I agree with Mr. Iwanaga. Japan already imports 60% of its food. It's only common sense for any country to get nervous when you start to see those kinds of numbers.

Hard-core globalizers will retort that Japan has nothing to fear in our brave new one-world economy and can feed itself entirely from imported food. But this does not take into consideration the profound insecurity a country experiences when it is at the mercy of imported food. Japan has few friends in Asia and a chokehold on its shipping lanes in the South China Sea could bring the country to total starvation in a matter of days or weeks if they lost the capacity to produce food. No wonder this makes people nervous.

Also, who wants to see Japan flooded with crap McGarbage mass produced American factory-farmed bullshit food? You want to see all the Japanese bloat up like their hoggish American counterpart? Want to see their skin fall apart from cattle hormones the way American girls start getting crows' feet and wrinkled skin in their late 20s? I'll take protected Japanese horenso and kome thank you very much, even if I have to pay a bit more for the privilage of not eating US garbage.

True, it could be said that the farmers receive unfair pork-barrel subsidies from the government...but this is no more true here than in Europe or Japan. In any representative government rural constituents will have an advantage that outweighs their significance to society, due to their landholdings.