Public dealing with rampant price increases for rice unhappy with minster’s claim he gets more than he can eat from political supporters.

People in Japan are struggling with rapidly rising consumer prices for just about everything, but the most prominently painful price increase of all is for rice. Up until about a year ago, it wasn’t hard to find a five-kilogram (11-pound) bag of rice at supermarkets for around 2,500 yen (US$17.25), but the price has roughly doubled since then.

Skyrocketing rice prices are a major problem for a number of reasons. Even setting aside its cultural significance in Japan, rice is the foundation of the Japanese diet. It’s an especially key expense for households who need to budget their food spending by cooking at home and stretching recipes, including those in low-income jobs, with large families of children and possible cohabitating grandparents, and senior citizens on fixed incomes.

So when Taku Eto, the Japanese government’s Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, was speaking at a seminar and fundraising party for the Liberal Democratic Party, of which he’s a member, naturally the topic of rice prices came up. So what pearls of wisdom or words of compassionate encouragement, did this man, who’s been tasked with helping the nation’s people cope with the soaring cost of their traditional staple food, have ready in response?

“I’ve never purchased rice. Honestly.”

That startling lack of life experience alone would be enough to make many question whether Eto has the perspective necessary to truly empathize with what regular people are going through, or to understand how to address consumer concerns. But please hold your exasperated groans until the end, as he went on to say:

“I receive a lot of rice from my [political] supporters, and have so much of it in the food storage space at my home that I could sell it.”

So yes, Japan’s agriculture minister, in the middle of the most painful rice price increases in a generation, said that he’s never once purchased any with his own money, and gets more than he needs as part of political donations.

Predictably, to everyone except Eto himself, apparently, his remarks haven’t been well received by the general public, for whom having political cronies give you stuff for free isn’t exactly viable budgeting advice. On May 19, the day after the fundraising party was held in Saga City, Eto held a press conference in which he tried to extract himself from the mess he’d created, saying “I overstated the situation by saying that I have enough rice that I could sell it. I believe there is room for criticism, and I did not show enough consideration for consumers.” During the press conference, he also claimed that he actually does regularly purchase rice, but while he said he regretted having made statements that did not reflect his actual situation, he asserted that “Rather than a retraction, this is a correction.”

It’s a pretty bold linguistic maneuver to not only say “I’ve never done this thing” but to even tack an emphatic “Honestly” on the end of it, then come back the very next day and say “Oh, actually I do that all the time, but I don’t need to take back what I said yesterday.” Apparently Eto’s colleagues at the national-government level weren’t particularly satisfied with his “correction” either, as the topic came up again during a meeting of the House of Councilors Budget Committee later that day. This time Eto reversed course with even more gusto, saying “I just bought rice at the supermarket last week.” He also admitted, though, that his comments during the fundraising party were inappropriate for someone in his position, and that “Speaking with reporters at the press conference a short while ago, I corrected and retracted my statement.”

▼ So to recap, Eto went from “I have never bought rice” to “I buy rice regularly” to “I just bought rice last week,” and from “This isn’t a retraction” to “I retracted my statement.”

Eto hasn’t said how something he supposedly does frequently, and as recently as last week, somehow completely slipped out of his memories, or, alternatively, how he expected “I have never purchased rice” to mean anything other than exactly that. He has said, though, that he has no intention of resigning from his position as the guy who’s responsible for making sure people have enough rice to eat.

Source: Kyodo via Itai News, NHK News Web
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