Word: japanned
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...world's second largest economy is now crying over spilled milk - and its delicious by-product, butter. Japan, insulated from rice shortages that plague other parts of Asia, is experiencing an unprecedented shortage of the household staple - and discovering that it is not as immune from the growing global food crisis as it wants...
Butter has a strange status in Japan. Historically, butter is a reminder of Japan's first contacts with the West - the islanders complained that the foreigners were bata-kusai , that is, "butter-stinkers." But since the 1960s, local butter making and consumption has been seen as a symbol of Japanese self-sufficiency in and mastery of an originally Western product. The shortage is a blow to that independent self-image...
...grain-feed prices have risen as a result of a drought in Australia as well as the accompanying use of corn for ethanol, which has reduced the amount available for feed for Japan's cows. The drought has also cut back on milk that would have been imported to supplement the Japanese market. Combined with competing demand for milk and milk products from emerging markets in China and Russia, the result is a collapse of the local butter production in Japan...
...that there is no butter in Japan. It's just expensive because of the tariffs imposed on imports. At a popular international supermarket in Tokyo, Nissin, consumers are complaining because they no longer have access to butter that costs 500 yen ($5) for 250 grams, produced in Hokkaido, the center of Japan's milk industry. Instead, they are confronted with an abundance of French butter, costing upwards of 2,000 yen ($20) for 200 grams. "Even if we order 100 or 200 packages of domestic butter," says Nissin's dairy buyer Katsuhiro Maruyama, "only about six or so actually...
...meantime, prices for Japanese butter are going up and the government announced that Japan may need "emergency" butter imports, A government-backed body would then purchase butter at a lower tariff...