Japan’s Free-Trade Nemesis Built on Part-Time Farmers Empire
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Japan’s government wants it. Mitsubishi Corp. backs it. Toyota Motor Corp. says they need it to compete. Yet, whether Japan joins the biggest attempt at a global free-trade pact may hinge on part-time rice farmers like Tadashi Hirose. And he doesn’t much like it.
Hirose, 59, loses money on his 14 hectares (35 acres) of rice and azuki beans in southwest Hokkaido, forcing him to supplement his income with a job at a construction company. Still, he says Japan joining the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact would destroy a livelihood his family’s known for more than a century and drive the whole of Hokkaido, the top rice producing region, into the red.