Its economy is in recession, it is up to its eyeballs in public debt and its political leadership is in flux, but with autumn approaching Japan faces perhaps the cruellest cut of all: its precious stocks of rice-based hooch may be toxic.

Across the paddies and orchards of rural Japan, the autumn harvest festival season is usually a riotously boozy affair. It is a moment to rejoice in nature's bounty and to honour the local deity by drinking - occasionally immodestly - in its honour. Favourite draughts include distilled shochu, and the weaker, sweeter, saké rice wine.

But the country's faith in its supposedly airtight food industry has been thoroughly rattled. Shipments of pesticide-ridden, rotting rice, intended for use in glue factories, have ended up in the human food chain, principally as ingredients for brewing the national tipple. In the past week more than a million bottles of shochu and saké - drinks made from rice - have been recalled over safety fears. The company behind the best-selling Japanese beer, Asahi Breweries, has removed 650,000 bottles of shochu from the shelves of off-licences and supermarkets in Japan.

With the harvest festival season in full swing, the Japanese drinking public fears that there may be far more to the scandal than has been revealed.

Over the weekend it started to emerge that the tainted rice shipments were not only sent to shochu and saké breweries but may also have been sent to makers of traditional mochi rice-sweets and to the kitchens of schools, old people's homes and even some hospitals. Leftovers of rice served to children in Kyoto contained twice the allowed levels of pesticide.

The original trouble appeared to centre on the Osaka-based miller, Mikasa Foods, and allegedly illegal sales of sub-edible rice as edible. The sales are understood to have taken place 53 times in the past five years and Mikasa has now admitted that it subjected only a handful of the shipments to serious tests. What has since emerged, although the details continue to baffle the Agriculture Ministry, is that the rice then entered a complex web of selling and reselling by food producers and wholesalers, which made it nearly impossible to know what was edible and what was not.

One company in Nagoya - Aichi - appeared to have sold 862tonnes of rice back into the food chain, having bought the shipment directly from a glue-maker.

The rice, which is thought to have entered Japan from China and Vietnam, may have been contaminated with the pesticide methamidophos or with the aflatoxin mould. It was originally sold to Mikasa by the Agriculture Ministry, however. Although Japan is self-sufficient in rice, it is obliged to import thousands of tonnes of rice each year under its World Trade Organisation duties. A large proportion of that grudgingly imported rice is sold for animal feed, glue and a variety of other low-grade uses.

Although the scandal has yet to spark any widespread poisoning incidents, it has sent another shiver through a society that used to be trusting of its food industry but has endured numerous scandals.

In most cases the scandals have been the result of dramatic cost-cutting measures.

The Agriculture Ministry accused Mikasa last week of selling the inedible rice in the name of “huge profits”. The past 12 months have been a mixture of extremes. Tokyo was recognised by the gourmets of the Michelin guide as having the greatest concentration of starred restaurants in the world. Its high-end food products - everything from miso soup to malt whisky - formed the core of a new export model that the Government was keen to push.

The scandals, however, have come thick and fast, including incidents where food was sold long after its best-before dates, fraudulent labelling of meat and tainted ingredient scandals at some of the best-known Japanese brands.

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