Japanese consumers faced price hikes in June on 614 food items, including confectionery and dairy products, with the prolonged depreciation of the yen and bad weather driving up import costs of raw materials, a credit research company said.
Poor harvests triggered by extreme heat and drought abroad have led to price hikes in Japan for imported cocoa beans, coffee beans, olives, and orange and other fruit juices, a survey by Teikoku Databank Ltd. showed.
Prices of 68 products from Japan's leading potato chip maker Calbee Inc., including traditionally popular snack food Kappa Ebisen, increased by up to 10 percent from Saturday, while another company has raised those of "natto" fermented sticky soybeans.
Electricity and gas charges for households for June, based on usage in May, rose for all of Japan's major providers. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's government halved subsidies aimed at curbing power and gas bills at the end of last month.
As more firms are expected to try to pass on higher import costs to customers against the backdrop of the weaker yen, price rises are "likely to expand" toward the latter half of the year, Teikoku Databank said in a recent report.
With speculation growing that the Japan-U.S. rate gap will not narrow sharply soon, the yen has declined to 34-year lows against the U.S. dollar, while the government intervened in the currency market sometime between April and May.
In June, meanwhile, pension payments went up, but not enough to keep pace with the inflation rate. As for medical care, patients were forced to pay more out of their own pockets at hospitals, possibly undermining consumer sentiment further.
On Saturday, a 40,000-yen ($254)-per-person tax cut program began to ease the pain of inflation felt by households as Kishida's Cabinet, plagued by low approval ratings, seeks to make the benefits of government support more visible to disgruntled voters.
But analysts question how effective the program is in shoring up private consumption after tepid domestic demand caused the Japanese economy to report its first negative growth in two quarters in the January-March period.
In the current fiscal year starting in April, Japanese households are estimated to shoulder around 106,000 yen more compared with the previous year amid the rising cost of living, according to Mizuho Research & Technologies Ltd.
