You’d have noticed in your local supermarket or heard from the news that rice prices have nearly doubled year-on-year. To combat this, the government is releasing bichikumai or stockpiled rice to select retail outlets across the country.
By law, rice that is produced between Nov. 1 of the previous year and Oct. 31 of the current year is known as shinmai (new rice), while rice that was produced the year before is komai — the kanji character for "ko" means “old” while "mai" means “rice”; bichikumai is also generally known as komai.
Each older batch of rice is simply tagged with an additional “ko” to its name, for example, kokomai (old old rice).
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