Japan Navigator

There is such a lot of noise in the press, also outside Japan, about a recent spate of food scandals, that you would almost take the Buddhist injunction of putting a warm stone on the stomach to fend off the pangs of hunger seriously and vegetate on an austere diet of green shoots. That in itself may not be bad for your spiritual life, but I do not believe there is so much wrong with our food lives in Japan. They certainly are not in danger - in contrast to the Snow Brand milk poisoning of 2000, this time nobody has died and as far as I know nobody has been ill. I have the impression it is the usual “much ado about nothing” the Japanese (and other) media are so fond of, all copying each other, adding new voices to the chorus, like so many chickens without heads (to stay in the food sphere).

This time there are two types of problems. One is faking the origin of products, mislabeling ordinary stuff as something very expensive. Roosting chickens have been sold as the expensive free ranging type, Australian beef as the exquisite marbled Japanese variety, Nile tilapia as sea bream etc. These are all economic delicts and should be punished as such. People are being fooled by restaurants and supermarkets. But the only danger they run is that they pay through the nose while chasing after a food mirage - in the meantime, the interesting fact is that almost nobody noticed the difference in taste.

The second problem often is not even really that serious: companies and shops tamper a bit with the expiry date of their products. Now it is a fact that expiry dates in risk-averse Japan are set so strictly that many products can still be enjoyed well past that date. In other countries in the world, consumers normally buy products just past their date without giving it a second thought. In fact, in Japan a lot of food that is still in perfect shape is now being thrown away and wasted. Much maligned confectionary maker Akafuku froze boxes of sweets and then labeled them as being produced on the day of defrosting and shipping; it did so for 30 years, but consumers never noticed it nor did anyone complain about the taste. So what is the problem? Unfortunately, the 300 year old shop is now probably going out of business…