Agree, and using the rice situation as leverage is shitty tbh. It’s a crisis and while Japan is a developed nation with a relatively good standard of living for the most part it’s also one with extremely stagnant wages and economic growth, fairly significant wealth inequality, etc.

many Japanese are struggling to get by more than Americans. Though it’s hard to directly compare. The average salary in Japan in far lower than in America (~30k vs ~39k) and wages for equivalent positions are much lower (like a computer programmer who gets paid $80k for an American company might get $50-60k from a Japanese company), but the cost of living is much lower in many ways, rent costs are substantially lower (even a Tokyo apartment is like $500usd/month unless you want something crazy extravagant), robust public transit network making car ownership truly optional, healthcare system that is not ideal but has much more managed costs than the us, etc

That’s probably in part why sanseitō (think japanese maga: anti immigration (in a country that barely allows it), super nationalist (in a country that’s already crazy nationalist), anti vaccination, etc) is seriously picking up steam and just picked up several seats in the upper house, going from 1 seat to 14 at the expense of the LDP and communist party who lost seats. They ran on rhetoric similar to trump, a “silent invasion” of immigrants is “taking over Japan”. It captured their youth, who are frustrated by a lack of meaningful jobs and the reality of an economy that has been stagnant for many decades at this point (arguably caused by boomer policy and refusal to break from tradition) but instead of looking inward at what could’ve been done wrong domestically they are looking for a boogeyman to easily shift blame to. Sound familiar?

The right wing shift is not limited to America unfortunately. AfD, sanseitō, national rally, Lega, Orban and bolsonaro, etc. many of these are picking up quite a bit of steam

Tell that to yoshinoya, who has been mixing California rice into their rice for the past year with some locations using entirely American rice, or Matsuya, who have switched to American rice at many locations due to cost. Lawson is also starting to prototype bentos with rice blends. Even if the consumer takes a nationalist approach the invisible hand of capitalism will reject that for profit

And with that there’s data to suggest the consumer doesn’t reject imported rice. Aeon sold the 80/20 blend with US rice and that proved popular enough that they are now selling 4kg bags of 100% california rice due to consumer demand. The 80/20 bags were 10% cheaper, the 100% is likely far more

It is a dangerous game. This is how walmart destroyed American small business. Everyone has ideals and principles until a massive vendor with huge advantage shows up and undercuts everyone in town by 10-30%. Doesn’t matter if the product is inferior. People don’t have money