Economics and Finance

Mapping the Japanese Rice Industry: Price, Contract, Inventory, Governance, and Explanatory Structures from Producers to Consumers, and the Limits of Public Traceability

Authors: Keiji Yoshimura
Comments: 22 pages. English translation edition v1.0.1-EN1 of the Japanese scientific baseline v1.0.1. Associated public reproducibility repository is linked in the manuscript.

This study reconstructs the Japanese rice industry not as a single price chain but as a multi-actor network in which goods, money, information, risk, authority, and explanations move at different speeds and levels of aggregation.Using public statistics, administrative and legal records, industry statements, and a purposively sampled media corpus, the audit fixed price stage, unit, period, product, and contract conditions before testing end-to-end traceability.Public sources provide substantial visibility into quantities, stage-level averages, production costs, inventory volumes, retail transaction prices, and policy outputs. They do not, however, permit continuous monetary tracing of the same contract, inventory cohort, or product.Four principal breaks were identified: the producer's final receipt, inventory acquisition cost, absolute wholesale selling prices, and product-level retail procurement, costs, and profits. Consequently, price-stage differences or bridge residuals cannot by themselves identify wholesale or retail profit, profiteering, or the contribution of a single actor.Policy responses since 2025 shifted from conditional auctions to downstream direct contracts, official self-review, and statistical and legal redesign, while the pure retail-price effect of reserve-rice releases and the practical effectiveness of the new reporting system remain unidentified.A staged transparency architecture is proposed as a design implication: common metadata and measurement crosswalks, anonymous price-bridge pilots, and eventually an integrated six-flow and cohort infrastructure.The study does not determine a fair price, a profiteering actor, collusion, or a pure policy effect; it specifies what is observable, where public traceability breaks, and what evidence would update the conclusions.
Category: Economics and Finance