform, a head of cabbage has gone for more than Y1,000 and cabbage about y450-y500. A mother-of-three told the global times that she hadn’t eaten the two vegetables in nearly a month, and that bean sprouts had been substituted for cabbage in her home-cooked chow mein. An 80-year-old man told NHK television, “Leafy vegetables are very expensive and living on your pension is really hard.”
As for the reasons for the high prices of leaf vegetables, the head of the horticultural crops department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said that the extreme high temperatures in summer and low temperatures and little rain in winter last year led to insufficient supply of cabbage and rising prices. Consumers turned to cabbages, increasing demand, but the lack of winter rainfall also affected the growth of cabbages, tight supply. Prices are expected to stabilize after the spring cabbage season begins in March. But the person in charge also said that cabbage prices, which had been on a downward trend, are not yet clear why they are rising again.
Cabbage is sold at a vegetable shop in Tokyo, Japan, February 21,2025. (visual China)
Beyond vegetables, there are many other foods that continue to rise in price in Japan. Of the 2,343 food items that will see price rises in March, processed foods such as frozen foods are the most expensive, with 1,381 items. Prices for about 20,000 items in the food industry are expected to rise this year, much higher than last year, Bloomberg said, citing data from Imperial Japan.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are facing challenges
Across-the-board food price increases have caused great difficulties for small and medium-sized enterprises, especially the self-employed. A restaurant in Shinjuku, Tokyo, consumes about 15 kg of rice a day. The store raised prices for all dishes by Y50 last month because of rising costs. Even so, store margins have been severely squeezed. As 90 per cent of the store’s customers are university students in the neighbourhood, the owner has to scour supermarkets every day in search of cheaper rice to cut costs.
Honma Bento Store, a 63-year-old chain in Hokuoka, Yamagata Prefecture, a well-known rice-producing area in Japan, stopped selling to individual customers on Feb. 28. The restaurant, which sells more than 1,000 bento boxes a day, has cut its portion size from 250g to 200g because of rising rice prices, but it is still struggling to make a profit and even pay the pensions of its 14 employees.
Reporter residence nearby Chinese product shop may provide the shopping to deliver the service, before this sends the price only to have 3000 yen. However, due to rising prices and increased demand, half a year ago, the allowance was raised to 6,000 yen. Other e-commerce platforms have also raised their delivery fees, with Amazon and others occasionally offering discounts on fresh produce that can not be delivered until a few days later.
As Japan becomes more dependent on imports, food has become a sore point for policy makers, Bloomberg reports. Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate (in calories) has fallen from 50 per cent about 30 years ago to less than 40 per cent in fiscal 2023. The 2024 country imports about nine times as much food as it exports. The price of imported food has been affected by global events such as the conflict in Russia and Ukraine, and the depreciation of the yen has made imported food more expensive. Domestic supply is affected by uncontrollable factors such as climate change. In addition, plastic packaging materials and other non-food costs, such as logistics costs, labor costs, energy costs are on the rise. Profits are being squeezed as companies struggle to offset rising production costs by cutting internal costs.
There is still a risk that vegetable prices will soar
Japan has sharply increased vegetable imports in the past two months to cool prices. Japan imported 17,400 tonnes of cabbage in January, up 43-fold from a year earlier, with 90 per cent coming from China, according to the Finance Ministry. Cabbage imports rose from almost nothing last year to 1,440 tonnes, while lettuce imports reached 2,023 tonnes, up 1.7 times on the previous year. To ease the pressure on rice prices, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture plans to put 210,000 tons of reserve rice through two rounds of bidding, is expected to enter the retail channel in late March.
But Yahoo Japan News Network reported that the Japan Meteorological Agency’s latest summer weather forecast for 2025 appeared to point to the risk of vegetable prices soaring again. It is predicted that the surrounding areas of Japan from June to August will be covered by warm air mass, nationwide temperatures may be higher than average in previous years. Generally speaking, continuous high temperature will affect the growth of vegetables.
Zhang Yulai, professor and deputy dean of the Institute of Japanese Studies at Nankai University, said in an interview with the Global Times on the 4th that the current rise in food prices in Japan is the result of multiple factors at home and abroad, the root cause is imported inflation since the start of the Russia-ukraine conflict in 2022. He explained that the first is the depreciation of the yen led to expensive imported food, the impact of Japan’s already external dependence on food consumption structure. Second, a shortage of domestic labour has pushed up the cost of production. Moreover, Japan’s transition to decarbonisation has made many industries, including food production, more expensive. He said these inevitabilities, combined with a reduction in production of certain foods such as cabbage and contingencies such as the current international tariff uncertainty, had driven up prices for Japanese food in general. Zhang cited the ineffectiveness of official intervention in Japan partly as a result of disagreements between the government and the central bank over the direction of macroeconomic policy. And if current inflation conditions do not ease, it will have a deeper impact on consumer psychology.