Japan

For decades, Japanese economists referred to the egg as the "honor student of prices" (bukka no yūtōsei) — the one grocery item that rarely seemed to become more expensive. That reputation was undermined in the 2020s: repeated waves of avian influenza, including a record 2022–23 season in which well over ten million birds were culled, pushed wholesale prices to levels the country had never seen and even forced restaurant chains to withdraw egg dishes from their menus.

Japan's market has two unusual features. First, the country is almost entirely self-sufficient in shell eggs, so domestic supply shocks translate directly into prices. Second, a large share of eggs in Japan is consumed raw — in dishes such as tamago kake gohan and sukiyaki — which requires an exceptionally strict hygiene and cold-chain regime, adding costs that consumers in most countries do not bear.

Wholesale pricing centers on a daily reference price set by the egg division of JA Zen-Noh, which the entire trade uses as its benchmark. The headline figure for Japan, however, comes from the retail end of the chain: the monthly food price survey of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), which records the in-store price of a standard 10-egg pack. It is therefore ranked against other retail-level sources rather than against wholesale or market-level estimates — one of the disclosure rules this site follows to avoid mixing incomparable figures.

The MAFF series tracked on this page begins in April 2024, when a 10-egg pack averaged about ¥244. It climbed steadily from autumn 2024 through the first half of 2025, passing ¥300 in June 2025, and has since held in a narrow band of roughly ¥300 to ¥312. The October 2026 reading of ¥312 is the highest in the series and about 28% above its starting point, although month-to-month moves over the past year have amounted to only a few yen. The site also lists a separate market-level figure of about ¥196 that has not changed since June 2026; it is a fixed third-party estimate rather than an observed price and should not be read as a trend.

Behind Japan's near-total self-sufficiency in eggs lies a heavy dependence on imported feed. The country grows little feed grain of its own and buys the great majority of the corn and soybean meal fed to its laying hens from abroad, chiefly from the Americas, so the cost of producing an egg is closely tied to world grain markets and shipping costs. Government and industry figures have long noted that, once feed is taken into account, Japan's effective self-sufficiency in eggs is far lower than the headline rate suggests. Producers can cushion part of this through feed-price stabilization funds and a government-backed support scheme, but sustained increases in input costs tend to reach store shelves over time.