Japan struggles to give homegrown food a boost

Masayuki Miura's restaurant is radically out of step with modern Japanese tastes. No Australian beef hamburgers, no mountains of fried Brazilian chicken, no imported steaks. Not a Chinese cabbage in sight.

Instead, Miura and his wife, Yoko, serve up a 100 percent made-in-Japan offering of fish and locally grown organic rice and vegetables.

"We need more people to eat Japanese vegetables," declared Miura, whose restaurant overlooks his almost 2-hectare farm in western Japan. "Of course, it's a food culture issue. Hamburgers don't have Japanese vegetables in them."