Homegrown veg, cheap substitutes: Japanese get creative to fight soaring food prices

TOKYO — Japanese homemaker Kirina Mochizuki has always considered "okonomiyaki" savoury pancakes the ultimate comfort food: simple, satisfying and cheap.

These days, though, it's a struggle to get the dish, a favourite among Hiroshima natives like herself, on the table. With the price of cabbage — a key ingredient — tripling recently, Mochizuki makes daily trips to the supermarket in search of discounted produce, or resorts to using dried seaweed.

"I never imagined that okonomiyaki would become a delicacy," the mother-of-two said, adding she had also taken to re-growing leeks in a glass of water using the usually discarded root base.

With inflation taking hold in Japan after a generation of stagnant prices, many consumers are facing a similar plight, and looking for creative solutions to ease the pain. Data on Friday showed the average price of cabbage more than tripling this month in the capital, Tokyo, from a year ago.

The Bank of Japan hiked interest rates to the highest in 17 years last week citing confidence in the outlook for salaries. But inflation-adjusted wages have fallen in 29 of the last 32 months while the Engel's coefficient, or the share of households' spending on food, hit a four-decade high last year.

The price of a head of cabbage reaching 1,000 yen (S$8.76) in Tokyo — roughly equivalent to an hourly wage — had already made headlines even before Friday's data, and the central bank noted last week that rice would probably stay expensive until the spring of 2026. Wholesale rice prices surged 60 per cent in December from the same period a year earlier.

As the price of agricultural products has risen, Japanese have also been eating less of them. The average intake of vegetables among Japanese adults fell to