A professor of mine explained his view on the key difference between Japanese and Western business processes; Western firms will seal a deal in 1 month, procrastinate for 10 months and then get the actual work done on the twelfth month, but Japanese firms will procrastinate for 10 months, seal a deal in the eleventh month and then get the work of it done on the twelfth month.
In the end it’s all the same.
Or Japanese firms could just not get anything done. Ever.
Such is the case with the rice issue discussed in the article; the government was basically too lazy to make money from rice that it usually just gives away.
Of the 770,000 tons it imports annually, the government sells about 100,000 tons for general consumption, 300,000 tons for use in processed foods and a few hundred thousand tons as animal feed, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. About 100,000 to 200,000 tons is for foreign aid.
...Rex Estoperez, of the Philippine National Food Authority, attributed the lack of movement to bureaucratic procedures and early disagreement on price.
Not only did Japan not sell expensive rice for a premium when it had the chance; now they will probably have to give some of that away. And to top it off, they come off as a stingy country that clings on to its brown rice, unwilling to share any of it with its Asian neighbors.
Of course, the flip side to the argument is that, had commodity prices continued their steep climb during the early summer months, Japan might have been able to sell their rice for an even higher price. But I guess that’s not going to happen now, and they’ll have to sit around for another year before they decide what to do with their leftover rice.
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