It will be interesting to see how this affects the Japanese rice farmers. The prices are high because the farmers don't have 'enough' rice to sell and thus have to raise the price to get the total amount of money they need for rice farming to be profitable. If the government artificially lowers prices by pulling rice from the stockpiles, that won't increase the amount of rice that rice farmers have to sell. They will have to sell the same amount of rice for less money, possibly driving them from the market permanently and lowering the amount of available rice in the future even further.