TOKYO, June 28, 2024—Lately, probably by coincidence, the Japanese bureaucracy’s regulatory grip of industry has tightened even more than before, and it is telling the world to follow its lead for human safety. Part of it is justified, for sure, but at the end of the day, it amounts to more paper work and added costs for the private sector.
As I wrote on May 28, effective June 1, producers of the centuries-old foodstuff must clear stringent government regulations on food safety under the latest Food Sanitation Law amendment introduced in 2023. The law bore a grace period until June 1 before enforcement. Fish condiments, picked and cured plums, various wild mountain vegetables and sea foods are subject to the regulations that require producers to have their food processing procedures to meet Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) rules.
In May, Ogose Town, Saitama, northwest of Tokyo, one of the famous plum producing areas, had a rare poor harvest that local folks blamed on climate change, and the town canceled the annual festival. The town produces about 200 tons of Umeboshi, or pickled and cured plums: Not this year.
The HACCP sanitary mandate is compounding the plum, farmers’ plight forcing many to give up the business, according to a town official.
It’s by and large the same situation on fishing villages of northern Japan, where fish catches have plummeted to the lowest in decades – some say in centuries – because of fast-warming sea water temperatures as fish hauling costs are soaring because of sky-high fuel prices resulting substantially from the weak yen. Add the cost of HACCP rules to making dried fish products, small fishermen cannot continue operating.
So, inland farmers and fishermen are retiring at what looks to be a scaring pace. The result is doubling and tripling of retail store shelf prices. And the impact has yet to show up in supermarket prices because what’s happening at production areas will ripple to retail stores only gradually.
Rice production, which is not directly affected by the latest food safety regs, also is affected as farmers that make plums or fishermen catching fish straddle between their trades and rice paddies are quitting working altogether. Rice prices are soaring and so are sake prices that ferment rice to produce alcohol.
And yet, ruthless bureaucrats are resolved to expand their administrative reach, this time, cross-border, to motor vehicles. At a recent UNECE WP.29 expert meetings, Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport officials successfully sold a proposal to install sudden unintended acceleration prevention devices to all vehicles in the world.
This entails that all new vehicles sold in Japan would have to be installed with such devices from June 2025. MLIT officials explained that the devices are for preempting accidents caused by senior drivers who misstep on the gas pedal instead of brake, one of the largest causes of accidents involving seniors in Japan.
Though officials were mum when asked, Japan seemed to have convinced other WP.29 countries to accept its proposal – though voluntarily, perhaps – in response to the Toyota Prius’s sudden acceleration in the 1990s in the United States.
The Japanese proposal is likely to be debated and approved at the UNECE November conference.
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