1
Japan grows 37% of the calories it eats.
Of the 2,237 kcal a person eats each day, 830 are grown at home. In 1965 it was 73%. Rice is nearly all Japanese; most of the wheat, soybeans, cooking oil and animal feed comes from abroad.
When I was a girl, nearly everything on the table came from around here.
2
In 2024 the rice ran short.
A hot summer and thin stocks emptied the shelves. In 2025 the price of rice rose 67.5% in a year, and the government released most of its reserve. Two big harvests have brought prices down since.
¥2,837 for 5 kg at the supermarket this week
3
The people who grow it are retiring.
Fewer than a million core farmers are left, at an average age of 67.7, and seven in ten are past 65. In 2020, 71% of farms had no successor lined up. MAFF expects about 300,000 core farmers by 2045. Each year about 24,000 hectares fall out of use and only 8,000 are brought back.
My knees aren't what they were, and the Tanakas next door are past eighty. When we stop, who plants?
4
Summers are getting hotter.
Heat while the grain ripens turns rice chalky. In 2023, the hottest summer on record, only 60.9% of Japan's rice made first grade; in Niigata about 14% did. On the paths JMA and MEXT lay out, Japan is 0.9 to 2.4 °C warmer than 1991–2020 by 2060.
Heat-tolerant rice like Nijinokirameki kept its grade in 2023. Breeding helps, but it takes years.
5
The world will need half as much food again.
There will be 9.66 billion people by 2050, and farms must grow almost 50% more than in 2012. 645 million people went hungry in 2025. Japan buys most of its calories abroad, so every field it keeps growing leaves more food for everyone else.
6
Where it's headed.
gohanSim's projection, built from JMA's warming paths, IPSS population estimates and MAFF trends. Not an official forecast.
7
What would change it.
The game's model looks for the cheapest steps that lift 2050 the most, using only real programs and tools that exist today. Each one is something Japan is already trying.
What anyone can do
- Eat rice and food grown in Japan. Rice is the one staple Japan grows almost all of.
- Join a planting or harvest day. 57.1% of households did in FY2025; the target is 70%.
- Back young farmers: a farm crowdfunding campaign raises ¥0.5–1.5 million, often paid back in rice.
- Send hometown tax to farm towns. Donations reached ¥1.33 trillion in FY2025, and rice is the most popular gift.
- Stay on a farm. Farm stays counted 8.68 million nights, and some guests stay for good.
The game
Take over a rice farm. Help feed the world by 2050.
In gohanSim, Grandma Fumi offers you her rice farm in Uonuma. Make your farmer, run a co-op on real weather and prices, raise money the ways real farmers do, invent, buy land across Japan, and farm with up to three friends.
Coming soon on theApp Store
