ISHIKAWA, Jan. 28 — The Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) group’s branch in Ishikawa Prefecture started selling rice packed in bags with popular anime scenes related to rice printed on them.
Major publishers — Kodansha Ltd., Shogakukan Inc. and Shueisha Inc. — and manga artists cooperated under the Ishikawa Genkimai Project to support farmers hit by the Noto Peninsula Earthquake and torrential rain last year.
A part of the sales of the products will be given to the farmers to fund the restoration of rice paddies in the Okunoto region of the prefecture.
Three rice brands that represent the prefecture are sold in nine types of bags.
For example, the Yumemizuho brand rice comes in a bag featuring “Blue Lock,” a manga series published by Kodansha, while the Koshihikari brand is sold in a bag featuring Shogakukan’s “Detective Conan” and a bag containing the Hyakumangoku brand has an illustration of Shueisha’s “One Piece” on it.
All the bags come with a message saying, “If you eat rice, you can be a hero too.”
The product was put on sale on Jan. 27 on JA Town, an online shopping website of JA ZEN-NOH, the marketing arm of the JA group, at 4,350 yen per a set of three 1-kilogram rice bags from each publisher.
Starting in early February, the bags will be sold at Yaesu Ishikawa Terrace, a prefecture specialties shop — referred to as an “antenna shop” in Japanese — of Ishikawa Prefecture in Tokyo’s Yaesu district, as well as at Hokuriku Plus, a specialty shop in the city of Osaka offering items from the Hokuriku region including Ishikawa.
The illustrations of the Ishikawa Genkimai Project and rice bags with anime scenes