Shopping for groceries in the major chains in Japan gave me the impression that Japan barely grew its own vegetables. Most things at the supermarkets were from somewhere else—the garlic from China or Spain, the kabocha from Mexico or New Zealand. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of produce from all over Japan at these stores, but it's significantly more expensive than the imported stuff.
It is counterintuitive. One step outside the city and you see a sea of small farms growing all types of produce. How is it that something that needs to be shipped across an ocean can get here and still be cheaper than the local stuff? And where does all that local produce even go?
What made it stranger was watching the people around us. When friends came to visit, they often brought eggs, cucumbers, corn, or whatever was in season. Coworkers did the same, distributing food to everyone. Knowing what prices are, I always assumed they were using their rent money to pay for all of this stuff. But I was wrong. There is a method—and I am about to share the magic trick with you. (If you've just landed and groceries are only one of a dozen systems you're decoding, I wrote a whole piece on what it's actually like living in Japan as a foreigner—this is one slice of that.)
Unlearn the One-Stop Shop
It turns out my whole approach to shopping for food in Japan was shaped by the way I used to shop in the United States. You go to the one major store and buy everything there for convenience. And the prices were at the mercy of the huge chains. Yes—you could go to different grocery stores, but the prices did not fluctuate far from each other. To top it all off, buying your groceries from different places—the butcher, the greengrocer, the farm down the road—was something from a bygone era.
The one-stop-shop model exists in Japan, too—don't get me wrong. But to some extent people here hang on to the old ways as well. It takes a bit more time, but the better pricing and quality makes it worth it. Not to mention the people you'll meet along the way.
So how do they shop in Japan? Shop locally. I can already hear you: fuzaken ja nē—stop messing around. But it's true, because the system in Japan is set up so that the same vegetables grown locally are sold in a store similar in form to the big chains.
Get to Know the Town You Live In
Shopping locally takes some communication, and for some people that's the hard part. Start with a Google search in Japanese for the specific item you're after—chances are there's an individual shop or farm nearby that sells it directly. If you are in a bigger city, you might find a shop that sources its produce locally.
Here's where the communication comes in: a lot of these places are run by pensioners and retirees. A few might speak some English, but don't count on it. What you can count on is that most of them will be delighted to meet you—they'll want to know who you are, where you're from, and how on earth you found them.
This method is how my wife and I found a local blueberry farm that had no traditional online presence at all. We went there, and after talking with the owner we found out that in 25 years of being open she'd never once advertised her farm. It had all been word of mouth.
In addition to the blueberries, our town has a small egg farm with a 24-hour vending machine that sells a pack of ten double-yolk eggs for about 250 yen. There are still butcher shops along the main road where you can get quality freshly cut meat for cheap. In my case I've never actually visited these shops because of religious dietary restrictions, but I found out about one famous shop because the owner happens to be the mayor of the town.
Talking to people and exploring the town on foot is the way to go. Google Maps is an excellent resource, but it will only get you so far—you're going to have to click past the first page. Otherwise these hidden gems stay part of circles we'd have no access to if we didn't go looking.
JA: The Japan Agricultural Cooperative
Exploring the town little by little takes time, but the JA stores will help you along the way. JA is a cooperative of Japan's smaller farmers, pooling money and resources to give them a better shot at growing and distributing their crops—and its stores are all over Japan. You've seen the green logo without registering it: on the bank, the gas station, the insurance office, and, in some towns, the funeral hall. It was born in 1947 to keep millions of small farmers from being picked apart by middlemen, and it grew into the system that moves most of the country's produce.
Which is exactly why the farm down the road from you is invisible at the supermarket. A farmer's harvest goes to the local JA collection point, gets graded and boxed together with everyone else's, and ships off to a central wholesale market—often in a major city—where it's auctioned to distributors and flows back out to supermarkets across the country. Every step adds cost, and every step strips away the farmer's name. That's how the cabbage grown two towns over ends up back on your shelf as anonymous "domestic produce," priced above the bulk imports that skipped the whole journey.
The JA store is the shortcut around all of that. There are locations everywhere, and no two are quite the same—each one takes on the character of its local farms. Same brand, same green logo, different vegetables on the shelf.
The first time I ever walked into one, my wife and I were looking for burghul (bulgur, cracked wheat) for tabouleh and other Syrian cooking. Walking in felt like walking into a farmers market. The products didn't look like they'd been packed by million-dollar equipment. The vegetables looked deeper in their colors, the price-to-quantity ratio made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and even though we never found what we were looking for, it all clicked. "So, THIS is where everyone gets those boxes of eggs." It was a mind-blowing experience.
A Side Note About Fruit
The United States has a problem with food. You can buy whatever you want, whenever you want. The idea that you can only get certain fruit during certain times of the year does not exist. Commercial growing capitalizes on quantity rather than quality—it has to, to keep up with demand and scale the profit margins. It's a capitalistic game, and I don't hate the player, but the sacrifice is the quality of the food, which, in my opinion, sacrifices quality of life.
You can technically get whatever you want in Japan too, but the standards here are different. Food tastes as advertised. A strawberry has the texture and taste of a strawberry. Back home, they imitate the flavor instead—load something up with sugar and the color red, call it strawberry, and hope psychology directs the customer to the intended taste. Over time, who can tell the difference? The taste of fruit becomes a distant memory.
Yes, fruit in Japan is expensive; that's no secret. Imagine paying $25 for a five-pound watermelon you can get in the States for $5, or $8 for a single peach you'd get back home for a dollar, if that. But did you know that peaches are supposed to be delicate to the touch? Did you know that they bruise? That when you cut one, the juice drips down your arm as you take a bite, and the texture is a cross between a mango and a banana? I will tell you that I did not know that. Back home you could compare apples and peaches, and most people would tell you they're both hard and crunchy.
Dad Note: If the only peaches you've ever met were the hard, crunchy kind, do yourself a favor your first summer here and buy one good Japanese peach. Eat it over the sink. It'll ruin the cheap ones for you forever—in the best way.
It should make people back home angry, but that's not what we're here for. Here's the honest split: fruit is where Japan charges you for quality. Vegetables and eggs are where shopping local flips the math entirely—and that's where the savings live.
Shopping Like a Local: Utilize Your Town
The crux of my advice takes a little bit of effort: you have to actively find the farms and stores around you, and building that map of local spots is a project that takes time. Ask around, google in Japanese, keep your eyes open on the drive home. Finding the hidden gems is what saves you the money—and it builds a little community while it's at it.
Is this a one-stop shop? Not really. You won't find the junk food aisle at a JA store, and there are things the big chains will always do better. But for the routine items—the vegetables, the eggs, the rice—you can save a serious chunk of money every month, and eat noticeably better while you do it. (And while you're squinting at labels in either kind of store, if you keep halal or avoid pork, my guide to spotting pork and gelatin on Japanese food labels is the same skill applied to the packaging.)
And somewhere along the way, the mystery from the beginning of this article solves itself. The friends who showed up at our door with eggs and cucumbers were never spending their rent money. They'd just been shopping in the right stores all along. These days, when we visit someone, we're the ones carrying the box.
Keep Exploring Japan Unwritten
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