this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
338 points (99.1% liked)

World News

47241 readers
2130 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (9 children)

Not quite, because the reason they don't want to buy from overseas is because they've had three decades trapped in a deflation crisis. So every time they buy anything from overseas it shows the weak buying power of the Japanese yen (which is a product of the deflationary "lost years").

...so there's a unique economic context for why they're acting this way.

[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 11 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

Deflation makes currency stronger, not weaker. That's part of the issue with it when it comes to a domestic economy, because it means this start becoming drastically cheaper over time, but it's only a problem if people keep waiting for prices to drop. It also devalues stocks, so large corporations don't like it either, and if you have a lot of money, it's not as competitive anymore locally with the average person's money either. Landlords also lose out because real estate value stalls (btw this is part of the reason for why Japan's mega cities exist - deflation has made it so nearly everyone can afford to live in the main city rather than needing to spread out to cheaper areas because inflation causes rent prices to increase via real estate value also increasing).

Buying overseas helps prevent deflation, but Japan has a protectionism type economy in general. Currency reserves from other countries buying exports heavily is what keeps things stable.

In the rice case, it's purely to protect the local rice economy because deflation has made the yen strong, and allowing cheaper rice from a country with a weaker currency would make local rice unable to ever have the hopes of competing for any profit whatsoever, probably not even at break-even.

[–] hobovision@lemm.ee 11 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

There's a lot of out of date info in there making your conclusions a bit innacurate. The yen is super weak right now, compared to USD and EUR especially.

Rice grown in California should not be cheaper than rice grown in Japan, just purely based on a currency analysis. Almost all other domestic foods in Japan are much cheaper in real terms than in California.

[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

A huge currency reserve of Japan is the dollar, which is why there's now some economic instability, as the dollar has lost a lot of value due to Trump's market manipulation.

It doesn't mean the yen is weak, it means the commodities markets will be in flux, as that's what things tend to fall back onto when things like these happen.

It's also why cheap rice specifically has a shortage, and why Japan has found itself in a catch 22 for the importation of rice. What they could do is go from importation restriction to tariffed but allowed if they want to increase the rice supply and stabilize the price of domestic rice. But that would require some flexible legal framework that's hard to write because you can't keep rice imports opened now while deflation is still strong without killing most domestic production. Best solution is to allow import from somewhere where rice isn't as cheap but still competitive, plus a very small temporary tariff that could over time be dissolved slowly, in my opinion at least.

There's a whole lot of cascading effects happening right now because of the unstable US economic policy and much of the world having their currency either pegged to the US dollar or having it as a primary currency reserve. Some major economies like the EU are benefitting, but the closer the economic ties are to US the worse the effects are.

[–] Drusas@fedia.io 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

The yen was weak last year as well. It's not Trump's doing.

[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Something can be bad but still become worse

[–] Drusas@fedia.io 1 points 7 hours ago

Obviously. But it's incorrect to blame this on Trump. He just made it worse.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)