A YouTuber promised to save Japan's rice farmers, and eighteen months later the project had stalled. The 1,197 people in the comments said he had used everyone for the clicks — but not one of them had bought the rice, and only one named it
1,197 people said the farmers had been used to farm clicks. Not one of them had bought the rice. One named it. Ten said they had watched the videos. The anger in this thread was never really about rice.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1st 8850 ∕ 342 I grow tomatoes, and there are a lot of rice farmers around me. Conditions on the ground are genuinely hard, so I am simply glad when someone takes an interest in what rice farming is like now. But being handled as a hobby hurts. Our livelihoods depend on this, and having things stirred up gets in the way of the work. What happens now to the people who agreed to help him? If you are going to do it as a business you should have done your homework first, and "I lost my enthusiasm so I stopped wanting to" does not pass as an adult in working life. Do not take farming lightly. He is being far too irresponsible
- 2nd 4665 ∕ 114 He launched this saying he wanted to save every rice farmer in the country and change Japanese agriculture, and now that his interest has faded it is straight on to the next thing. He used enormous words at the start, and told the agriculture minister to his face to show some resolve himself. Eighteen months on, that same person has all but stopped filming the rice at all. This is not a game — farmers and staff believed the words and got involved, large volumes of rice were bought in, and unsold stock means real losses. What a person is really made of shows less in the energy at the start than in how they take responsibility once it stops going well
- 3rd 1970 ∕ 73 The people who subscribed without really thinking about it should unsubscribe and show him reality. YouTube's own system could help, if subscribers who have not watched anything for a while were unsubscribed automatically, creators would have to work harder at making videos people actually want to watch
- 4th 1498 ∕ 137 There is malice in this article. He has promoted a wide range of products over the years, and of course viewers get bored if the same one keeps being pushed at them. If you actually watch the video you can see the exchange is staged. This kind of spin is why I stopped reading the news sites. Go and check it with your own eyes
- 5th 1403 ∕ 68 Most things are the way they are for a reason, and a structure built up over decades does not change overnight. If you start a business from the simple idea that you can just buy direct from farmers because middlemen are taking the margin, you end up facing every job the existing distribution system was doing — storage, milling, inspection, logistics, sales, and sourcing and price risk in a bad year. He did not have the resolve to take all of that on and change the structure
I read all 1,197 top-level comments. This is the thread about thirteen hours after publication, at ten past seven on the morning of 23 September 2026. The article shows 2,515 comments in total; the replies displayed under the top-level comments come to 413. The buttons: 28,005 agree, 2,287 that-explains-it, 4,560 hmm — 87 to 13. Against the 52 threads counted here before, this is on the divided side; the most divided was a car-park thread at 63 to 37, and several have run as tight as 95 to 5 or 96 to 4. The vote is extraordinarily top-heavy. One comment alone holds 8,850 agree presses, 31.6 per cent of them; the top five hold 65.7 per cent, the top ten 78.7 per cent and the top twenty 86.6 per cent. Below that the thread is silent: 534 comments, 44.6 per cent, drew no agree press at all, 358, 29.9 per cent, drew no button of any kind, and 191, 16.0 per cent, drew more hmm than agree. The average comment runs 91 Japanese characters; only 79 run past 200. Now to what stands out. The most-agreed comment in the thread is from a farmer — but a tomato farmer, not a rice farmer. Someone writing that there are many rice farmers around them, and that it hurts to have the work handled as a hobby, drew 8,850 presses, 31.6 per cent of the thread's agree vote. Comments from someone identifying themselves as a farmer come to eight out of 1,197, 0.7 per cent, and they carry 9,007 presses, 32.2 per cent of the vote. A third of this thread's vote sits with eight farmers, and only two of them say they grow rice. Next, what the thread was talking about. Comments mentioning farmers or producers come to 228, 19.0 per cent, carrying 18,676 presses, 66.7 per cent of the vote. Comments using a word for responsibility come to 63, 5.3 per cent, carrying 15,911 presses, 56.8 per cent. Comments about the staff, the people on the ground or being dragged in come to 56, 4.7 per cent, carrying 14,971 presses, 53.5 per cent. The counts are small and the vote is large because the long comments at the top all cover those three things at once. The reverse holds for view counts: 164 comments, 13.7 per cent, use a word for views or play counts, but they carry only 2,867 presses, 10.2 per cent, because most of them are one-liners. Here is the core of it. The thread is angry that farmers were used to farm clicks. So I counted whether the people in the thread had any contact with the business at all. Comments from someone saying they bought the rice, ordered it, received it or ate it: zero out of 1,197. Twenty-nine comments mention buying, and all of them are reasons not to — it costs more than the supermarket, postage makes it worse, buy direct from a farmer instead. The product has a name, Genki-da-kome, and exactly one comment uses it: the seventh most-agreed comment, 607 presses. Comments plainly saying they had watched his videos come to ten, 0.8 per cent, carrying 2,011 presses, 7.2 per cent. Comments plainly saying they had never watched him come to fourteen, 1.2 per cent, carrying 719 presses, 2.6 per cent. The other 1,173 say neither. Thirteen comments, 1.1 per cent, say outright that they cannot understand why this man is popular or why anyone watches him — and those thirteen carry 19 presses between them, 0.07 per cent of the vote. Now the comments the thread pushed back on. The most hmm presses in the thread went to someone writing that the criticism is probably fair, but that people who will actually go and try something are rare: 37 agree against 445 hmm, 12.0 times, fiftieth by agree. Second is someone asking him to take up the same subject again, 53 agree against 349 hmm, 6.6 times. Third is someone saying he did his job as a YouTuber and nothing more, 145 agree against 348 hmm, 2.4 times. The steepest ratio belongs to someone claiming he stepped back because powerful interests made it dangerous: 3 agree against 198 hmm, 66.0 times. All three of the most pushed-back comments are comments that declined to be angry. What I have not verified. I have not established what is actually happening with this business now. The article rests on a video by the staff running it, and the thread contains comments saying he never said he was stopping and that the business continues. This site has not established which is right. The purchase price, the retail price and the volume left unsold are figures I have taken from the article without independent checking. As for why the milling companies declined the work, the article itself notes that his stated view drew a community note saying there was no concrete evidence, so I have neither counted nor tested that point. On the comments I counted but will not quote: twelve comments, 1.0 per cent, use an insult word — fool, useless, fraud, liar — and they carry 42 presses, 0.1 per cent. This site does not print abuse aimed at a named individual, so those are counted but not shown; and this thread is remarkably light on them, twelve out of 1,197. Comments about his appearance come to five, 0.4 per cent, carrying four presses; comments about foreigners or nationality come to three, 0.3 per cent, carrying one press. Finally, the answer to what I assumed going in. I assumed nobody could tell me who actually watches these self-described influencers. Thirteen people in the thread asked exactly that, and their comments drew 19 presses between them. The overwhelming majority of the thread is not discussing whether anyone watches him at all. The comment shared from this site's account is third by agree, with 1,970 agree presses, 106 that-explains-it and 73 hmm — the one telling idle subscribers to unsubscribe and show him reality. It is one of very few comments in the thread that turns to face the audience rather than the man, and it is among the three most-read. On the name: he runs this business under his own name and publishes under his own name, so this is public activity and I have written it as reported. This site withholds names only for private individuals caught up in crimes and accidents. The two staff who appear in the video are named in the article, but naming them adds nothing to this commentary, so I have not.
What happened
The story ran on Yahoo! News Japan at ten past six on the evening of Tuesday 22 September 2026, from the weekly SmartFLASH.
Five days earlier, on 17 September, the official YouTube channel of a clothing brand posted a video titled, roughly, "We can no longer sell rice on the Hikaru channel." In it, the two people who had been running the rice business day to day say he has stopped filming anything about the rice at all.
Eighteen months before that, Hikaru — a YouTuber with more than five million subscribers — had posted a video explaining how the rising cost of fertiliser and machinery was squeezing rice farmers, and launched the business saying he wanted to save every rice farmer in the country and change Japanese agriculture. When the agriculture minister of the day told him to go into it with resolve, he told the minister to show some resolve himself. The article quotes that exchange.
The plan was to buy rice from farmers at 23,000 yen per 60-kilogram bale and sell it on subscription at 3,980 yen for five kilograms. The purchase price rose to 30,000 yen. Most of the roughly fifty milling companies he approached turned the work down. Sales opened in October 2025, orders came in far below expectation, and the article says several hundred million yen worth of rice went unsold and aged in storage.
Then, the article says, social media filled with people saying the farmers had been used to farm clicks.
1,197 people wrote in the comments.
What I assumed going in
Who is this man, and who on earth is watching these self-described influencers? I genuinely do not understand it.
That was my starting position, so this time I counted something I have never counted before. Of the 1,197 people in this thread, how many watch him? How many bought the rice?
87 to 13 — 1,197 comments, about thirteen hours in
I read all 1,197 top-level comments. The article shows 2,515 comments in total; the replies displayed come to 413.
The buttons: 28,005 agree, 2,287 that-explains-it, 4,560 hmm. That is 87 to 13.
Against the 52 threads counted here before, this one is on the divided side. The most divided was a car-park thread at 63 to 37; several others have run as tight as 95 to 5 or 96 to 4.
The vote is extraordinarily top-heavy. One comment alone holds 8,850 agree presses, 31.6 per cent of them. The top five hold 65.7 per cent, the top ten 78.7 per cent, the top twenty 86.6 per cent.
Below that it is silent. Of 1,197 comments, 534 — 44.6 per cent — drew no agree press at all, and 358, 29.9 per cent, drew no button of any kind.
The average comment runs 91 Japanese characters. Only 79 run past 200.
A third of the vote went to one person
Here is the most-read comment in the thread.
I grow tomatoes, and there are a lot of rice farmers around me. Conditions on the ground are genuinely hard. So I am simply glad when someone takes an interest in the state of rice farming. But being handled as a hobby hurts. Our livelihoods depend on this, and having things stirred up gets in the way of the work. What happens now to the livelihoods of the people who agreed to help him? If you are going to do it as a business you should have done your homework first, and "I lost my enthusiasm so I stopped wanting to" does not pass as an adult in working life. Do not take farming lightly. He is being far too irresponsible.
私はトマト農家ですが、周りにたくさん米農家の方がいます。現場は本当に厳しいです。なので、水稲の現状に関心をもってくれる人がいるのは、単純に嬉しいです。
ただ、遊び半分に触られるのは辛いです。我々は生活がかかっていますから、引っ掻き回されるとかえって仕事の邪魔になります。協力者の方々の生活はどうなるんでしょうか？
ビジネスとしてやるなら事前にきちんと下調べをするべきだったし、『熱意がなくなったからやりたくなくなった』は社会人として通用しません。農業をなめるな。
彼は無責任すぎますね。8,850 agree presses, 31.6 per cent of the thread's agree vote, and 124 replies underneath.
The person writing is a farmer — but not a rice farmer. They grow tomatoes. The rice farmers, they say, are the people around them.
Comments from someone identifying themselves as a farmer come to eight out of 1,197, 0.7 per cent. Those eight carry 9,007 presses, 32.2 per cent of the vote. A third of this thread's vote sits with eight people, and only two of them say they grow rice.
Second place is about responsibility
The second comment drew 4,665 agree presses. Its summary is in the tally above.
He began with enormous words, it says, and now that his interest has faded it is on to the next thing. He told the agriculture minister to show some resolve, and eighteen months later he has all but stopped filming the rice. This is not a game: farmers and staff believed the words, and unsold stock means real losses. What a person is made of shows in how they take responsibility once it stops going well.
Those top two comments together hold 48.3 per cent of the thread's agree vote. Two comments out of 1,197, and almost half the vote.
What the thread was actually counting
Comments mentioning farmers or producers: 228, 19.0 per cent, carrying 18,676 presses — 66.7 per cent of the vote.
Comments using a word for responsibility: 63, 5.3 per cent, carrying 15,911 presses — 56.8 per cent.
Comments about the staff, the people on the ground, or being dragged into it: 56, 4.7 per cent, carrying 14,971 presses — 53.5 per cent.
Small counts, enormous vote. That is because the long comments at the top cover all three of those at once.
View counts go the other way. Comments using a word for views or play counts come to 164, 13.7 per cent — but they carry only 2,867 presses, 10.2 per cent, because most of them are one-liners.
Comments turning the suspicion on the article or the press itself come to 52, 4.3 per cent, carrying 2,615 presses, 9.3 per cent. Comments saying the people who trusted him share the blame come to 27, 2.3 per cent, carrying 325 presses, 1.2 per cent.
The thread also talks about how rice actually moves
This is not only an angry thread.
Comments mentioning the farm co-operatives, the national federation, wholesalers, middlemen or the milling companies come to 80, 6.7 per cent, carrying 1,976 presses, 7.1 per cent of the vote. These are the comments about who currently does the storing, milling, inspecting, shipping and selling — the fifth most-agreed comment belongs here.
Comments about the government, policy, subsidies or the ministry come to 49, 4.1 per cent, carrying 4,868 presses, 17.4 per cent. Their argument is that this is a job for the state, not for one man's business.
Comments using a word for trust or betrayal come to 92, 7.7 per cent, carrying 2,612 presses, 9.3 per cent. Comments using a word for boredom, lost interest or enthusiasm come to 54, 4.5 per cent, carrying 4,743 presses, 16.9 per cent.
The largest count belongs to view counts, 164 comments. The largest share of the vote belongs to farmers, 66.7 per cent. In practice the two usually appear inside the same comment, one sentence apart.
Nobody in this thread had bought the rice
Here is the core of it.
The thread is angry that farmers were used to farm clicks. So: had the 1,197 people in it ever touched the business?
Comments from someone saying they bought the rice, ordered it, subscribed, received it or ate it: zero out of 1,197.
Twenty-nine comments mention buying at all. Every one of them is a reason not to — it costs more than the supermarket, postage makes it worse, buy direct from a farmer who sells their own crop.
The reason the rice went unsold is sitting in the comments, written out.
One comment out of 1,197 names the product
The business has a name. It is called Genki-da-kome — roughly, "rice that keeps you well."
Exactly one comment in 1,197 uses that name. It is seventh by agree, with 607 presses. The person says he probably did mean it in the early days, and then closes by saying the videos changed and they stopped watching.
1,196 people were angry about a product they did not name.
Ten say they watched. Fourteen say they never did
Comments from someone plainly saying they had watched his videos, currently or in the past: ten, 0.8 per cent, carrying 2,011 presses, 7.2 per cent of the vote.
Comments plainly saying they had never watched him, or do not watch him: fourteen, 1.2 per cent, carrying 719 presses, 2.6 per cent.
The other 1,173 say neither.
Of the ten who say they watched, this is the most-read. It is fourth in the thread.
There is malice in this article. He has promoted a wide range of products over the years, so of course the audience gets bored if the same one keeps being pushed at them. If you actually watch the video, you can see it is staged. This is exactly why the spin in news outlets and online articles put me off reading them. You should all go and check it with your own eyes.
この記事に悪意を感じます。
多岐に渡り様々な商品を訴求してきたからこそ、同じ商品をずっと訴求され続けても、見ている側もつまらなくなりますよね？
実際に動画を見たら、プロレスなのは分かります。
これだから、情報機関やネットの記事の印象操作が嫌で見なくなりました。
皆さんも実際に自分の目で確認した方がいいですよ。1,498 agree presses against 137 hmm.
The fourth most-read comment in this thread says: go and check with your own eyes. And out of 1,197 comments, ten say they did.
The comment shared from this site's account is third
The people who subscribed without really thinking about it should unsubscribe and show him reality. YouTube's own system could do it too — if subscribers who have not watched anything for a while were unsubscribed automatically, creators would have to work at making videos people enjoy.
取り敢えず何となく登録してしている人達が
登録解除して現実を見せてやれば良いと思う
YouTubeのシステム的にも定期的に登録した人の
動画等を見ていないと自動的に解除されるように
すれば、配信する人も一所懸命に頑張って楽しめる動画を考えると思う。Third by agree: 1,970 agree presses, 106 that-explains-it, 73 hmm.
Unusually for this thread, it is about the audience. It turns away from the man and the business and faces the people who subscribed and then stopped paying attention.
Of the top three comments, the first two are about farmers and responsibility. Only the third is about the people watching.
The most pushed-back comment says trying counts for something
I understand the criticism of him, and it is probably right. But there are very few people who will actually go and try something the way he did. Plenty of us look at an industry we know nothing about, think something looks wrong, and criticise it. I do it too. Hardly anyone goes on to enter that industry themselves, spending their own money, effort and time, to try to put the wrong thing right. Even if he did it for the profit a YouTuber makes, the trying is honestly impressive. I think every industry needs people like that. All of the above is the view from a distance, so of course the people directly caught up in it may well be suffering for it.
ヒカル氏への批判は理解できますし、きっと正しいのでしょう。
ただ、実際彼のように「やってみる」ことができる人はなかなかいません。
自分の知らない業界に対して、変だな、と思って批判や批評をする人は多くいます。私もそうです。
でも、じゃあ実際おかしいことを是正しようと、自分が参入してお金と労力と時間を割いて、「やってみる」という人はほとんどいません。
それがユーチューバーとしての利益のためだとしても、「やってみる」ことは素直にすごいことです。
どの業界にもこういう人の存在は必要だと思います。
以上は、あくまで俯瞰的な視点ですから、直接巻き込まれた方が迷惑している可能性はもちろんあります。37 agree presses against 445 hmm — 12.0 times, and fiftieth in the thread by agree.
Second by hmm is someone asking him to take up the subject again next year: 53 agree against 349 hmm, 6.6 times. Third is someone saying he did his job as a YouTuber and nothing more: 145 agree against 348 hmm, 2.4 times.
The steepest ratio of all belongs to someone claiming he stepped back because powerful interests had made it dangerous: 3 agree against 198 hmm, 66.0 times.
All three of the most pushed-back comments are comments that declined to be angry.
What I have not verified
I have not established what is actually happening with this business now.
The article rests on a video posted by the staff running it. The thread contains comments insisting he never said he was stopping and that the business continues. This site has not established which is right.
The purchase price, the retail price and the volume left unsold are figures taken from the article. I have not checked them independently.
On why the milling companies declined the work: the article itself records that his stated view drew a community note saying there was no concrete evidence for it. So I have neither counted nor tested that point.
Counted but not quoted
Comments using an insult word — fool, useless, fraud, liar — come to twelve, 1.0 per cent, carrying 42 presses, 0.1 per cent of the vote. This site does not print abuse aimed at a named individual, so those are counted and not shown.
By the standards of these threads, that is remarkably little: twelve comments out of 1,197.
Comments about his appearance come to five, 0.4 per cent, carrying four presses. Comments about foreigners or nationality come to three, 0.3 per cent, carrying one press.
Checking my assumption against the count
Who actually watches him? Thirteen people in this thread asked exactly that — why is he popular, why would anyone press play on this.
Those thirteen comments drew 19 agree presses between them. That is 0.07 per cent of the vote.
So the question was asked here, and almost nobody read it. The overwhelming majority of the thread is not discussing whether anyone watches him at all.
A self-described influencer. The thread frames him the same way: 215 comments, 18.0 per cent, call him a YouTuber, an influencer or a streamer. But those carry 1,653 presses, 5.9 per cent — the framing is common and the vote is not with it.
The comment shared from this site's account is third by agree, with 1,970 presses. It is one of the very few comments that turns to face the audience rather than the man, and it is among the three most-read in the thread.
What this thread was really saying
1,197 people said the farmers had been used.
Not one of them had bought the rice. One of them named it. Ten said they had watched the videos; fourteen said they never had.
So this thread was not about rice.
It was about a person who said something enormous in public, and what he did afterwards. That is why comments using a word for responsibility carry more than half the vote.
And a third of that vote went to someone with no stake in this business at all — a tomato farmer, writing about the rice farmers who live around them.
The comment the thread pushed back on hardest was not an insult. It was the one saying that trying counts for something.
On the name
He runs this business under his own name and publishes under his own name, so this is public activity and I have written it as reported. This site withholds names only for private individuals caught up in crimes and accidents.
The two staff who appear in the video are named in the article, but naming them adds nothing to this commentary, so I have not.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.