The eating of rice, long treated with more symbolic importance, came to chararacterize being Japanese. In history, one Japanese emperor had to abdicate the throne because he could not stick to rice eating and loved buckwheat noodles. Rice, after 1868, and especially after 1945, also came to carry political implications as the rice and other farmers, who were sparsely populated in Japan, occupied disporportionately large electoral districts that should have been long redrawn to reflect on the rapidly growing urban population.

The Japanese agriculture has, however, undergone a decline in the past fifty years, which forces the Japanese to the issue of imported rice because Japan could no longer produce enough rice for national consumption, and because countries that have incurred great debt to Japan over imbalanced trade in Asia and America have clamored for the Japanese to open up their market, therefore easing the balance of trade. On the Japanese side, it would not only affect a national myth of cultural identity (rice eating people), but also a system of regulation, replete with corruption, and the future of Japanese agriculture. The title of the essay is "Gatting Japan" because as a member of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the predecessor of the WTO (World Trade Organization), Japan is expected to open up almost all its markets to abroad, including agriculture (see The Uruguay Round).

Japan's opening up to the world rice market came in 1993, when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)'s control of the Diet dropped to the lowest in Japanese history since 1955. In fact, the ruling party in 1993 and the prime minister Hosokawa came from the Japan New Party, a coalition party that combined members who split from the LDP because of disappointment with an ongoing economic recession in Japan and Japanese politics. The LDP's control of rural voting districts weakened, at least momentarily.

McCormack makes an interesting twist in his argument by saying that Japan actually should keep its rice production because it is uniquely beneficial to its ecology. He criticizes Japan not for not opening up its rice market, but for using up much of the agricultural lands for building resorts, leading to more and more imported foods from abroad, and causing ecological problems in other countries because farming methods elsewhere differ from Japan and are not always beneficial to the environment. The question to ask, perhaps, is how can Japan remain a viable industrial power, which it will undoubtedly continue to be, while developing an agriculture that takes advantage of its ecology. What changes would that demand of government policies?