Japan orders mass recall of Chinese meat products
TOKYO: The government said Friday that at least 175 people in Japan were sickened by insecticide-tainted dumplings from China, prompting supermarkets to pull Chinese-made meat products from their shelves while Tokyo pressed Beijing to improve food safety.
Newspaper headlines warned of a national panic as hundreds more people complained of dizziness and nausea after eating dumplings and other Chinese-made foods. As of Friday, a dozen Japanese food processing companies said they had issued recalls for at least 59 meat products imported from China, from beef jerky to pork chops.
All those products came from the same Chinese company that produced the tainted dumplings, Tianyang Food Processing in Hebei Province, the Health Ministry said. While pesticide has only been found in the dumplings, the ministry said it had halted sale of all the Chinese company's products.
The prime minister and other leaders tried to reassure the public that the steps were enough to ensure the safety of food in Japan, which imports more Chinese food than the United States. But as public opinion appeared at times to carry a tinge of hysteria, a half dozen large supermarket and department store chains announced that they had taken all Chinese-made processed foods off their shelves, even products not made by Tianyang.
"We withdrew them just to be on the safe side," said Hisae Kajiwara, a spokeswoman for the department store operator Daimaru.
The dumpling contamination appears the latest blow to global confidence in the safety of Chinese goods, following recent discoveries of dangerous chemicals in everything from leukemia medicine to toys. But the reaction has been particularly strong in Japan, a heavily urbanized country that imports more than half of its food supply.
The contamination also highlighted problems in oversight of Japan's own food companies, which have recently been hit by a series of homegrown scandals involving contaminated and mislabeled food products. The company that sold most of the contaminated dumplings, Japan Tobacco, has come under criticism for failing to begin the recall until a full month after the first known illness, in late December.
Health officials also scrambled to explain how thousands of tons of contaminated meat products were allowed into Japan, which is supposed to have some of the world's toughest checks on imported food.
"We are doing all we can to get a grasp of the current situation and plan countermeasures," Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said.
"What's most important now is information gathering and crisis management."
In New York, the Japanese Consulate posted a warning on its Web site that small quantities of the tainted dumplings may also have been brought into the United States.
In Japan, the problem first became public on Wednesday, when JT Foods, a unit of Japan Tobacco, the country's largest cigarette company, issued a recall of frozen dumplings that the authorities initially said had sickened eight people. Some of them were hospitalized for symptoms including vomiting and stomach pain, which were severe enough to put one victim, a 5-year-old girl, into a brief coma, Health Ministry officials said.
On Friday, government officials raised the number of known illness cases to 175 and ordered checks to ensure potentially tainted products were not served in school lunches. According to the Health Ministry, the dumplings contained an agricultural pesticide, methamidophos, which is used in China but is not common in Japan.
Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters that Tokyo was urging Beijing to fully investigate the poisoning to avoid damage to economic ties between the two Asian countries. The Chinese Embassy in Tokyo issued a statement saying that the Chinese police were investigating the case and that China was responding in "a spirit of responsibility toward consumers."
Local media have given the matter intensive coverage, while restaurants have posted signs and schools have sent letters reassuring parents that they do not use the tainted products. Japan has had a series of scares involving pesticides on Chinese products, starting with spinach six years ago.
But the Health Ministry also clearly felt under pressure to explain its handling of the dumpling contamination. The ministry has been criticized for failing to stop a string of domestic food safety scandals involving the sale of mislabeled meats, outdated sweet bean cakes and contaminated milk.
Health Minister Yoichi Masuzoe, blamed Japan Tobacco for the slow response, saying the company had failed to inform it when the first illness cases appeared. The ministry said that the Tokyo city government also learned of three people getting sick from dumplings in early January, but took no action because Japan Tobacco said the illnesses were just an isolated case.
Ryohei Sugata, a spokesman for Japan Tobacco, said it took time for the company to realize that the illnesses in different parts of Japan were related, and caused by an agricultural pesticide. Sugata said Japan Tobacco had recalled 48,000 boxes of dumplings, worth some $95 million. In all, the Health Ministry said it has ordered the halt of sales of 3,845 tons of mostly meat products made by Tianyang.
Japan orders mass recall of Chinese meat products
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