When it comes to trade policy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces a choice between the fears of an aging farm lobby and the hopes of suburban families lined up at a 20-meter-long meat counter in a Chiba mall showcasing Australian beef.
When Aeon Co. set out to open a flagship shopping mall just outside Tokyo, it wanted the scale to dazzle urban shoppers. The 3-month-old Makuhari New City mall is almost four times larger than the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome.
At the mall's supermarket, the daily specials include beef shipped directly from Aeon's own feed lot in the Australian state of Tasmania — an arrangement that reduces prices and skirts a politically strong agricultural cooperative system that many see as an outdated relic of Japan's postwar revival.