National Context

 

Before World War II, agriculture, fishing, and forestry dominated Japan’s economy. Since the mid-1950s, the role of agriculture in Japan’s economy has significantly declined. The Japanese government has promoted consolidation of small pieces of farmland and encouraged farmers to secure other occupations, thereby promoting an increasingly industrialized agricultural economy. Employment in the agricultural sector has correspondingly declined from over fifty percent in the 1950s to less than two percent in 2016.[1] In 2017, Japan imported sixty percent of the caloric value of food consumed nationally.[2]

 

Japan’s decreasing farmer population and farmland cultivated contrasts emerging “agrileisure” trends. Farming for fun is becoming increasingly popular among wealthy urban residents. Shumatsu nogyo or “weekend farming” often takes place on shimin noen, “people's farms,” in the peri-urban regions. Within the city of Tokyo, allotment farms are largely run by for-profit enterprises.

 

Other prominent Japanese LFS champion economic and environmental solidarity, challenging government policy that favors a food system based on industrialization and imports. Furthermore, food safety crises have played a key role in shaping Japanese citizens’ perceptions of food systems, food purchasing choices, and development of LFS. Serious incidents of food supply contamination in the mid-twentieth century prompted the emergence teikei, a prominent consumer-producer distribution scheme throughout Japan. After the rise of teikei, other organic distributors have provided a more mainstream way for consumers to purchase local, sustainable food. More recently, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown has reignited people’s food safety concerns, which has significantly impacted recent food policy discourse and galvanized LFS consumer movements.

 

Research Intent

 

In Tokyo, I examined the evolution, ideals, and impacts of teikei and third-party organic distributors over time. Through interviews with commercial farmers, agrileisure farmers, and food systems researchers, I also investigated how the decline of Japan’s agriculture-centered economy and culture contrasts emerging agrileisure trends. Finally, I considered the potential for LFS in Tokyo to maintain food security in times of economic, food safety-related, or environmental crises, recognizing what demographics Tokyo LFS currently serve.

 

Teikei: A producer-consumer local food ideology

 

The Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA), founded in 1971, created a novel form of agricultural producer-consumer network, called teikei. In the post-WWII period, the creators of teikei provided an alternative to purchasing food from “[hastily industrialized sources that] brought about environment contamination and destruction.”[3] Dr. Hiroko Kubota, a consumer movement researcher in the Faculty of Economics at Kokugakuin University and long-time member of the JOAA explained to me the JOAA’s unique definition of “organic.” For JOAA members, organic principles extend far beyond chemical-free production methods: organic food encompasses ten “Principles of Teikei,” which describe a holistic farmer-consumer partnership that involves direct exchanges of chemical-free foods and emphasizes a mutually supportive relationship between producers, consumers, and the natural environment.

 

Despite Japanese consumers’ enduring food safety concerns, teikei membership peaked in 1983. Since then, organic cooperatives have been gradually replaced by for-profit, “third-party distributors,” such as Daichi wo Mamoru Kai, Oisix, Bio Marche, and Radish-boya. The rise of alternative organic distributors contributes to Dr. Kubota’s skepticism whether teikei will persist alongside the aging of its original members, shift in Japanese consumer preferences, and urban residents’ increasingly busy lifestyles. Dr. Kubota, a member of three teikei groups herself, has observed teikei membership decline significantly in the past decade.

 

While young urban residents did not personally experience the food safety crises that motivated the founding of teikei, Dr. Kubota described how younger Japanese generations are still concerned about food safety. However, Dr. Kubota also articulated how “young people don’t want to join a movement”—they’re too busy with work, their social lives, or their smartphones— “so we have to create another kind of system to support small farmers.” Rather than spend their extra time participating in teikei, young people in Tokyo are increasingly turning to other markets to buy organic and local food, such as farm shops, farmers markets, and online food delivery services.

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Daichi wo Momaru: An online local food enterprise

 

Daichi wo Mamoru (or Daichi) emerged from the same backdrop of food safety crises that spurred the development of teikei and other consumer cooperatives in the early 1970s. Daichi’s origin can be traced more specifically to the failure of the Japanese Student Movement in the late 1960s. The Student Movement, during which student activists opposed topics ranging from the Anpo Treaty to the Vietnam War, failed to gain significant response from the Japanese government. Mr. Fujimoto, Daichi’s founder, was a prominent student activist who disappointed when the Movement fizzled out. So, he searched for another way to make positive social change. At his new job at a publishing company, Mr. Fujimoto learned about a peculiar phenomenon: Japanese farmers used many chemicals to make “the perfect” fruits and vegetables to sell to the market but at the same time produced organic varieties of the same crops to consume themselves. Mr. Fujimoto also recognized the country’s rising fears about food safety, and he sought utilize his newfound knowledge to help make the country’s food supply safer.

 

Daichi was first established as a pro-organic NGO. The organization’s initial goals were two-fold: one, to get more farmers to produce food organically and two, to secure customers for those farmers. Soon after its establishment, Daichi’s leaders realized the expansive resources needed to conduct their proposed work, and in 1977, they transitioned Daichi from an NGO to a for-profit enterprise. At that point, many teikei members criticized Daichi for advocating organic food sales over anti-capitalist ideals of “mutual assistance,” which are outlined in the Teikei Principles. Indeed, during the 1970s, Daichi tried marketing its food to agricultural cooperatives, yet the cooperatives rejected Daichi’s market structure in favor of their established, barter-like systems. (These same agricultural cooperatives started purchasing organic food from similar market sources less than a decade later.)

 

Despite criticism from other pro-local and pro-organic Japanese food distribution schemes, Daichi’s goal has always been to increase the sustainability of organic farming in Japan. Since the company’s inception, Mr. Fujimoto has recognized the importance of providing a fair, secure income to organic farmers to ensure that those farmers can continue to produce organic crops in the upcoming years. At first, Daichi provided a group buying structure for consumers to gain access to environmentally and socially sustainable food sources. In the late 1980s, Daichi made its business more accessible by transitioning to an individual ordering system.

 

Today, Daichi operates primarily through its website. It connects its 300,000 customers to 2,500 producers, and the company maintains close relationships with each of those producers. Despite Daichi’s successes, however, the company has struggled to maintain its long-term sustainability. It has had difficulty attracting new customers, and the majority of its current customers are over forty years-old. Mr. Hiroshi Toyoshima, a corporate social responsibility representative at Daichi, attributes Daichi’s inability to attract young consumers to young people’s “inability to read sentences very carefully.” He cites young people’s busy lives, economic constraints, and familiarity with small screens and catchy advertisements as why they choose to order food from other online retailers, which tend to be less expensive and sell only a small percentage of organic food.

 

Some of Daichi’s troubles may be solved this fall, when it merges with Oisix, another online food retailer. Unlike Daichi, Oisix has a younger consumer base. It was founded in 2000 as a web-based retailer and caters to working couples in major cities. The company has served over 900,000 customers in Japan and since 2009, customers in Hong Kong. Like Daichi, Oisix emphasizes the safety and quality of its food. It frequently profiles its producers to provide consumers with greater knowledge of where their food comes from and how it is produced. Today, Oisix doesn’t have as rigorous of quality standards as Daichi, and the food items it sells are generally less expensive than their Daichi counterparts. However, Mr. Toyoshima described to me Daichi’s and Oisix’s pre-merger initiatives to sell some Daichi products on the Oisix website. Toyoshima stated that many customers are beginning to choose the higher quality, more expensive (Daichi) products over Oisix products. While the extent to which companies like Daichi allow consumers to connect with producers is limited, these organic distributors provide a fast, easy—and potentially low-cost—way for consumers to purchase food from reliable organic and local sources.

 

Mr. Toyoshima has high hopes for the upcoming Daichi-Oisix merger, yet Daichi’s upcoming trajectory—and adherence to its founding principles—is uncertain. Mr. Toyoshima is particularly anxious about Daichi’s transition from a private to public company: he fears that the new shareholders will restrict Daichi to mainstream market activities. Indeed, it has already been ten years since Daichi’s last anti-GMO protest; nevertheless, the upcoming merger may make it harder to Daichi to prioritize any social activities or CSR.

 

LFS & Tokyo’s Food Security

 

The trajectory of LFS organizations and ideals in Tokyo conveys a key narrative regarding the evolution, importance, and sustainability of LFS overtime. However, while teikei and third-party distributors emphasize economic and environmental solidarity, the question persists: do they contribute to urban food security?

 

For example, to increase its contributions to Japanese food security, Daichi must expand its business, which may not be possible without decreasing the company’s contributions to food security. Mr. Fujimata, of Daichi, stressed that the best way to secure a sustainable local food system—one based on the principles of organic farming—is to ensure organic farmers’ income and livelihoods. To do that, Daichi must expand its consumer base. Daichi tries to increase the public’s interest in buying organic products through educational programming and by providing an easy online platform for customers to purchase organic products. However, much of Daichi’s potential customer base values immediate cost-savings over organic principles. To recruit those customers, Daichi must lower its prices. And to lower its prices, Daichi must either reduce its quality standards or payments to farmers, which would thereby reduce the company’s contributions to Japan’s food security.

 

Teikei’s decline and third-party distributors’ business challenges convey the fragility of consumer-producer partnerships, which speaks to one premonition I held throughout the summer: LFS may not be able to maintain a country’s food security any more than diversified international trade networks. Nonetheless, other research I conducted in Tokyo challenged that premonition. In addition to their concerns about chemicals used to produce imported food, many of my Japanese interviewees worry about the rising prices of imported food. Japan’s imported food supply is secure in that the country does not face any impending trade barriers due to global conflict. In fact, my first week in Tokyo, Japan and the EU launched a new Free Trade Agreement, which strengthened international trade. In July 2017, Japanese government officials also sought to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet strolling down the produces aisles of Japanese supermarkets, I understood why my interviewees were concerned. My interviewees noted the significantly price increases of everyday commodities, such as butter, sugar, wheat, and meat. These price increases—which can be attributed to rising global fuel prices, increased demand from neighboring countries, and climate change-induced lower agricultural productivity—pose a legitimate threat to Tokyo’s food security.

 

Other LFS: Sorado Farms & Farmers Markets

 

Two other forms LFS, Sorado Farms and farmers markets, add an additional narrative to my research on LFS in Tokyo—a narrative of elite urban residents. Sorado Farms, a prominent form of allotment farm in Tokyo, differ from the community gardens I studied in other cities. Despite the substantial demographics that teikei and online organic food distributors exclude, the high price to rent a plot at Tokyo’s Sorado Farms—allotment farms owned by Japans’ Central Railway Company—excludes even more.

 

Urban farmers markets are another price-exclusive form of LFS in Tokyo. Most farmers markets in Japan are owned by agricultural cooperatives. They take place in permanent locations, where producers drop off their goods in the morning and pick up whatever is left at the end of the day. In contrast, the approximate ten farmers markets located near Tokyo’s city center, where producers sell their own goods, are a new concept in Japan.[4] The products sold at farmers markets I visited—which contain locally grown produce along with specialty products, such as handcrafted jewelry and imported wine—are very expensive, compared to both teikei and grocery store prices. Thus, farmers markets remain a largely exclusive, still developing form of LFS for urban recreation and minimal food purchasing.

 

Despite their price exclusivity, urban farmers markets and Sorado Farms in Tokyo have increased certain residents’ access to local food and understanding of how to grow food. Looking ahead, their basic structures and ideologies could be adapted to serve a broader segment of Tokyo’s population.

 

Summary & Key Takeaways

 

In Tokyo, I primarily studied teikei and third-party local food distributors, investigating the shift of local food purchasing in Japan from consumer cooperatives to online stores. Interviews with Japanese consumers and employees of online organic food shops provided insight into potential alternatives to community-organized local food networks, their benefits, and their challenges. Ultimately, the decline of teikei and rise of online local food networks in Japan illustrates potential alternatives to niche local food networks; however, third-party distributors’ current challenges to maintain their customer base indicates the necessary continued evolution of LFS.

 

Furthermore, I examined the decline of agriculture’s importance to Japan’s economy and culture, which contrasts emerging trends of agrileisure. Despite increasing numbers of urban residents renting plots of land in or near Tokyo, this phenomenon has little to do with urban food security. While agrileisure may contribute to a select few city dwellers’ personal well-being, it remains an exclusive activity for people with the time and financial resources. Furthermore, people that engage in farming for fun may be clued into niche social trends and have an exceptional awareness of the complex challenges and consequences of Japan’s declining agricultural sector and high import rate.

 

 

[1] Dolan, R. E. & Worden, R. L. (1992). Japan: a country study. Headquarters, Dept. of the Army; “Japan’s Farming Population” (2016, July 30). Retrieved from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/30/national/japans-farming-population-falls-below-2-million-for-first-time-survey/#.WwMxA9OUsWo

[2] USDA Economic Research Service. (2017). Trade. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-trade/countries-regions/japan/trade.

[3] JOAA. (1993.) “Teikei” system. Retrieved from http://www.joaa.net/english/teikei.htm#ch3-1

[4] Tachikawa, M. (July 9, 2017). Personal interview.

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