On Oct. 25, the education department of Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, sent notices to the city's 30 elementary schools and 13 junior high schools saying that school lunches would not be served on Dec. 20 and Jan. 12. The reason, it said, was a sharp increase in the price of vegetables owing to bad weather this past summer. The budget was overburdened, and the department felt that the two days selected would have the least negative impact on students because Dec. 20 was the last school day of the year and Jan. 12 was the first school day of 2017, so schedules would be irregular anyway.
This very local news received a fair amount of coverage in the national press, and some media called the city for further clarification. As it turns out, the hot lunch program for Suzuka's schools was running a net deficit. The monthly lunch fee for elementary school students had been increased in 2014 from ¥4,000 to ¥4,100. Junior high schools, on the other hand, had only started serving school lunches in May, and they charged ¥4,700 a month. A bureaucrat told the Mainichi Shimbun that the city "couldn't help but cut lunches for those two days," because, in accordance with rules set by the education ministry, it had to "meet certain nutritional standards," and in order to do that it would have to purchase certain ingredients that have become more expensive in recent months.
"We can't increase the lunch fee suddenly in the middle of the year," the representative told the Mainichi, "so we hope parents understand this is a better solution." Two weeks later, after media reports engendered a backlash, the city rescinded the cancelation.