Japanese consumers who used to treat foreign-grown rice with scepticism have been forced to develop a taste for it amid domestic shortage
  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    11·
    17 days ago

    partly due to a rise in consumption caused by record numbers of tourists

    Even the guardian getting in on the foreigner-bashing. Don’t blame the gov or the JA, blame those damned dirty foreigners (but also come spend your money here but don’t because it annoys people)!

    So fucking dumb as a guy living in Japan for a decade now.

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      17 days ago

      How is it tourist bashing if it’s a single throwaway line in the article? I’m unclear on just how many tourists Japan gets, so I have no idea if their contribution is a drop in the bucket or potentially a significant percentage.

      • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
        7·
        17 days ago

        It’s more because this is the line touted by the far right here and appeared in several publications as the reason for the shortage. The failure of the government and JA to plan for weather, harvests, and tourists (at a time when the yen is super weak against other currencies and things are open post-corona and they’ve known they’re coming) ends up just getting blamed on the tourists in a number of places. Seeing it get touted elsewhere pokes a sore spot.

        There were about 32 million tourists pre-corona and about 37 in 2024 per https://www.tourism.jp/en/tourism-database/stats/inbound/

        That’s not a huge jump and follows the trend (less the anomaly of the corona times). The idea that we would have such a rice shortage for those conditions is absurd to me yet, at least last time I looked, that was the one a bunch of domestic media focused on.