Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 569

focused on labeling as a way to address consumption risk concerns, prompting the gov-
ernment to require more stringent safety assessment and labeling. This constituted an
important—albeit limited—victory for the consumer movement in Japan, which had
long addressed food safety as a top priority yet been excluded from policy processes
(Maclachlan 2006). This success facilitated the politicization of other aspects of GM
food. In the early 2000s, narratives that portrayed GM food as a threat to local agricul-
ture and Japanese culture and identity emerged, particularly in the opposition against
GM rice development and field trials. Ecological effects of biotech crops also garnered
more public attention, and the government subsequently introduced stricter environ-
mental regulation for cultivating them.
Successful politicization of consumption aspects of GMOs as products preceded
and helped draw public attention to GM food as a category, and then to such produc-
tion aspects as agriculture's significance to national and local culture and environmen-
tal risks. At the same time, the initial narrow focus on food safety and labeling affected
the ways in which the general regulatory approaches were considerably more lenient
than those of the EU or France. Consequently, despite high public awareness of the food
safety issue, Japan continued to import—and consume—a significant amount of biotech
crops from other countries.
From State Support to the First Opposition
In Japan, as in France, the regulatory framework for agricultural biotechnology was
explicitly lenient and favorable to R&D and commerce for a long time (Fujihara 1997).
In the 1980s the government began to invest heavily in the field, which it considered cru-
cial for Japan's competitiveness in science and technology and for solving the country's
low food self-sufficiency and dependence on imports (Yamaguchi and Suda 2010). The
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) gradually built an institutional
setting conducive to public and private R&D and government-industry cooperation
(Amagasa 2000, 2003).5 From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, various crops developed
by MAFF's research institutes, prefectural research centers, and private companies (e.g.,
chemical, beer, tobacco) moved from labs to greenhouses, then into the field. A pio-
neering opposition group, the DNA Issue Study Group, and the Environmental Agency
raised concerns about ecological impact of field tests, but this did not result in much
public or policy debate.
By the early 1990s, in preparation for the impending arrival of food made with rDNA
technology, the government established a regulatory framework distinctly for it, from
indoor experiments to field tests to safety as food. In 1994, under this framework, Japan
quietly introduced its first GM food, two varieties of chymosin (an enzyme used in
cheese-making) made by American and Dutch companies, and cheese made with them.
On one level, this framework affirmed the category of GM food. On another, it was non-
binding and explicitly maintained that approved transgenic food was “the same” as the
existing food. The latter idea was even more explicitly institutionalized in 1996 when the