TOKYO — Nearly everything about South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s first summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo will be scrutinized for signs of warmer bilateral ties, including a shared meal of a Tokyo classic called “omurice”.

The dish, whose name is a mash-up of omelette and rice, has become the talk of the town since Japan’s Fuji TV reported on Monday of a hushed plan for Mr. Kishida to treat Mr. Yoon at Rengatei, the storied but no-frills restaurant that invented it.

Mr. Yoon, a self-described foodie and avid cook, reportedly had “unforgettable” memories of the omurice he ate in his youth at the 128-year-old establishment in Tokyo’s Ginza district. He made frequent trips to the Japanese capital in 1966 while his father, a university professor, spent a year there, he told the Yomiuri daily.

Japanese and South Korean officials have declined to confirm the plan or venue, while Rengatei, famed as the birthplace of omurice in 1900, declined to comment.

Although many foreigners might associate Japanese cuisine with sushi or tempura, “yoshoku,” or Western-influenced dishes such as “omurice” and tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet), are more common fare on Japanese dinner tables.

Yoshoku is a genre of Japanese cuisine established more than a century ago, and some made its way to South Korea in the 1960s as ethnic Koreans traveled between the two countries, said Motoo Kawabata, a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University who specializes in Japanese restaurants’ global strategy.

Mr. Kishida and Mr. Yoon will reportedly share a more formal dinner of sukiyaki beforehand, but the real ice-breaker could be when they sit down for omurice, Kawabata said. Japan and South Korea are holding a summit for the first time in 12 years, seeking to mend relations that had deteriorated severely.

“It could be an effort to foster a laid-back mood, through a casual dish that both Japanese and Koreans consider comfort food,” he said. Rengatei’s price for its omurice: 2,600 yen ($19.57).

Kawabata said the omurice in South Korea typically has a thinner and firmer layer of eggs, while the image of a perfectly crafted one in Japan has a fluffy, runny, almond-shaped covering of eggs that blanket the ketchup-fried rice.

“Yoon may have been impressed with the softness of Japanese-style omurice,” Kawabata said.

Although Rengatei’s original dish mixed the egg batter in with the rice, the omurice as Japanese people know it today was conceived for and popularized in the 1985 Juzo Itami film Tampopo, a critically acclaimed meditation on food and one of Japan’s best known movies.

Hiroshi Modegi, the third-generation owner chef of Taimeiken, which appears in the film, said he was disappointed that his restaurant was not the president’s choice, but welcomed the renewed attention on omurice.

“I hope the world discovers that Japanese food culture also has a dish like this,” he said. — Reuters

SINGAPORE/BANGALURU — Cereal and oilseed crops across Asia are forecast to face hot, dry weather, with meteorologists expecting the El Niño weather pattern to develop in the second half of the year, threatening supplies and heightening concerns over food inflation.

Vast swathes of farmland in Australia, Southeast Asia and India are expected to face higher temperatures, while some growing regions in North and South America are likely to see more crop-friendly weather as there is more than a 50% chance of the El Niño phenomenon occurring, meteorologists said.

The threat from dry weather to food production in Asia comes after grain and edible oil prices climbed to historic highs in 2022 as the Russia-Ukraine war and COVID-19 disrupted world supplies.

“At present, the global grain market is historically tight and thus liable to sudden upward price movements on negative supply-side developments,” Charles Hart, a commodities analyst at Fitch Solutions in London, told Reuters.

“The strains of the COVID era and the poor harvests of 2022 will be felt beyond 2023 as inventories are replenished over time.”

La Niña weather, characterized by unusually cold temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, has ended and El Niño, a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, is expected to form during the northern summer, according to US and Japanese weather forecasters.

While La Niña brings cool and wet weather to parts of Asia, El Niño is typically associated with heat and dryness in the region. In North and South America, the weather tends to be favorable for crops during El Niño, although there are likely to still be pockets of adverse weather lingering.

HOT, DRY WEATHER
A dry winter in central and western parts of Australia could stress the wheat crop in the world’s second largest exporter of grain.

Australia produced record wheat crops for the last three years, thanks to higher-than-normal rainfall brought by the La Niña weather.

“There is a forecast of warm and dry winter in the central and western parts of Australia,” said Chris Hyde, a meteorologist at US-based Maxar. “If El Niño develops faster than what we are forecasting now, it could get much drier and warmer.”

In Southeast Asia, crucial for palm oil and rice exports, forecasters are expecting slightly below normal precipitation in June-August, although the region has ample soil moisture after heavy rains in recent months. “It will take a while for dry weather in Southeast Asia to have an impact on palm oil and rice production,” Mr. Hyde said.

However, northern and central parts of India, which are already reporting a lack of moisture, are set for below normal rains in the second half of the year, meteorologists said, leaving the most-populous nation vulnerable to lower food output and higher prices.

“In central and northern parts on India, stretching right up to Pakistan, the issue is that the current conditions are opposite to that of Southeast Asia,”

“The region is facing drought, so even slightly below normal precipitation is likely to pose risk to crops.”

Typically, China sees dryness in its corn growing northern region and more precipitation in the soybean producing northeast during El Niño.

For the United States, weather is expected to be favorable for the wheat crop.

“In the southern Plains, parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas in particular, those areas do tend to do a lot better, when it comes to rainfall, in an El Niño year,” Illinois state climatologist Trent Ford said.

Argentina, which is facing a historic drought, could also see improved weather. — Reuters