Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5kg

Rice in Japan is indeed weirdly expensive in the first place. Typical price is ~1 USD/lbs, but there's been a mysterious shortage and they're retailing at double the regular price.

The minister of agriculture right now, Shinjiro Koizumi, is the son of Jun-ichiro Koizumi with now-unpopular legacy of deregulating and wrecking the Japanese postal service among few other government functions. The minister is now advocating for deregulating rice anyhow in response to the ongoing situation, and the situation kind of stinks.

Sorry that it's probably not the kind of content appropriate at HN anyway. It's more of "uncovering Cold War history podcast" style of content except it's in live.

The previous minister was fired after they admitted they didn't have to experience the expensive rice because they were given free rice by farms in Japan

That is some bizarre obliviousness of privilege. I thought all of the more-equal-animals knew to keep quiet on the implicit bribes and other luxuries of their station.

It's rather quite the opposite in Japan. The "more-equal-animals" consistently make public completely oblivious remarks, only to apologize the following day and then (often) just go back to business as usual.

These days it seems preferable to the Western alternative of politicians blatantly lying about their class to avoid the label.

I think this is driven by the fetish to be extremely apologetic in Japanese culture.

I don't think the grey-haired dinosaur politicians are sexist, classist (is that a word?) and racist because they love to apologize.

> now-unpopular legacy of deregulating and wrecking the Japanese postal service

Unpopular with who? In hindsight, the post office was a bandaid that needed to be ripped off before it became the next JNR. If he didn't do that, the tax payer would be on the hook for its final implosion, which is happening right now.

Yeah, their imperviousness to either progress or consequences is kind of incredible. An entire nation of collectivist, rule-following tendencies with a scummy layer of cartoonishly evil folks at the top, who for some reason seem immune from having to be decent people.

And yet, somehow, it's a generally pleasant country to live in with happy healthy people and opportunity. Though, that momentum Japan's been running on seems to be running out.