Abstract
Covid-19 precipitated a food crisis that reconfigured food systems in unprecedented directions. While much research on Covid-19 and food crises focuses on food insecurity, we argue for a critical agrarian approach to food crises that extends beyond food insecurity. We emphasize how food crises enact disruptions that can lead to the reconfiguration of food systems. Further, we distinguish between specific crises that disrupt food systems from the general Crisis of the corporate food regime. This article draws on interviews with key actors to explore how changes to social distance in response to Covid-19 rippled through Japanese food systems as segments of Japanese food economies expanded, adjusted, and contracted. Although Japan avoided the harshest consequences of food insecurity arising from Covid-19, the pandemic reconfigured Japanese food systems in novel directions. This reconfiguration does not neatly correspond to the general Crisis of the corporate food regime because of the prominence of the hybrid zone and scalar politics of local food within Japanese food systems. We urge critical agrarian scholarship to closely examine the situated dynamics enacted by specific food crises, because such crises introduce key inflection points for reshaping food system trajectories.
Introduction
Much of the social science research on Covid-19 as a food crisis emphasizes the surge in food insecurity and the importance of developing stronger foundations for more sustainable, equitable, and just food futures. The Journal of Peasant Studies published a series of articles in 2020, examining how Covid-19 caused a surge in food insecurity and the need to develop a better foundation for our food systems going forward (Altieri and Nicholls, 2020; Clapp and Moseley, 2020; van der Ploeg, 2020). In these articles, scholars note that the pandemic exposed the underlying fragility of neoliberal food systems and argue that agroecology provides a promising path toward more sustainable food futures. These scholars situate the pandemic's disruption within the broader context of the corporate food regime. They also identify food insecurity as a pressing issue that accompanies Covid-19. Others have examined the pandemic's impact on food security in more localized contexts (Deaton and Deaton, 2020; Perry et al., 2021; Power et al., 2020; Sareen et al., 2021). Bereft of state support, vulnerable populations have sought to build new forms of solidarity in the face of Covid-19 (Mehta et al., 2022).
We experienced the pandemic while researching local food initiatives in Kyoto, Japan. Although vulnerable populations in Japan endured greater insecurity during the pandemic (Slater, 2020), the Japanese government's response received widespread praise for avoiding a hard lockdown and encouraging widespread mask-wearing (Tashiro and Shaw, 2020). In Japan, government officials promoted a “new normal” of living alongside Covid-19. This approach was markedly different from declarations in other countries that the “pandemic is over” or things are “back to normal.” The most visible indicator of these differences was the persistence of widespread mask-wearing in Japan (Hueston, 2022). Furthermore, market access to basic food supplies remained largely uninterrupted in Japan throughout the pandemic. Despite the comparatively favorable circumstances for Japanese food systems, the pandemic led to unprecedented changes, prompting us to explore social science literature on food crises to determine whether these changes warranted being labeled as a food crisis.
The term “food crisis” is commonly used to refer to instances where the rates of hunger or malnutrition rise sharply at local, national, or global levels. But as Lang (2010: 87) explains, “food crisis” gets used to describe a range of situations, from “irritation with petty difficulties to, at the other end, meltdown and reconfiguration. It can mean different things to different people. What matters is the frame of reference and indicators.” As Lang notes, popular and everyday uses of the term “food crisis” are inconsistent, with media coverage often using the term “food crisis” as a synonym for food insecurity. Based on these popular usages, the altered trajectory of Japanese food systems caused by Covid-19 does not qualify as a food crisis. However, instead of drawing on this popular idea of food crises, we turn to the Marxist notion of a crisis that considers a crisis to arise at the conjuncture where economic systems face disruption and are susceptible to rapid change (Harvey, 2018: xi; Marx, 1863: 711). Through this Marxist lens, Covid-19's impacts on Japanese food systems clearly qualify as a crisis. We connect this view of a crisis with critical agrarian scholarship that examines how food crises expand the realm of possibilities for realignment within rural economies. Unlike previous food crises, the disruption to Japanese food systems radiated out from an emerging infectious disease. We identify the specific crisis of “social distance” as reshaping Japan's food systems in a direction that broke from all modern precedents.
In developing a critical agrarian approach to food crises, we distinguish “lower c” food crises that indicate a phase of disruption with expanded possibilities for reconfiguration from the “capital C” food Crisis of the corporate food regime. This distinction clarifies that food crises can encompass more than just food insecurity. An overemphasis on food insecurity risks overlooking other ways in which specific food crises such as Covid-19 alter food system trajectories. We focus our analysis on how specific food crises reconfigure food systems and intersect with the broader context of the corporate food regime. Given the intensification of the corporate food regime and climate destabilization, specific food crises will likely occur with greater frequency. As such, we encourage critical agrarian scholars to employ a nuanced framework when analyzing food crises.
Methods
Covid-19 has presented new impediments and ethical dilemmas for ethnographic researchers (Surmiak et al., 2022). Ethnographic researchers have had to reassess their research methods and utilize digital approaches such as video-chat interviews (Howlett, 2022; Podjed, 2021). In conducting our research, we experienced these challenges and received frequent advisories cautioning against unnecessary gatherings or travel outside of Kyoto Prefecture. Despite these impediments, we conducted semi-structured interviews with key actors between May and December 2020, with additional follow-up interviews conducted in 2021. Our research was subject to both scalar and temporal limitations. At the national scale, we could not comprehensively cover all the ways in which Covid-19 changed food systems. To address this limitation, we highlighted prominent shifts we identified by drawing on a combination of qualitative ethnographic research and secondary literature, such as media coverage, statistical reports, and consumer surveys. We also faced temporal limitations, narrowing our main qualitative research to the period in 2020 when disruption from the pandemic was most acute.
In our research, we draw upon critical agrarian and critical food scholarship that highlights issues arising from industrial cheap food and promotes alternatives to the dominant corporate model. Although neither of us are native Japanese speakers, we hold sufficient proficiency to conduct independent research without the aid of a translator. We use grounded theory to guide our research, an approach in which researchers collect and analyze the data, then connect their findings with theoretical insights through an iterative process (Bryant, 2017; Charmaz, 2006). Drawing on grounded theory, we continually reflected on the challenges of conducting research during the pandemic as we collected and interpreted data that we then connected with broader analytic categories. As our research proceeded, we developed the following overarching research question: How is the specific food crisis of social distance reshaping Japanese food systems? This question encouraged us to interview actors who had experienced disruption and clarified the importance of analyzing how the food system has been reconfigured, even though the implications for the longer term are uncertain.
Our primary source of data was ethnographic interviews with 26 research participants, 16 of which were conducted in person and 10 remotely via video chat or phone calls. The interviewees consisted of three government employees, two employees from home-delivery corporations, five consumer cooperative employees, three managers of in-person dining establishments, three agricultural producers, three jidori (artisan poultry) producers, two managers of greengrocers, two operators of joint greengrocer and home delivery services, and three individuals running joint production and direct retailing operations. Given the space limitations, we are unable to include ethnographic data or particulars from every interviewee. Since many shared similar perspectives, we selected examples to include in the article that succinctly shed light on Covid-19's impact on food systems.
A critical agrarian approach to food crises
In recent decades, there has been an increase in scholarship challenging prevailing discourses which promote the benefits of urbanization and industrial food systems. Edelman and Wolford (2017: 962) situate this body of scholarship within “Critical Agrarian Studies” and trace its expansion alongside “the rise of related critical frameworks that call into question dominant paradigms.” In their survey of this emerging field, Edelman and Wolford note that while Critical Agrarian Studies draws heavily on Marxism, differences persist both within and between Marxist and critical agrarian approaches (for more in-depth discussion, see Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010) and Hussain and Tribe (1981)). Whereas Marxism emphasizes social classes and the political economy, Critical Agrarian Studies focus on the interplay among ecological processes, agri–food systems, and rural–urban dynamics.
Karl Marx's general conception of a crisis provides a useful starting point for researching the relationship between the Covid-19 pandemic and food crises. David Harvey, a leading exponent of Marxist theory, explains that Marx was particularly interested in the role of crises within capitalism, but remained circumspect about whether crises arise inherently from capitalism or from external shocks such as war or disease (Harvey, 2018: xi). Marx approached the scale of a crisis in a dynamic fashion, writing about “world market crisis” on one page and detailing on the next how a crisis arises from a situated breakdown in reproduction (Marx, 1863: 709–10). Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of a crisis for Marx is that it disrupts the smooth functioning of capitalism. In Marx's words: “the crisis is precisely the phase of disturbance and interruption of the process of reproduction” (Marx, 1863: 711). The scale of the crisis—global or situated—and the origin of the crisis—external or internal—are fluid, but for Marx the one constant characteristic of a crisis is that it disrupts capitalist economic systems. Harvey adds a crucial point to Marx's conception of crises and their aftermath: “Crises do not, Marx tells us (contrary to much popular opinion), necessarily spell the end of capitalism but set the stage for its renewal” (Harvey, 2018: 93). From Marx and Harvey, a broad Marxist definition of a crisis emerges: crises arise from a conjuncture during which an economic system that previously appeared to function smoothly encounters disruption that expands the possibilities for reconfiguration. Two aspects of this definition of a crisis warrant further elaboration. First, while a crisis must involve disruption, this disruption does not necessarily lead to radical transformation. Second, the expanded possibilities for reconfiguration can lead either to the expansion of capitalist economies, or to alternatives to capitalism, or to new economic formulations that encompass both capitalist and noncapitalist economies. Thus, while crises can enable rapid change, the direction of this change does not necessarily align with a shift for or against capitalist economies.
The general Marxist notion of a crisis can be applied to food systems. Many critical agrarian scholars already considered food systems to be in a state of crisis before the Covid-19 pandemic (Lang, 2010; McMichael, 2009; Moore, 2011). In addition, food systems entail ecological and social relations that make it challenging to distinguish one discrete food crisis from another. To untangle these interlocking crises, we turn to van der Ploeg's (2010) distinction between specific and general causes of the global food crisis. For van der Ploeg, specific causes pinpoint weaknesses within food systems. In contrast, general causes arise from the broader contradictions inherent to all capitalist food systems. Examining the 2008 spike in food prices, van der Ploeg identifies specific causes such as “low levels of grain reserves” and “extreme weather conditions” (van der Ploeg, 2010: 99). These specific causes might have otherwise subsided uneventfully, but they instead grew into full-blown food crises due to the instability that accompanies the corporate food regime. In van der Ploeg's (2010) article, he uses the term “food crisis” to refer to the singular global food crisis instigated by the corporate food regime. Building on his approach, we differentiate between “lower c” food crises that disrupt food systems and the general “capital C” food Crisis within which contemporary food systems operate. Making this distinction enables us to better delve into the dynamics that a specific food crisis introduces and evaluate its intersection with the general food Crisis.
The concept of the corporate food regime was developed by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) to describe the current state of the global food system. Critical agrarian scholars have widely debated what its characteristics are. Scholars have variously analyzed the corporate food regime's connection to agricultural biotechnology (Pechlaner and Otero, 2008), agrofuels (Baines, 2015), claims of sustainability (Freidberg, 2020), localization (Lin, 2022), and the climate crisis (Sage, 2013). Scholars have also debated the extent to which alternative food initiatives have either been coopted by the corporate food regime or have expanded future possibilities for alternative food initiatives to flourish. For example, Allen and Guthman (2006) argue that the aspects of farm-to-school programs reinforce the neoliberal logic that dominates food systems. In response, Kloppenburg and Hassanein (2006) counter that despite operating within the confines of neoliberalism, farm-to-school programs create important possibilities for resistance and mobilization in the future. Similar debates emerge over the conventionalization of alternative food. The corporate cooptation of organic and fair-trade standards led not only to an expansion of these markets but also a diminished commitment to alternative ideals (Jaffee and Howard, 2010). These debates make clear the complexity involved in linking food initiatives with either resisting or deepening the corporate food regime.
One of the most alarming symptoms of a specific food crisis occurs when people are unable to access food, usually due to sudden increases in food prices or disruptions to food distribution systems. Food security and its opposite, food insecurity, are widely discussed in research on food crises. Agricultural corporations often stress the need to increase production to feed growing world populations (Schurman and Munro, 2010: Chapter 2; Tomlinson, 2013). Although critical agrarian scholars acknowledge the horrors of food insecurity, they also frequently question how discourses of food security are leveraged to achieve corporate and geopolitical objectives (Lang and Barling, 2012; Maye, 2018). The 2008 spike in food prices reignited interest in food production as a source of geopolitical security. Critical agrarian scholars have highlighted how the financialization of food interferes with access and questioned the extent to which proximity to agricultural production augments food access (Clapp, 2012; Jarosz, 2009; McMichael, 2009). Some scholars have cautioned that an overemphasis on food security draws necessary attention away from other developments, such as ecological considerations, the role of social movements, and the significance of place (Moragues-Faus, 2017; Sonnino, 2016; Tomlinson, 2013). Our conception of food crises extends beyond the issue of food insecurity and considers how disruption to food systems may reshape food systems in unexpected ways. Our use of “food system” draws from Kneafsey et al. (2021: 10), who explains that the concept of food system is “generally and in everyday language used to refer to all the processes involved in growing, distributing, and retailing food.”
Figure 1 illustrates a simplified visual representation of our critical agrarian approach to food crises that draws attention to how specific food crises reshape food system trajectories. Given the diversity of food systems, not all segments will face disruption from a specific food crisis. In addition, the long-term implications of short-term disruptions are difficult to assess in real time. Despite these challenges, researchers should seek to analyze these dynamics. To do so requires looking at how specific food crises reconfigure aspects of the system and the ways in which this reconfiguration intersects with the reversal or deepening of the general Crisis. Edelman and Wolford emphasize the importance of utilizing critical agrarian studies to deepen the analysis of future possibilities. They argue that, “[I]gnoring rural life because it appears to be marginal means not only ignoring the production of the past and present but also the construction of future possibilities” (Edelman and Wolford, 2017: 966). By connecting this critical agrarian approach to food crises, we conceptualize specific food crises as introducing important inflection points that warrant careful analysis.
Future possibilities emerging from a specific food crisis.
“Social distance” as a specific food crisis
Having discussed a critical agrarian approach to food crises, we now turn to consider Covid-19 as a specific food crisis. Social scientists have examined Covid-19 as a food crisis at both global and localized scales. Just as the general food Crisis intersects with specific food crises, so too does the Covid-19 crisis introduce global dynamics that enact and respond to situated disruptions. The Covid-19 pandemic originated from a virus, but its impact soon extended beyond public health to encompass economic, food, and mental health crises that intersected with structural inequalities and discrimination that operate across racial, sexual, and geographic lines (Mehta et al., 2022; Pattenden et al., 2021; Sultana, 2021; van der Ploeg, 2020). Rather than enacting a single specific food crisis, Covid-19 can be better understood as triggering multiple specific food crises simultaneously. Disruptions to grain supplies resulted in greater food insecurity and starvation (Clapp and Moseley, 2020; van der Ploeg, 2020). Vulnerable agricultural workers faced greater exposure to Covid-19 and economic insecurity (Handal et al., 2020). Agricultural workers sought out inventive responses to navigate the challenges they faced during the pandemic (Leonardelli et al., 2021). Rumours of empty supermarket shelves contributed to panic buying (Arafat et al., 2020).
When Covid-19 tore through unvaccinated populations, public health experts called for “social distancing” measures, requesting that people “stay at home” (quotation marks are used to indicate jargon that gained wider usage during the pandemic). Through social distancing, the public could help to reduce rates of Covid-19 transmission and “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients. Instead of uncontrolled spread, Covid-19 transmission slowed down as governments and publics adapted to a “new normal” of social distancing measures and behavior change such as mask-wearing. Countries such as Japan experienced multiple “waves” of Covid-19 as cases surged and then declined in response to a confluence of factors such as seasonal conditions, vaccination rates, transmissibility of new variants, herd immunity, and changes in social distancing measures.
Instead of “social distancing,” we use the term “social distance” to highlight the distinct features of a food crisis that arise from an infectious disease like Covid-19. Since “social distancing” is a public health strategy that aims to reduce social interactions to reduce disease transmission (Baum et al., 2009), removing the “-ing” suffix focuses attention on social disruption that arises alongside but distinct from the public health crisis of a pandemic. In addition to the influence of short-term public health interventions, social distance draws attention to the broader and longer-term impacts that may accompany a public health crisis.
Food crises in Japan
During the post-World War II era, the Japanese government aimed to conserve farmland for small-scale farmers, who maintained a powerful electoral base, while expanding the nonfarm economy (McDonald, 1997; Mulgan, 2000). Japanese policymakers sought to balance the growth of the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors in the post-war economy. Against this backdrop and amid a period of sustained rapid economic growth, general trading companies called sōgō shōsha (henceforth, shōsha) emerged as key actors spanning both the agricultural and nonagricultural economy (McDonald, 2000; McMichael and Kim, 1994).
Examining Japan's food security strategies, Hall (2020) highlights the unique role of shōsha in enabling Japanese financial capital to become crucial players within the global grain market. According to Hall, Japan's historical “extreme import dependence” equipped the Japanese state and shōsha to better navigate disruptions that arise in the global grain market (Hall, 2020: 995). Focusing on the response to the 2007–2008 spike in grain prices, Hall identifies three different visions that guide Japanese foreign agriculture investment: the “global supply vision,” which sees global production as benefiting Japanese food security; the “direct supply vision,” which emphasizes the food security benefits of securing “specific grain resources for Japan”; and the “economies of scale vision,” which posits that greater participation by Japanese shōsha in the global grain market provides Japan with food security benefits by increasing the capacity for shōsha to deliver grains to Japan (Hall, 2020: 995). Although these visions of food security are not exclusive, Hall argues that the economies of scale vision provides the greatest insights into Japanese foreign agricultural investment strategies. Hall's analysis shows that Japanese shōsha are surprisingly prominent players in global grain markets, even when they are not directly supplying the Japanese market. Japan navigates contemporary grain markets via shōsha so adeptly that other countries, such as South Korea, have sought to emulate Japan's approach (Lee et al., 2014). The unique role of shōsha provides Japan with exceptional access to global grain markets, a strength that is often overlooked when statistics such as caloric self-sufficiency take center stage.
Japan's rapid economic growth post-WWII caused its economy to shift from an agrarian foundation toward an emphasis on manufacturing, technological innovation, and service industries. Along with this economic transition, popular discourses have characterized Japan's food systems as being in a state of crisis as the number of farmers have declined and the remaining farms have grown increasingly large. Drawing on the example of dairy farmers in Hokkaido, Hansen (2014) argues that Japanese agricultural policy does not alleviate the “crisis” confronting producers. Instead, Japan's policies push dairy farmers into a state of continuous crisis that simultaneously hinders innovation and increases their dependence on state support. Agricultural policy in Japan has been largely shaped by the “iron triangle” of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Japanese Agricultural cooperative (JA), and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) (Mulgan, 2000). While Japanese agriculture is widely described as being in a state of crisis, the characteristics that define this crisis and the solution to this crisis are widely debated.
In domestic policy debates, analysts frequently describe Japan's low rate of self-sufficiency as the most striking aspect of Japan's food system. Government documents regularly assert the goal of increasing caloric self-sufficiency, a statistic that indicates the percentage of food calories a country produces divided by how many food calories it consumes. For example, the MAFF set the goal of increasing Japan's caloric self-sufficiency from 37% in 2018 to 45% in 2030 (MAFF, 2020: 2). Japan's low self-sufficiency draws attention to Japan's weaknesses within a global arena filled with competing countries. However, scholars in the field of critical agrarian studies tend to view such an emphasis on national caloric self-sufficiency with skepticism. For example, Lang and Heasman (2004: Ch. 1) caution that calls for increasing national self-sufficiency tend to reinforce input-intensive monocultures, which aligns with the dominant approach of the corporate food regime.
The Fukushima triple disaster has been the most disruptive specific crisis to strike Japan in recent decades. Besides the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant caused irradiated food to enter the food system (Reiher and Yamaguchi, 2017). After the government fumbled its initial response to safeguard against irradiated food, numerous citizen–scientist groups formed to monitor food safety (Kimura, 2016; Sternsdorff-Cisterna, 2018). Government and industry leaders responded to public concern over food safety by criticizing those who spread “spurious rumors,” and sought to recast consumption of products from affected regions as an act of patriotic support for disaster recovery (Kimura, 2016; Takeda, 2017). The spike in food safety concerns also generated broader interest in alternative food (Hisano, 2015; Rosenberger, 2016).
Hisano et al. (2018) identify the growth of a hybrid zone nested between peasant and corporate agriculture as crucial for future trajectories of Japanese food systems. They associate JA-linked, new entry, and entrepreneurial modes of agriculture with this hybrid zone. In addition, the success of local initiatives in Japan often hinges on the effectiveness with which these initiatives navigate shifting government policies at various scales (Jentzsch, 2021). Local food initiatives in Japan often originate at the grassroots level but then evolve in response to policies that are enacted at national and prefectural scales (Schrager, 2021). In Japan, the line between alternative and corporate approaches is often ambiguous, and this further complicates analysis of how specific initiatives intersect with the general Crisis.
A complex food retailing environment
In comparison to agricultural production and self-sufficiency, relatively little has been written about Japanese food retail, which was the segment of Japanese food systems that suffered the greatest disruption from the pandemic. Japan has a diverse food retailing sector. In the United States, supermarkets and wholesale clubs accounted for 81% of food sales (excluding in-person dining) in 2016 (MAFF, 2018: 6). In contrast, Japan's leading sources of food sales that year (excluding in-person dining) were supermarkets (27%), convenience stores (21%), specialty small-scale retailers (9%), delivery and distribution services (8%), bread shops (7%), departmental stores (5%), alcohol stores (5%), drug stores (4%), prepared food stores (3%), and direct marketing stands (3%) (ibid., 6). Taking a dim view of this diversity, pro-development and business experts have long criticized Japanese food retail for being inefficient and hindering innovation. For example, Larke and Causton (2005: 123) decry Japan's fresh food retailing as “remaining highly fragmented” and failing “to modernize.” Despite these criticisms, Japan's diverse food retailing environment likely enhanced resilience during the pandemic, because producers and consumers had multiple options to navigate the unprecedented disruption to typical commerce.
Analysts categorize Japanese food retail into three broad categories: food for home consumption, preprepared food, and dining out. As Table 1 indicates, from 2010 to 2019, there was a gradual decrease in home consumption, a slow increase in dining out, and a modest rise in preprepared foods (JRMA, 2021). The pandemic upended these trends. In 2020, overall food sales decreased as the share of home consumption increased while dining out decreased (JRMA, 2022). Compared to 2019, dining out sales decreased by 30% in 2020. These statistics indicate that within food retail, in-person dining was the food retail sector hit the hardest by the pandemic. Among in-person dining, the sharpest revenue decline was for drinking establishments such as “izakaya” (Japanese-style bars) and “pubs/beer halls,” which saw revenue decrease by 50% from 2019 to 2020 (JF, 2021).
Japanese food sales for home consumption, pre-prepared, and dining out (2010, 2019, and 2020) (Source: JRMA, 2021, 2022).
Like other segments of Japan's economy, dining out is gradually shifting away from small individual owners towards chain restaurants managed by corporations. In the 1920s and 1930s, railways and departmental stores familiarized the public with standardized and affordable food (Cwiertka, 2006: 53). The influence of chain restaurants intensified after the US fast food chains entered Japan in the 1970s (Ako, 2021: Ch. 3). McDonalds and KFC were the most successful of these early entrants to the Japanese market. Domestic corporations swiftly emulated US fast food chains for a wide range of foods, including not just Western fare like hamburgers and coffee shops but also Japanese foods such as conveyer belt sushi, beef on rice bowls, and ramen. Corporate franchises heighten competition and accelerate gentrification, but despite these pressures, the sizable presence of independent restaurants and bars remains a distinctive characteristic of food retail in Japan (Farrer, 2022; Futamura and Sugiyama, 2018). According to the 2016 economic census, Japan has 450,000 dining establishments that employ 3.2 million people for an average of 7.3 employees per restaurant (Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2018). Surveys of businesses and consumers indicate that tourism and restaurants were hit especially hard by the pandemic. In an April 2020 survey of 18,000 small and medium-sized corporations by Daido Life Insurance Company, 72% of respondents reported a negative influence from the pandemic. This rate was highest in “lodging and dining industries,” with 96% reporting a negative influence (Daido, 2020).
Covid-19's early trajectory in Japan
Due to limited space, we do not delve at length into the specifics of Covid-19's trajectory in Japan (for more information, see Togo (2020) and Yamazaki (2020)). In April 2020, Japan banned people from over fifty countries from entering the country (Furutani, 2020). The government eventually extended this ban to almost all tourist visas and kept most limitations on immigration in place until October 2022. During the initial phase of the pandemic, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare introduced an effective public health messaging campaign that urged citizens to avoid the “Three Cs” (san-mitsu). The three Cs consist of “Closed spaces” with poor ventilation, “Crowded places” with many people nearby, and “Close-contact” settings such as close-range conversations (MHLW, 2020). The “Three C” campaign succinctly and successfully communicated high-risk Covid-19 settings to the Japanese public. Unfortunately for dining industries, many restaurants and bars exhibit the Three Cs.
Japan has experienced numerous waves of Covid-19 in response to which the government at the prefectural level—and during the initial outbreak at the national level—issued various emergency declarations (kinkyū jitai sengen) requesting people to stay home. These declarations also occasionally called for dining establishments to close early and to restrict alcohol sales. Japan received positive international coverage for curtailing the spread of the virus without enforcing a mandatory lockdown or mass-testing (Tashiro and Shaw, 2020). Instead of hard lockdowns, the Japanese government signaled its desired behavior through a combination of requests, incentives for cooperating, and communication of socially appropriate behavior to the public. The Japanese government, among its wide-ranging Covid-19 responses, implemented direct payments to households, expanded subsidies for businesses, and launched a range of low-interest business loans (Ando et al., 2020).
On July 22, 2020, the government launched a “Go To Travel” campaign subsidizing domestic travel. From October 1, 2020, the government also launched a “Go To Eat” campaign subsidizing in-person dining. These campaigns sought to support ailing tourism and dining industries. However, such industries pose an elevated risk of Covid-19 transmission. This resulted in mixed messaging with some politicians promoting travel and in-person dining while others warned against the Three Cs. As cases reached then-record levels in December 2020, politicians faced criticism over the role of the Go To campaigns and ended the programs on December 28, 2020.
Social distance as a food crisis in Japan
We turn now to our field research to address our question: How is the specific food crisis of social distance reshaping Japanese food systems? Using a grounded theory approach, we answered this question through an iterative process in which we interviewed key actors, transcribed key sections of the interviews, and analyzed our findings. Based on this analysis, we developed Figure 2 to explain our insights into how the specific food crisis of social distance reshaped Japanese food systems.
The specific food crisis of social distance's impact on Japanese food systems.
Some interviewees described dramatic changes in response to the pandemic, while others observed minimal differences. Consumer practices shifted away from retail options that they perceived as risky, such as in-person dining, and toward options that they perceived as safer such as home delivery. Producers and retailers faced varying degrees of disruption and opportunity from these novel shifts in consumer practice.
Boom: home delivery
As the throngs of tourists dwindled during the pandemic, a new category of urban workers grew prominent in Japan: the food delivery worker who typically rides a bicycle wearing a square insulated backpack. International corporations such as Uber Eats employ algorithms that exploit flexible gig workers to provide deceptively simple platforms, offering services like restaurant food delivery to consumers (Wood et al., 2019). According to one market analysis, Japan's restaurant home delivery sector expanded at an average rate of 4.1% per year from 2016 to 2019 (NPD Group, 2021). 1 In 2020, the food home delivery sector increased by 50% from 418 billion yen (∼3.6 billion USD) in 2019 to 626 billion yen (∼5.5 billion USD) in 2020 (ibid.). As a share of restaurant income, home delivery increased from 3.1% in 2019 to 6.5% in 2020. These restaurant home delivery websites provide consumers with the option of paying more to have food delivered directly to them. Although delivery charge varies, interviewees reported the general fee charged by Uber Eats Japan to be an additional 35%, plus tax and a fee for the food delivery worker. If a restaurant joins such a platform, they face difficult decisions over whether to accept less revenue per item or inflate their menu prices on Uber Eats to maintain the same revenue per item.
In December 2020, we interviewed “Steven,” a native English speaker based in Tokyo who is an employee of a home delivery platform that operates in Japan.
2
Steven claimed that restaurants profit from not having to hire additional workers or pay for the cost of transportation equipment. Regardless of the extent to which restaurants benefit from these platforms, many restaurants have turned to them as sales sharply declined. Steven explained the overwhelming demand that he faced from restaurants seeking to register for his platform: I had restaurants calling me all day long for three weeks. And you know what they were saying? It was, “Hey thanks so much for the other day. Can I introduce you to a few restaurants?” I’d say, “Oh my gosh thank you so much.” I hang up. Another call. They say, “Hey, I have five friends who want to join.” And I say, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much.” … Then I get e-mails from them as well saying, “They all want to join. Can you call all of these people?” And it's like twenty people a day. By tomorrow. (Fieldnotes, December 2020)
The urgency with which restaurants sought to join this platform conveys the shock that the restaurant industry faced from the pandemic. As numerous independent restaurants closed, restaurant delivery platforms boomed, indicating a reconfiguration of Japanese food systems, with restaurants more likely to offer online delivery services and consumers more inclined to utilize them.
Even as food delivery emerged as a success story during the pandemic, a different type of digital platform experienced even more spectacular growth: direct marketing platforms for artisan agricultural products. According to one market analysis, direct marketing e-commerce sales increased 20-fold between 2019 and 2020 to reach 4.0 billion yen (∼35 million USD) in 2020 (Fuji Keizai Group, 2021). 3 Direct marketing e-commerce (sanchoku-EC) platforms such as Tabechoku and Pocket Marche frame their business strategy in altruistic terms as providing a service that enables a closer connection between producers and consumers. This strategy of linking urban consumers with rural producers recalls previous initiatives such as village-based subscription box programs (Knight, 1994). In contrast to those earlier programs, direct marketing e-commerce platforms introduce a distinct scalar politics in which corporations both enable and extract revenue from these platforms.
In interviews, several producers described using one or multiple direct marketing e-commerce sites to generate supplemental revenue. These sites usually have low barriers to entry for producers, but the algorithms used by e-commerce platforms tend to provide more visibility for top sellers. For producers to succeed within these platforms, they need to have an excellent product, technological know-how, and logistical proficiency. Platforms such as Pocket Marche and Tabechoku also have social media functions that encourage producers and consumers to post and interact with each other. This not only provides positive social feedback for producers, but also requires additional labor for tasks like photographing and posting.
Algorithm-based platforms for food retail experienced significant growth in Japan during the pandemic, but traditional food delivery services also witnessed a surge in popularity, with the Co-op (seikyō) 4 being the most prominent example. The Co-op emerged from a popular consumer movement centered on collective-buying and evolved into an organization that coordinated the ordering, processing, and distribution of food for collective-buyers (Nomura, 1993). In order to compete against larger supermarket retailers, the Co-op added supermarkets in the 1960s, and their services reach almost all regions in Japan. Prior to the pandemic, Co-op membership and sales were gradually declining along with downward trends in Japan's population, especially in rural areas. During the pandemic, Co-op home-delivery sales surged. An online magazine article published in July 2020 carried the headline: “Even Amazon cannot win, Co-op swamped with record-breaking new members and orders” (Okada, 2020). Unlike food delivery and direct marketing e-commerce, the Co-op lacked an online algorithm-based platform to drive sales. Instead, Co-op expanded rapidly because it enabled shoppers to get food, groceries, and other essential items delivered directly to their homes. In terms of scale, the Co-op's widespread infrastructure throughout the country enabled many consumers to turn to it as the best option to receive fresh foods while avoiding unwanted social contact. Unlike restaurant home delivery platforms or direct marketing e-commerce, the Co-op’s existing infrastructure provided a service of grocery home delivery for which consumer demand surged during the pandemic.
Adjust: flexible food retailers and farmers
In November 2020, we attended an event in Kyoto City focusing on Co-ops titled “Overcoming the shock of Covid-19.” The Co-op's biggest sources of revenue are their home delivery service and conventional supermarkets. Compared to the previous year, between April and October 2020, Kyoto Co-op delivery sales increased 20.6% and supermarket sales increased by 12.8% (Fieldnotes, November 2020). In subsequent months, home-delivery sales remained elevated, but supermarket sales returned to pre-pandemic levels. While these segments of Co-op grew, other segments faced a sharp downturn in sales. For example, Co-op operates many university cafeterias, but they closed during the initial stages of the pandemic. In addition to these major shifts in demand, the Co-op also had to develop and implement hygiene protocols to reduce the risk of Covid-19 transmission to workers and customers. They also had to deal with temporary shortages for certain items.
Among segments of the Co-op that grew, managers faced pressing logistical challenges to meet the surge in demand. In February 2021, we conducted a follow-up interview with four Kyoto Co-op employees regarding the pandemic's impacts. They explained that Kyoto Co-op typically registers about 3000 new members per year, but in April and May 2020, it registered 8000 new members. It gained nearly three years’ worth of new members in two months. This spike in demand strained the company's capacity to deliver food. A manager told us: Even after you hire someone, it is not like they are able to go out and make deliveries on their own. It takes at least two months of training, and so we are still trying to catch up. Aside from people, if you don’t have trucks then you can’t make deliveries, and we struggled with that when demand peaked. (Fieldnotes, February 2021)
On a typical delivery day, Kyoto Co-op makes deliveries in two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The management resorted to adding a third evening shift to satisfy immense demand. With the widespread emphasis on social distance, Co-op expanded to fill an important economic niche of home delivery. That surge in home delivery has since subsided along with ebbing concerns over Covid-19.
While most retailers had to adjust to changes in social distance, some producers experienced little change in their operations or demands. For example, “Takashi” is a mid-sized farmer in Kameoka who described no disruption to his medium-sized operation that produces rice and vegetables (September 2020). He continues to employ a handful of workers and to sell most of his products through JA and supermarkets. Since he and his employees live in a rural area with comparatively fewer close contacts, they faced less disruption to their everyday lives from Covid-19 than urban residents.
Based in Kyoto City, “Kazuki” is a mid-sized farmer. While he benefited from a modest increase in demand for the rice and vegetables he sells through a direct market farmstand and wholesale markets, he endured a sharp decline in demand for bamboo shoots that he sells to upscale restaurants in Kyoto. Demand was especially low because the 2020 harvest season coincided with an emergency declaration. As we describe in the next section, tourism and artisan foods experienced the sharpest decline in demand. In general, the more diverse a farm operation was, the better farmers were able to adapt to the pandemic. We use “diverse” here to indicate farms that produce numerous products and utilize various revenue streams.
Small-scale alternative food networks have proven particularly resilient to the conditions introduced by Covid-19 (Lichten and Kondo, 2020). The pandemic even catalyzed some small-scale operations to expand. For instance, “Hanako,” who runs a small café in Mie Prefecture, launched a new program focused on healthy eating during the pandemic. In April 2020, she temporarily closed her café and reduced its operational capacity. Simultaneously, she researched different strategies that utilize fasting to promote healthier eating habits. She then launched a fasting program that she offers once per month, with each program lasting for a week. During the program, Hanako delivers prepared lunches to participants using ingredients sourced from organic farms and in collaboration with a nearby organic greengrocer operation run by her sister, “Sachiko.”
In contrast to Hanako, Sachiko benefited from an influx of farmers seeking to market their produce through her store and consumers who were newly interested in healthy eating. Sachiko said: Not only was I getting calls from farmers to see if neighbouring farms could also sell to us as their restaurant sales decreased, but our store also saw a huge influx of consumers whenever the news shared something about the pandemic and that eating things like honey or pickled plum (umeboshi) help to build up immunity … We also started to see more regulars who were interested in buying organic and local produce. (Fieldnotes, July 2020)
The adjustments made by these two sisters reflect broader disruption within Japanese food systems. Revenue from dining at the café declined, so Hanako launched a new home delivery service that helped people rethink their relationship to food. Sachiko enjoyed modest benefits for her organic greengrocer operation with heightened interest from producers and consumers. Alternative-oriented retailers and diverse farmers exhibited a strong capacity to adjust to changes in social distance. The pandemic heightened consumers’ awareness of local food systems and healthy food. Still, as disruption from the pandemic recedes, the extent to which this awareness will fortify alternative food networks in Japan remains unclear.
Shrinking demand: dining out and premium foods
Unlike operations described in the previous section, independent restaurants faced persistent challenges due to structural limitations that hindered their ability to adjust to the conditions of the pandemic. Social distance most directly disrupted revenue for in-person dining, but there remains much variation within this broad category. In his research on Tokyo restaurants during the pandemic, Farrer (2020) distinguishes between independent restaurants and large corporate chain restaurants, noting that large corporations have more capacity to navigate government relief programs and weather economic downturns. Although independent restaurants face greater risk of closure, they also have more flexibility to adapt. For example, many restaurants sought to make up for reduced revenue by selling lunch boxes (bentos) to storefront passers-by.
During our interviews with key actors, we discovered characteristics that either helped or hindered restaurants during the pandemic. Independent restaurants that fared better tended to focus on local residents rather than tourists, to operate in residential districts rather than business districts, and to rely on food sales rather than alcohol sales. These three advantages arose in response to the disruption that social distance introduced into food systems. Japan's ban on international tourists in April 2020 led to a revenue decline for dining establishments that primarily targeted tourists. As a result, restaurants in or near large hotels and resorts have struggled. In business districts, restaurants target employees who eat out for lunch and dinner. During emergency declarations, many employees ceased commuting to these business districts. Even after the emergency status was lifted, restaurants faced an array of rules that limited their hours of operation and ability to serve alcohol. These rules caused revenue to decline sharply for bars and hostess clubs that already faced additional stigma when Covid-19 outbreaks occurred (Giammaria, 2020). The economic challenges that accompanied the pandemic were unpredictable, and a restaurant's outlook could change in just a matter of weeks.
The pandemic had an even more severe impact on bars and music venues, since their revenue fell steeply, particularly when they were prohibited from selling alcohol. An example of this is UrBANGUILD, a performance venue in Kyoto that used to generate most of its revenue from alcohol sales and entry fees for national and international performances. During the pandemic, both revenue streams dried up. In response, the manager explained in an interview how he took on new tasks such as filling forms required to receive government support (Fieldnotes, June 2020). In April 2020, UrBANGUILD produced and sold reusable masks at a time when masks were scarce. Additionally, they launched a podcast called Ur Radio and occasionally invited a vegetable farmer to set up a direct marketing stand. Through a combination of adaptability and government subsidies, UrBANGUILD weathered the sharp decline in revenue. While many restaurants and bars suffered through prolonged hardships during the pandemic, most producers who supply these establishments were able to pivot their sales away from in-person dining successfully.
Unlike diverse operations, artisan food brands for products such as wagyu (Japanese beef) and melons faced major limitations in pivoting to other retail mechanisms. In Japan, artisan food brands are typically only eaten in restaurants or bought for auspicious gift-giving. Most of the artisan brands that avoided disruption either did not rely on restaurant sales or had ties to larger cooperatives or corporations with fixed contracts. Select categories of artisan food brands such as wagyu and melons received government support in response to the hardships of Covid-19 (Kajimoto, 2020). Many artisan producers, however, did not enjoy the same level of stability. While some could pivot towards direct marketing e-commerce sites, as was previously discussed, these sites have limited capacity and could not supplant the abrupt declines in restaurant sales.
For independent artisan producers, we focused on a brand of jidori chicken from Miyazaki Prefecture called Miyazaki Jitokko. Jidori is a prominent symbol of local and artisan food in Japan that must fulfil minimum requirements for breed, lifespan, and space per bird before they can market it as “jidori” (Schrager, 2021). There is much diversity within jidori, and some cheaper brands of jidori were unaffected because they sell their chicken for home consumption. Other, more expensive brands of jidori, like Miyazaki Jitokko, faced a sharp decline in sales, because most of their sales were to upscale restaurants and bars.
As restaurant sales plummeted, independent Miyazaki Jitokko growers have struggled to forecast market demand. Miyazaki Jitokko is processed after reaching four months for roosters and five months for hens, so producers must decide months in advance the number of chickens they will raise. When the pandemic broke out, restaurants stopped ordering chicken and growers hastened to slash production. The drop-off in restaurant sales that accompanied the pandemic left artisan growers with a glut of artisan chicken meat that remained unsold, so they scrambled to secure more freezer space and figure out other ways of offloading excess meat. After experiencing numerous waves, growers have faced uncertainty regarding when they should ramp production back up. An official in charge of the Miyazaki Jitokko brand estimated overall sales were down by 70% to 80% in January and February 2021 compared to a typical year (Fieldnotes, April 2021).
We interviewed three Miyazaki Jitokko growers, all of whom reported cutting production by more than half in 2020. The first grower had a contract with a larger company, but he withdrew from contract production during the pandemic and instead built processing facilities and a website, so he could directly market his chicken. Despite increasing his investments in Miyazaki Jitokko production, he worried about the sharp decline in demand. He said: If we can’t sell [Miyazaki Jitokko] then there's no point. That must be the foundation. If you can’t sell, then if follows you don’t get cash and can’t make a living. Just because something is delicious does not mean that you’ll be able to sell it. (Fieldnotes, December 2020).
Miyazaki Jitokko growers had less flexibility compared to diversified farmers to pivot to other sections of the food economy that faced less disruption from the pandemic. The second grower reported a steep drop-off in orders from izakaya and restaurants that he supplies. In response, he joined an e-commerce platform, but after a surge in orders when the platform received widespread publicity, e-commerce sales tapered off. The third grower has a contract with a company connected to a larger national corporation, and the company directed him to reduce the number of chickens he produces, cutting into his income. Miyazaki Jitokko growers are a vivid example of producers who endured intense disruption due to social distance as demand declined along with their revenue. Since more independent and stringent jidori brands such as Miyazaki Jitokko face more adversity than industrial jidori brands with fixed contracts, the specific crisis of social distance is likely reconfiguring jidori in a direction that deepens the corporate food Crisis, as jidori shifts towards more industrial production.
Conclusion
Our research shows that Japanese food systems have undergone significant and unprecedented changes during the pandemic. Due to health fears of Covid-19, in-person shopping and dining declined as home delivery services rapidly expanded. These abrupt changes, arising from the specific food crisis of social distance, rippled across Japanese food systems.
Even as dining-out and home delivery underwent wild swings, wide swaths of consumers, producers, and retailers avoided significant disruption. Consumers reduced how much they ate out and bought more food at the supermarket or through home delivery. Instead of delivering to restaurants, diverse producers shifted toward direct marketing stands and direct marketing e-commerce platforms. With a national home delivery infrastructure for fresh food, demand for Co-op home delivery surged, but this demand has subsided along with concerns over Covid-19. Specific food crises enact a short-term period of disruption in which issues such as food insecurity are most acute, but such specific food crises also reshape food systems in ways that extend far beyond food security. Specific food crises such as the changes to social distance can still disrupt food systems in ways that warrant close analysis. Using a critical agrarian approach, we conceptualize specific food crises as disrupting and enabling the rapid transformation of food systems in uncharted directions.
The Covid-19 pandemic reveals the complex and manifold ways in which food systems respond to disruption. At the global scale, Covid-19 underscores the deepening crises inherent to the corporate food regime and the imperative for questioning, resisting, and supporting alternatives (Altieri and Nicholls, 2020; Clapp and Moseley, 2020; Nemes et al., 2021; Pattenden et al., 2021; van der Ploeg, 2020). Specific food crises thus have the potential to reconfigure food systems. This reconfiguration may lead to the reversing or the deepening of the general food Crisis. Rapid change arising from a specific crisis may intersect with the general Crisis in ways that are not apparent in the short term but become so over time. Some food system segments may undergo a deepening of the general Crisis while others undergo a reversal. Even when specific food crises enact change that is too complex to classify as either deepening or reversing the general Crisis, such change reconfigures food systems to bring about a new terrain across which future contestations will occur. This critical agrarian approach to food crises focuses on these complex shifts that accompany specific food crises.
Our analysis of the specific crisis of social distance in Japan shows that the growth of home delivery platforms and direct marketing e-commerce indicates a reconfiguration of Japanese food systems that intersects with the general Crisis in complex ways. At present, both platforms may deepen the Crisis because they enable corporations to generate revenue by mediating between consumers and food businesses. They may also reverse the crisis as independent restaurants and producers benefit from an additional revenue stream. This complexity underscores the persistence of longstanding debates over the extent to which alternative initiatives resist or are coopted by the corporate food regime. While reaching judgments about how these platforms intersect with the general Crisis is premature, our analysis suggests that they will become increasingly important arenas for contesting the future trajectory of Japanese food systems. The Crisis will deepen if the corporations controlling these platforms grow increasingly oligopolistic and extract usurious fees. In contrast, the Crisis will reverse if activists supplant corporate platforms with more democratic mechanisms for connecting consumers with food businesses.
Food crises enact disruption that expands the future possibilities for food systems. Each specific food crisis has the potential to reverse, deepen, or otherwise reconfigure the expression of the corporate food regime within situated food systems. Given these wide-ranging possibilities, food crises present important inflection points that warrant close analysis. Through examining food crises, we may discover some of the cracks that are growing in the corporate food regime and ways to coax forth more sustainable and just food systems.
Highlights
Deepens our engagement with how specific food crises reshape food system trajectories.
Identifies the specific food crisis of social distance as an unprecedented food crisis arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Focusing on Japan, analyzes how the specific food crisis of social distance is reconfiguring Japanese food systems.
Develops a critical agrarian approach to food crises that emphasizes examining the context in which specific food crises intersect with the general food Crisis.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.