Japanese shoppers queue for hours to buy cheap rice as prices soar
Advertisement
Household goods supplier Iris Ohyama began selling the rice – procured through a direct contract with the government – at two of its locations at 9am.
It became the first bricks-and-mortar retailer in the country to release the stockpiled grain, narrowly beating supermarket chain Ito Yokado, which launched sales at its branch in Tokyo's Ota ward an hour later.
In spite of steady rain, a queue began forming early at the Iris Ohyama store in Matsudo city, according to The Japan Times newspaper. It snaked from the store entrance around the building and into the car park, with about 100 people in line by 6am. Some customers had begun lining up as early as 8pm the previous evening.
People queue up to buy government-stockpiled rice at an Ito Yokado outlet in Tokyo on Saturday. Photo: Reuters
Numbered tickets were distributed at 8am, with each person limited to one bag of rice.
Advertisement
The 5kg (11lbs) bags were sold for 2,000 yen (US$14) each before tax – less than half the average price in recent weeks. All of the 65 bags prepared for the day sold out quickly, with many leaving empty-handed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
04-07-2025
- South China Morning Post
DeepSeek's LinkedIn AI job listings show hunger for international Chinese talent
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek has posted a flurry of new job openings on the professional networking site LinkedIn over the past week, coinciding with Meta Platforms ' aggressive hiring blitz amid an intensifying global race for AI talent. Advertisement The Hangzhou-based company listed 10 new positions online, including two internships focused on large language models. Other roles include deep learning researchers, core systems engineers, front-end developers and full-stack engineers, based in either Hangzhou or Beijing. The job descriptions were all in Chinese, and the company highlighted its competitive edge from 'top-tier GPU [graphics processing unit] clusters and rapid experimental iteration on potential ideas'. Recruits would 'collaborate with team members who excel at both research and engineering, focusing on AGI [artificial general intelligence] that balances practical results and academic depth', according to the listings. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has largely withdrawn from mainland China , suggesting DeepSeek is hungry for Chinese talent overseas. The start-up has also been actively posting roles on its official website and Boss Zhipin, a Chinese job board. As of this week, 18 roles were listed on the company's own site, including positions marked 'urgent' in AGI research and core engineering. Other listings were for lawyers, a chief financial officer, a chief operating officer, and human resources personnel. On Boss Zhipin, DeepSeek had more than 40 listings, with top salaries reaching 90,000 yuan (US$12,560) per month and annual bonuses equivalent to two months' pay. Advertisement Anticipation for DeepSeek's next-generation models has been high, but so far only incremental updates have been released.
South China Morning Post
03-07-2025
- South China Morning Post
Xpeng launches G7 ‘Super AI' SUV, taking on Xiaomi YU7 and Tesla Model Y
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Xpeng launched its G7 SUV on Thursday, sending another contender into a fierce battle in the premium SUV segment of the world's largest EV market, where it joins Xiaomi's recently introduced YU7 in taking on Tesla's market-leading Model Y. Dubbed Xpeng's first 'Super AI [artificial intelligence] car', the G7 starts at 195,800 yuan (US$27,325), with the top-of-the-line model selling for 225,800 yuan, the Guangzhou-headquartered company said during a launch event in Beijing on Thursday. The car is Xpeng's first model to feature its in-house Turing AI chip . With three such chips, the EV was able to run an AI large language model with more than 30 billion parameters, the company said. This made the EV the world's first mass-produced car with Level 3 (L3) self-driving capabilities, said He Xiaopeng, Xpeng's founder and CEO, at the launch event. 'The G7 is an epoch-making product from Xpeng and also our first new car in 2025,' said He. 'Starting today, in Xpeng's intelligent driving system, there will not only be L2, but we will also bring L3 intelligent-driving computing power to consumers.' Xpeng unveiled the G7 on June 11 and started presales at 235,800 yuan, placing the car between the company's G6 and flagship G9 SUVs. The model garnered more than 10,000 pre-orders in 46 minutes, He said in a post on Chinese social-media platform Sina Weibo last month. L3 is considered a 'hands-off' system, but still requires drivers to be responsible for safety and ready to take over, while L4 would allow drivers to take their eyes off the road in designated areas, according to standards set by US-based SAE International.
South China Morning Post
30-06-2025
- South China Morning Post
Baidu the latest to join open-source movement with Ernie 4.5 models publicly available
Chinese tech giant Baidu on Monday marked its entry into the highly competitive field of Chinese open-source artificial intelligence (AI) systems, by making its flagship Ernie 4.5 models available for download on AI site Hugging Face. Advertisement Baidu open-sourced 10 variants from its Ernie 4.5 multimodal model family, from the 0.3 billion parameter lightweight models to the heavyweight 424 billion parameter ones, according to a statement. Beijing-based Baidu, one of the earliest tech firms in China to develop large language models (LLMs) following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, has made a U-turn by making its models open-source. A year ago, founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong was publicly saying its Ernie series, like OpenAI's ChatGPT models, would be more powerful than open-source ones. However, the release of open-source models by Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which took the AI world by storm at the start of this year, triggered an accelerated shift to open-source by China's Big Tech firms. For example, the Qwen models developed by Alibaba Group Holding are the world's most popular open-source models among developers. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The logo of Baidu's Ernie Bot is displayed near a screen showing the Baidu logo, in this illustration picture taken June 28, 2023. Photo: Reuters Citing a range of benchmark tests that value an AI system's general and domain knowledge, coding and maths skills, as well as reasoning capabilities, Baidu said that its 300B Ernie 4.5 model outperformed DeepSeek's V3, which was twice the size of the Ernie model. Advertisement The benchmark results showcase the progress Baidu has made in improving its models in recent months, after the company announced earlier this year it would shift to an open source approach. The move followed Hangzhou-based DeepSeek's emergence into the global spotlight with its open-source V3 and R1 models that were built cost-efficiently for high-performance tasks.
