More From Our Geographers

Read more from our interview with Dr. Gil Latz on the importance of rice to Japanese culture and the future of rice farming in Northern Japan.

I think the first place to start is that rice is to the Japanese diet what bread is to the Western diet. It's a center and traditional characteristic of, a feature of what people eat each day. Typically the meal in Japan is organized around the rice and many of the other ingredients are like condiments which accent the taste of the rice itself. So there's a nutritional dimension and a traditional cuisine dimension to why rice is so important. But there are so many historical reasons for explaining the significance of rice.

In the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the 19th century, rice was the equivalent to the currency of the country. And so monetary transactions were pegged to bushels of rice. It has religious significance in terms of the role of the imperial family and the cycle of life when rice seedlings are transplanted each year. And this goes way back, even into Japanese prehistory. So there are a variety of reasons, historical, religious, economic, that contribute to and, when combined, explain that in the contemporary period, rice takes on more meaning than simply being a crop that's grown on the majority of Japan's agricultural land.

When one starts to talk about international trade of agricultural goods from an economic and an even broader point of view, there is a question of food security. Japan is a country that grapples with food security all the time. It depends more heavily than any other country on imported foodstuffs. So when their trading partners ask for these agricultural markets to be opened up even further, it makes them feel more insecure. And of course one can batter away at this in terms of an economic product. Well, you should buy the cheapest product that's available and use your resources in other ways. But that does nothing to address the sense of economic security that comes with being so dependent on other countries in the world for international trade.

Dr. Latz also provides further insight to future changes in rice farming brought about by aging and/or otherwise employed farmers.

So the only solution to that problem is to allow fewer farmers to own larger plots of land. That sound self-evident from an American point of view and, indeed, [we've] seen the disappearance of the family farm in the United States and an enlarged corporate type of farming occurred here. In Japan, there have been very strict controls that have regulated that for the last fifty or sixty years -- because in the pre-war, pre-World War II period, landlord activity was hated by the farming community. And at the beginning of World War II, something like 50% of the farm labor force were tenant farmers.

During the occupation of Japan after the war, there was a transfer to these tenant farmers of land and they became landed gentry or landed yeoman farmers, the expression goes. And these individual farmers had a huge vested interest in maintaining their property and the law protects them in that way. But one suspects that what will change, though, is the laws will be loosened as the need to maintain these self-sufficiency goals is consistently in place.