A homemaker in Nara piles up toilet paper at her home. After a story appeared in The Asahi Shimbun about a woman who had purchased two year's worth of toilet paper, shoppers converged on a supermarket in Senri New Town, Osaka, on Nov. 1. The following day, an 83-year-old woman broke a bone in her leg after being pushed to the floor by a crowd of shoppers in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture.

Shoppers in Tokyo buy toilet paper in bulk in December 1973. Although there was no real shortage of toilet paper, reports about mass buying spread to other parts of Japan, leading to similar scenes of shoppers buying up toilet paper. Some outlets were forced to place limits on the number of rolls each customer could buy.

Shoppers at a supermarket in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward form a long line to buy sugar. The price of various products rose due to the oil shortage, including such daily necessities as detergent, cooking oil, shoyu and kerosene. The measures taken by Middle Eastern petroleum producers led to a fourfold increase in petroleum prices over a few months. Japan's dependence on imported petroleum led to large increases in wholesale and consumer prices through 1974.