🍵 In the first half of 2026, Japan shipped 897.7 billion yen (roughly $5.7 billion) worth of food, farm, forestry and fishery products overseas. That is the highest January-to-June figure on record, and the second year in a row that the half-year record has been broken. Green tea was up 83.5 percent. Yellowtail was up 69.0 percent. Yet close to half of that growth comes from the exchange rate rather than from appetite.

What Japan actually sold

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries released the numbers on August 4. Exports for January through June came to 897.7 billion yen, up 10.9 percent from the same period a year earlier, an increase of 88.0 billion yen (about $560 million).

Agricultural products, a category that includes processed foods and alcoholic drinks, accounted for 567.4 billion yen ($3.6 billion), up 8.5 percent. Fishery products came to 238.4 billion yen ($1.5 billion), up 19.5 percent, the fastest growth of the four categories. Forestry products added 39.4 billion yen ($250 million), up 6.2 percent.

The remaining 52.6 billion yen ($335 million) sits in a category Japan calls "small-value cargo": shipments where a single item is declared at 200,000 yen or less. These fall outside the regular trade statistics and are surveyed separately, twice a year. In practice it works as a rough proxy for cross-border e-commerce and direct-to-consumer parcels, and it grew 5.0 percent.

The ministry's own explanation for the growth lists rising interest in Japanese food, greater familiarity with Japanese products among people who have visited the country as tourists, and health-conscious buying. It also notes something more concrete: supermarkets and restaurants that had not previously carried Japanese products are now stocking them.

Growth in the first half of 2025 was 15.5 percent. This year it was 10.9. The line still points up, but the slope has eased. The figures are also provisional, and later revisions by the Ministry of Finance can move them.

Green tea and yellowtail did the heavy lifting

Of the 88.0 billion yen of growth, about 40 billion came from just two products.

Green tea exports reached 48.2 billion yen ($307 million), up 83.5 percent, which works out to 22.0 billion yen of growth on its own. The ministry attributes it to demand in Europe, North America and Southeast Asia for powdered tea, matcha included, bought as an ingredient for lattes and desserts rather than as something brewed in a pot.

Yellowtail came second at 43.5 billion yen ($277 million), up 69.0 percent. Known in Japan as buri and served in sushi restaurants as hamachi, it is farmed mostly in the southwest. Demand from North America and South Korea was strong, but the ministry is candid that part of the jump is price rather than volume: feed and other production inputs have grown more expensive, and competing demand from several countries pushed unit prices up.

Sauces and mixed seasonings, a category covering curry preparations, mayonnaise, dressings, vinegar and Worcester-type sauces, reached 39.1 billion yen ($249 million), up 14.9 percent, with Japanese tare and tsuyu selling alongside the dressings. Beef came to 36.9 billion yen ($235 million), up 13.4 percent, led by Taiwan and Thailand. Scallops reached 38.2 billion yen ($243 million), up 9.1 percent. Confectionery excluding rice crackers rose 13.0 percent, which the ministry links partly to influencer posts across Asia.

Not everything rose. Eel fell by 4.6 billion yen, tracking a weak catch of glass eels. Sardines fell by 2.4 billion yen, also on a poor catch, and compound feed fell by 2.7 billion yen partly because the sardines that go into it were not there either.

The map of buyers is shifting

The United States remains the largest single market at 162.6 billion yen ($1.04 billion), 19.2 percent of the total once small-value cargo is set aside, and up 15.3 percent. Hong Kong follows at 110.0 billion yen ($700 million), then China at 94.0 billion yen ($600 million) and Taiwan at 88.2 billion yen ($560 million).

The bigger moves are further down. South Korea rose 20.5 percent to 61.1 billion yen ($390 million), pulled up by yellowtail, beer and cod. Vietnam rose 35.4 percent to 53.3 billion yen ($340 million). Malaysia rose 39.6 percent. The European Union as a bloc rose 26.4 percent to 57.3 billion yen ($365 million). Every one of the top ten destinations grew, and eight of them set first-half records.

The two that did not were Hong Kong, up 3.0 percent, and China, up 4.3 percent. China is the more revealing case. Of the 94.0 billion yen it bought, only 3.5 billion yen ($22 million) was seafood. Almost all the rest was farm produce and timber.

Behind that sits a three-year standoff. China banned all Japanese seafood in August 2023 over the release of treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. In June 2025 it partially reopened, allowing imports from 37 prefectures. The first shipment of frozen Hokkaido scallops left port on November 5, 2025. Two weeks later, on November 19, after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's remarks on a Taiwan contingency drew a sharp response from the Chinese government, imports effectively stopped again.

According to the Fisheries Agency, China accounted for 22 percent of Japan's seafood exports in 2022, and for scallops alone the share was above half. Seafood exports grew 19.5 percent this half with that buyer effectively out of the market. Vietnam has picked up much of the scallop reprocessing work that used to go to Chinese factories, which is why Vietnamese demand for frozen scallop meat shows up so prominently in the ministry's notes.

How much of the record is just the yen

Trade statistics are compiled in yen. When the yen weakens, the yen figure rises even if nothing extra is sold. (Dollar figures here use 157 yen to the dollar, the rate on August 4, 2026.)

Osaka Customs publishes the monthly average of the exchange rate used for customs declarations. For January through June 2026 those figures were 156.91, 155.65, 156.60, 159.27, 158.29 and 159.69 yen to the dollar. For the same months of 2025: 157.20, 154.61, 149.55, 147.70, 143.97 and 144.04. A simple average of each set gives roughly 157.7 against 149.5, a yen about 5.5 percent weaker.

Set that beside 10.9 percent growth and close to half the record is currency. Nikkei made the same point in its coverage, listing the weak yen alongside matcha and yellowtail as a driver.

In January the yen was fractionally stronger than a year earlier and exports rose 28.0 percent, which is real demand. By June the yen was 10.9 percent weaker and growth had slowed to 6.8 percent, meaning that in dollar terms June 2026 came in roughly 4 percent below June 2025.

The same currency cuts the other way at home. Tokyo Shoko Research counted 45 bankruptcies attributed to the weak yen in the first half of 2026, up 32.3 percent and the most for any January-to-June period since the current weak-yen phase began in 2022. Wholesalers squeezed by import costs made up more than half of them.

The target Japan already missed

The government set two numbers years ago: 2 trillion yen in food and agricultural exports by 2025, and 5 trillion yen (about $31.8 billion) by 2030. The 2025 result was 1.7005 trillion yen ($10.8 billion). A record, and short of the goal.

Getting to 5 trillion yen by 2030 would mean nearly tripling from that level in five years. Nikkei's assessment is blunt: it is not in sight. Hironobu Kitagawa, who heads the Japan Food Alliance, told the paper that the quality of Japanese food is not the problem, but selling products on their own is hard, and the industry should work with processors and restaurant chains to maximise added value.

On July 10, 2026, the ministry registered "Japanese tea" under the geographical indication system it administers, the first time it has granted a GI with the entire country as the production area. The applicant was the Japan Tea Central Public Interest Incorporated Association, the national industry body, and the stated aim is to draw a clear line between Japanese tea and Chinese or Vietnamese product as global matcha demand climbs. Japan now has 170 registered GI products. Alcoholic drinks fall under a separate GI regime run by the National Tax Agency, which designated "Nihonshu" nationwide back in 2015.

The less visible worry is on the supply side. Scallop prices rose partly because warm water in the Sea of Okhotsk during the summer of 2025 cut the harvest. The falls in eel and sardines were not lost demand either; the fish were not there. What holds this record up is not only appetite but weather, water temperature and the price of feed.

An export figure is, in the end, a count of things that reached a shelf somewhere. What was the first Japanese product to reach one where you live?

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