Selling to Tourists : California Growers Find Loophole in Japan’s Rice Ban

When many Japanese tourists make their way home from United States these days, tucked into their suitcases among their purchases of Gucci purses, Chanel cosmetics and UCLA T-shirts are two-pound bags of rice.

That’s right, rice--the California-grown variety.

The tourists are, in effect, becoming accomplices of California farmers, who have found a legal way around Japan’s ban on imports of foreign rice. A loophole in the law allows individual Japanese residents visiting abroad to bring up to 220 pounds of foreign-grown rice into Japan annually.

Kiyoshi (Eddie) Minagawa hopes to cash in on the loophole. His firm, Tokiwa Foods, a Los Angeles food supplier to sushi bars, is selling the tourists packages of rice supplied by the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative of Sacramento, the state’s largest rice-marketing cooperative.

The specially designed, two-pound packages are on sale at airport duty-free gift shops in the United States and Guam as well as at outlets in Little Tokyo. Minagawa said Tokiwa has sold nearly 15,000 of the packages since the program began in June. And the program has considerable potential because more than 500,000 Japanese tourists visit California annually.

“I’ve been here a long time--20 years after graduating from Tokyo University,” Minagawa said in an interview. “I know the Japan side and the United States, so I’m neutral. But, I wondered, if Japan is a rice (-growing) country, why does rice cost so much (there)?”

Japanese Rice Costly

California rice farmers have long tried to crack the market in Japan, where the price of the grain is kept unnaturally high because of Japan’s high subsidies, government protection and powerful farm lobby.

A 22-pound bag of rice costs the equivalent of about $44 in Japan, Minagawa said, but is much cheaper here, with one supermarket selling 20-pound bags of California rice for only $3.99 and 25-pound bags selling elsewhere in the Los Angeles area for between $4.99 and $6.79.

He said he believes that his rice, sold under the Yamato Hikari label for $1.50 to $2.50 for two pounds, will help introduce Japanese consumers to California rice. To help the marketing effort, he has placed advertisements in a local Japanese-language newspaper and is scheduled to publicize his product on Japanese television talk shows during a visit to Japan in the next couple of weeks.

Although the amount of rice involved may seem inconsequential, Ralph S. Newman, president of the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative, said: “On one hand, you could say it is small. But on the other hand, when we look at the number of Japanese tourists . . . we say, ‘Gee, if something like half of them buy one or two bags, it really comes to being quite a bit of rice’--an amount of rice equivalent to what any big supermarket chain sells in a year.”

More important, he says, the program “introduces a wide spectrum of the Japanese population to California rice.” And that will help, he added, because “the Japanese government keeps telling the people California rice is not as good as rice in Japan.”