The manager of the Z-one supermarket, five minutes from Prada’s flagship store and in the heart of Tokyo’s chicest residential area, shrugs her shoulders and suggests margarine.

Japan, she says apologetically, has nearly exhausted its butter reserves. When the shop will next have any, she whispers, is anybody’s guess.

Even as the elderly shopkeeper explains the acute national butter shortage, she can barely believe her own words: Japanese farmers who once scoffed at the low prices of imported cattle feed have been crippled by the global rise in grain prices.

And a rich country that has not gone without anything it wanted on its plate for 35 years is suddenly panicking about food security.

Decades of urbanisation, complacency about food, burgeoning imports and dwindling self-sufficiency were once proud boasts. Suddenly, they look like liabilities. Japan, say analysts, is emerging as a useful proxy for what the food crisis could mean for developed economies because it has gone further down the road of reliance on global food markets — markets that now threaten to deliver turmoil.

To developing Asia — China and India particularly — Japan’s history of industrialisation offers solid clues about what will happen to food demand as meat-eating middle classes spring from an expanding economy. Chinese eat twice as much meat — 50kg (110lb) per year — as they did in the 1980s. Japan made that leap half a century ago.

For other developed nations, Japan’s reaction to global food shortages will illustrate what happens to a country whose population has far outgrown its farmland’s ability to support, whose agricultural population is elderly and disaffected, whose food self-sufficency rates are low, but whose palates have grown accustomed to exotic imports.

It has also demonstrated that the pressures driving world food prices higher can hit large, consolidated industries as hard as small Thai or Haitian farmers.

Once-reliable assumptions, such as that Japan was the export destination of choice for many food-producing countries, have evaporated in a new reality of ferocious competition between buyers.

More shocking than the — probably fairly brief — butter shortages is the speed with which catastrophe has struck an institution so old and well organised as the Japanese dairy industry. Just two years ago, Japan’s spring milk glut was so embarrassing that 1,000 tonnes were poured down the drain and farmers were forced to stand outside railway stations in Hokkaido handing out free cartons to passers-by.

Some dairies looked into ways to convert milk into burnable natural gas, there was simply so much of the white stuff.

Since then, Australian milk imports have fallen because of the country’s three-year drought and feed is much more expensive because grain prices have soared across the world.

Wealthy Japan faces low risk of starvation, food rioting or any of the associated social unrest which threaten much of the developing world. Japan’s people can absorb food price rises for the time being.

But Japan’s butter shortages have exposed an alarming effect of what economists at Goldman Sachs describe as the long-term, “structural” shift towards higher food prices currently being felt: that many of the existing arrangements crafted by wealthier nations to feed their populations are now in peril.

Japan, its leading food importers say, will inevitably take a step backwards in the food it eats. “The time will come,” says Akio Shibata, the director of the Marubeni Institute and one of Japan’s foremost experts on food supply, “when the Japanese people will realise that they will not have the quality, taste and prices of food they are used to.”

At the root of the problem, not just for Japan, is the historic diminution of the world’s wheat and corn inventories. It is a situation, says Michael Lewis, head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank, which “shows how precarious a system can become when inventories get low and the sensitivity to price spikes explodes”.

With only a month’s worth of corn and wheat inventories remaining, the world’s food system has lost its cushion. And wealth does not guarantee insulation.

So even as Tokyo’s restaurants celebrate their world-beating haul of Michelin stars, a government survey found last week that 40 per cent of Japanese are dismayed by a deterioration in the quality of their food.

Takashi Hagemura is not surprised. Where once the world was a buyer’s market for a strong yen, Japan has fallen victim, says the owner of the Ren noodle restaurant in Shibuya, to movements in global food markets over which it no longer has any real control. China’s growing middle class has developed a taste for coffee that has created a demand on a scale that the old market was barely prepared for.

Vietnamese farmers, quick to spot a cash crop that they could readily produce in bulk, diverted their activities to coffee growing and, inadvertently, slashed their exports of the pepper that used to be grown on the same land. Pepper prices, as charged to noodle restaurants in Tokyo, have surged by nearly 80 per cent and, desperate to keep his prices competitive, Mr Hagemura now, regretfully, puts less into his noodle soup.

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