By SHINYA TOKUSHIMA/ Staff Writer
June 9, 2022 at 14:42 JST
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda addresses criticism about his comment that Japanese households are more tolerant of price rises at a meeting of the Upper House Finance Committee on June 7. (Koichi Ueda)
The central bank chief backtracked on his contentious suggestion that Japanese households were becoming more accepting of rising consumer prices, saying his remark was “completely inappropriate.”
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has been criticized as out of touch with the realities of inflation facing ordinary citizens since he made the comment on June 6.
Questioned again by lawmakers, Kuroda apologized for the “misleading” remark at a meeting of the Lower House’s Committee on Financial Affairs on June 8.
“I am fully aware that households are bitter about price increases because they cannot be avoided,” he said. “My comment that households are now tolerating price rises was completely inappropriate. I apologize for the comment.”
He was responding to Shu Sakurai, a member of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, who said Kuroda’s perceptions were out of sync with consumers’ sentiments.
Prices for food, gas and other daily goods continue to rise in Japan, while wages remain flat or have only slightly increased.
The BOJ’s continuation of its ultra-loose monetary policy has been cited a cause of the yen’s recent depreciation, which has led to even higher prices of imported products.
But Kuroda, in a speech on June 6, said that surveys conducted by Tsutomu Watanabe, professor of economics at the University of Tokyo, showed that Japanese households have become more tolerant of the higher prices.
According to the surveys, 57 percent of Japanese respondents in August last year said they would abandon their favorite stores if they increased prices of their favorite products by 10 percent. The ratio fell to 44 percent in April this year.
Kuroda failed to mention in the speech that in the April survey, in which respondents were allowed to choose multiple answers, more than 60 percent of respondents said they would continue shopping at their favorite stores if prices rose by 10 percent but would reduce the amount they buy or the frequency of their visits.
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