Population aging and a decrease in the number of food stores affect the daily food purchase of elderly people. One of the factors burdening the elderly is the distance to stores. In this study, we estimated the population for whom distance to the nearest fresh food store is over 500m in Japan. Owing to the unavailability of a reliable list of the relevant stores in Japan, we employed the grid-square statistics of Population Census and Census of Commerce. We used the probabilities of the relevant stores being more than 500m away from residences, assuming that a store and a person are uniformly distributed in the grid and that stores are located independently of one another. We estimated that, in Japan, 44 million people and above live over 500m from the nearest fresh food store. We also analyze the actual conditions of food accessibility on the basis of the result of all municipality consciousness survey. There is growing awareness that accessing food issues, on the other hand it is delay taking action.
