Crisis Looms For Struggling Japanese Farmers Relaxed Import Restrictions, New Attitudes Raise Doubts About Future

Love was in the air, and Yoshihiko Tanaka talked sweetly to his beloved about marriage and the future and getting up at 3 each morning during the tea harvest to work back-breaking 20-hour days.

The love suddenly dissipated, which is a nice way of saying that Tanaka’s girlfriend dumped him.

So today, Tanaka is the most eligible man in Omiya. He is 33 years old, a clean-cut man with broad shoulders, a good job, a farm to inherit, a pleasing manner, an honest reputation, no vices and no marriage prospects. He yearns for a wife and children, but all he gets is rejections.

“Girls these days want to marry salary-men,” Tanaka explained cheerfully, without a hint of bitterness. “They want a comfortable life, but my family business is hard work from morning to night.”

As Tanaka noted, Japanese “salary-men” may be workaholics who sometimes put in 14-hour days, but their wives are less masochistic.

These are cruel times for towns like Omiya, for Japanese agriculture is facing a crisis and the cost is measured not only in rice paddies left fallow but also in the Saturday evenings that Tanaka sits alone at home, dreaming of what he would tell the children he desperately wants.

American pressure has helped open the Japanese market to imported rice, apples, oranges and logs, and most Japanese have benefited from the resulting lower prices. But the toll that Japan pays for acceding to American demands is evident everywhere in small towns.

Conversations over cups of green tea or sake, as people sit on the floor in Omiya’s traditional wooden farmhouses, pulsate with concerns that are common to much of Japan.

About 5,700 people live in Omiya, nearly 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, and most families have worked for dozens of generations in the rice paddies, in the neat rows of tea bushes on the hillsides, or in the cypress, cedar and pine forests on the jutting mountains that surround Omiya on the Kii Peninsula.

“Folks don’t know about the future of farming, so every year the number of farmers declines,” said Giichi Kamiya, a lean 65-year-old rice farmer. “And there’s no one to take over from the existing farmers.”

Kamiya plans to farm as long as he can, but then there is no one to take over from him. His son is working as a salary-man, or full-time employee, at the town office and has no interest in quitting his job to take over the farm.

“We worry about the future every day,” Kamiya said. “We may be able to work for another five years, but no more.”

Ancient pattern broken

Most of the families in Omiya have been farming for just this side of forever. This makes it deeply painful for those with graying hair to realize that it will be in the next 10 or 20 years - during their watch - that their clan may abandon the paddies forever.

Yet that is the trend. Most farms are already part-time ones, and neither the full-time farmers nor the part-time ones have anyone to take over when they grow old. Their children yearn for neckties rather than overalls.

“My son won’t even go into the barn,” complained Masayuki Ogita, who keeps 20,000 hens, two to a tiny cage. “He says it’s too dirty.”

Ogita traces his family back 18 generations on the same property, and he is profoundly torn about whether he wants his son to take over for another generation.

“Frankly, I want him to take over,” Ogita said. “But it’s difficult because I don’t know what the future will be like.”

Tiny farms inefficient

Many American farmers face similar concerns, but the problems are multiplied by history and geography in Japan.

Farms in places like Omiya are in trouble because they are so inefficient. The shortage of land - the United States has twice Japan’s population and 82 times as much farmland - leads to tiny farms that are relatively unmechanized and produce high-quality merchandise at astronomical prices.

Rice, the staple food in Japan, sells for $2.50 a pound, several times the price in the United States. Apples sell for several dollars apiece, a perfect muskmelon for $150, and top cuts of beef bring more than $100 a pound.

American farmers salivate when they see the prices of Japanese food, and the United States has forced the Japanese government to admit growing levels of imported food. Japanese farm groups complain, but they know that it is a losing cause.

“Our official position is that we oppose liberalization in agriculture,” said Kazuhisa Ogura, who runs a farmer’s cooperative in Omiya. “But we see the future, and it’s clear that further liberalization is unavoidable.”

Indeed, Ogura sees the future when he looks at his dinner plate. Asked if his own family ate imported beef, he wriggled in embarrassment.

“My wife buys Australian beef,” he acknowledged. “On my income I can’t afford high-priced beef every day.”

Ogura’s family is not alone. Nationally, almost two-thirds of what the Japanese eat is now imported. Apples from Washington state entered Japan in 1995, and even the last bastion of Japanese agricultural inefficiency - the rice market - is opening a tiny bit.

Imports equivalent to 4 percent of the rice harvest are now allowed, and the figure will rise to 8 percent in 2000.

Cities lure youngsters

As families give up farming, they are also giving up Omiya. The population of the town has fallen from 6,227 in 1985 to 5,736 today.

As international market forces push families to give up farming, more homes and shops in Omiya are likely to be shuttered.

“I’m already telling my kids to go out to a city and start a new business,” said Mitsuhiro Onishi, who runs a plant distribution business. “My sons have made it clear that they don’t want to stay, and I don’t want them to stay, either.”