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Japan chafes at Trump’s demand to buy more American rice
US President Donald Trump has publicly criticised Japan for not importing more US rice, calling the country ‘spoiled’ in a social media post
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Japan would not sacrifice the agricultural sector as part of its tariff negotiations with the United States, its top government spokesman said on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump complained that its ally was not importing American rice.
Trump wrote in a social media post that Japan’s reluctance to import American-grown rice was a sign that countries had become “spoiled with respect to the United States of America”.
“I have great respect for Japan, they won’t take our RICE, and yet they have a massive rice shortage,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
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Japan has been grappling with a doubling in rice prices due partly to a weather-driven poor-quality harvest in 2023 that caused a shortage last year. The government has released almost its entire stock of emergency rice since March in an effort to bring prices down.
“We are not thinking about doing anything that would sacrifice the farm sector,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a press conference.
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