We analyzed the domestic topic of genetically modified food in Japan by using text-mining techniques. We used KH Coder—free software for quantitative text analysis of the Japanese language—to analyze 1164 Japanese newspaper articles published between December 1988 and November 2018. Our text-mining analysis revealed that the number of articles on this topic increased in 1999 and 2000. Particularly in 1999, “labeling” was used frequently in newspapers, and in 2000, “safety” was used frequently. Four research periods (phases 1 to 4) were identified through the analysis of frequently appearing words with a focus on changes in the labeling system. Response analysis revealed that the debate on genetically modified food had focused on “labeling” and “safety” in phases 2 and 3. In addition, hierarchical cluster analysis showed that Group H (genetically modified food labeling and safety) was the principal category in phase 2. We used an analysis of co-occurrence networks to visualize the relationships of the words in group H in each of the four periods. The analysis showed clearly that there was an active debate that ranged from genetically modified food importation to the establishment of genetically modified food labeling (in phase 2), and then from the establishment of genetically modified food labeling to transfer of the food labeling business to government control (in phase 3). Also, it became clear that there was constant reporting about “safety”, but only temporary, intensive reporting about “labeling”.

In recent years, crowdfunding has attracted attention as a mechanism of financing new projects. Research has been conducted into the factors behind the success of crowdfunding, but there has been little research into crowdfunding in the agricultural sector. Therefore, here, we analyzed the status of use, and factors behind the success, of crowdfunding in agriculture, and we considered its future potential use in this field. We found that 66.7% of all respondents considered that crowdfunding had benefits not found in conventional funding, such as increased advertising effectiveness and more fans. We also found that the success factors were a low target amount, a large number of supporters, existence of options on giving larger contributions, and a large number of activity reports. However, the number of reward types, which was regarded as a success factor in previous research on non-agricultural crowdfunding, was not a success factor in agricultural projects. We found that e-mail was not a suitable dissemination tool for crowdfunding projects in agriculture. Furthermore, we found that social networking services such as Twitter and Instagram were not often used in agricultural crowdfunding. Also, people who succeeded in their projects—but not those who failed—greatly appreciated the use of crowdfunding in agriculture. Nevertheless, we found that not many people—including those who were successful—were planning to use crowdfunding again in the future.