The Dojima branch of Yoshinoya in Osaka is doing a roaring lunchtime trade. As soon as one diner vacates their counter seat, another takes their place, while staff take just seconds to assemble the next order of the restaurant’s trademark dish: gyūdon.
The Observer has joined the rush, ordering a set lunch of seasoned beef and onion on rice, and side dishes of pickled cabbage and miso soup – all for a extremely affordable ¥632 (£3.46).
A bowl of gyūdon, for years a symbol of Japan’s deflationary spiral, is the lunch of choice for time-poor office workers on a budget, even after the chain – which has about 1,200 outlets across the country – raised the dish’s price in 2021 for the first time in seven years.
But the enthusiasm with which they demolish bowl after bowl of the salty, satisfying dish masks an unsettling trend for its staple ingredient: the Japanese are eating less rice than at any time in their history.
And washoku (Japanese cooking) purists are worried. A short walk from the restaurant, a stone sculpture of a giant grain of rice – set against a murky river and an overhead expressway – is a reminder of Dojima’s historical connection to the cereal that has long-sustained the world’s third-biggest economy.
The Dojima rice exchange was the centre of Japan’s rice trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, a time of unprecedented prosperity for Osaka’s brokers when rice prices set here were disseminated, by flags and couriers, all the way to the capital Edo, present-day Tokyo.
Today, though, rice’s place in the Japanese food firmament is under strain from depopulation, changing lifestyles and the sheer proliferation of tasty alternatives.
Rice consumption in Japan peaked in 1962, when every person ate an average of 118kg a year, or just over five average-sized bowls a day, according to the agriculture ministry. By 2020, per-capita consumption had more than halved to just under 51kg annually. And in 2011, Japanese households spent more on bread than on rice for the first time.
The seeds of what has become known as kome banare – or the “rice separation” – were sown during the years of breakneck economic growth, when the Japanese began eating more wheat-based products, such as bread and noodles and, later, pasta.
Several factors have combined to make rice less appealing than it was during the postwar years, when food choices were less eclectic and multigenerational households were the norm.
The rise of single households and the pressures of work and family life mean more people are putting convenience over loyalty to gohan – the Japanese word for cooked rice that is also used in a more general sense to describe any meal.
Today, though, a typical Japanese breakfast is more likely to be toast and a boiled egg than the traditional staple of rice, grilled fish, miso soup and pickles.
According to a recent survey by the rice distributor Makino, 84.8% of respondents said that they ate rice every day, but 68.1% said they only ate it once a day, with just 16.7% preferring it for all three meals.
“It’s much easier to have bread, especially in mornings,” says Nanami Mochida, a schoolteacher near Tokyo and mother of a teenage daughter.
“Preparing a Japanese-style breakfast takes more time,” she adds. “You need to rinse the rice first, then it can take 30 minutes to an hour to cook, even with a rice cooker.”
The Fukushima neighbourhood of Osaka was once home to about 50 rice shops; now just five remain, including Shigeru and Teruyo Okumura’s 100-year-old business, which stocks rice from around the country, along with homemade dango sweets, rice flour and ingredients for rice-based dishes, from boil-in-the-bag curries to seasoning for chirashi-zushi, a form of sushi.
“There is so much choice these days that people no longer automatically think of rice when they’re planning a meal,” says Shigeru, the third-generation owner of the shop.
“There’s a tendency even among people who enjoy cooking to think of rice as a bit orthodox – after all, there’s only one way of cooking it. But there are so many delicious dishes you can make with gohan.”
For Yukari Sakamoto, that means adding vegetables or grilled fish to the rice pot, with a splash of sake and soy sauce and a pinch of salt, to make takikomi-gohan, or seasoned raw seafood on boiled white rice.
“Younger people are more interested in eating a variety of dishes, not just the traditional Japanese rice, miso soup, and side dishes, which takes longer to cook than toast and eggs or a bowl of noodles,” says Sakamoto, author of Food Sake Tokyo.
“The quality of bread and an increasing number of bakeries make it easier to choose bread over rice. And rice isn’t cheap, so having bread or noodles is more affordable for a lot of people.”
With domestic consumption in decline, producers are looking overseas in an attempt to exploit the explosion in global interest in Japanese cuisine. Japan’s rice exports rose from 4,515 tonnes in 2014 to 22,833 tons in 2021 – a fivefold increase in seven years, with a third going to Hong Kong.
Yet exports still make up less than 0.5% of Japan’s domestic rice production, prompting agricultural cooperatives to encourage restaurants to serve more donburi (rice bowl) dishes exemplified by the ubiquitous gyūdon.
But even aficionados like Okumura, a trained chef who describes himself as a “95% rice person”, concedes that occasional campaigns are unlikely to reverse rice’s decline. “It takes time to prepare rice,” he says, his T-shirt emblazoned with a simple message that leaves customers in no doubt about his loyalties: “No rice. No life.”
Yasufumi Horie has taken his devotion to rice further than most, cultivating a small paddy as part of his “kitchen garden” at his home in the rural Fukushima prefecture in Japan’s north-east. “When I moved here in 2007, I wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible,” says Horie, who expects to produce 90kg this autumn – enough to feed him for a year.
Horie, who eats brown rice at least twice a day, is optimistic that the grain will remain a staple, even for consumers with more adventurous palates. “My diet is basically rice-based, but I’m looking forward to the time when we have gone beyond thinking of gohan as just a big bowl of boiled white rice.”
