Fears and suspicion of a Hong Kong ban on Japanese seafood that's triggered by politics rather than genuine safety concerns

  

Tuna from Shiogama at a high end sushi-ya in Hong Kong

may soon be a thing of the past :( 

 

Back in May 2019, I spent time in the Tohoku region of Japan.  I had such a great time there that I've been telling myself that I want to go back there again on my next Japan trip.  And while visits to places like Geibikei, Hiraizumi and Matsushima were trip highlights, I also loved the trip because of the great food I had, including over at a sushi-ya in Sendai and the seafood wholesale market in Shiogama, a port-town famed for having the largest catch of tuna in all of Japan. 

Flashforward a few years later when I was having dinner at a high end sushi restaurant here in Hong Kong.  Dinner that night included some tasty morsels of tuna (including prime otoro).  After having a particularly delightful piece of sushi, I asked the chef where the tuna was from.  After he said Miyagi (prefecture), I asked him whether he had got the tuna from Shiogama and mentioned that I had been there and, specifically, its seafood wholesale market.  Whereupon the chef rushed to the kitchen and came back with the chunk of tuna pictured above -- to proudly show me that the tuna we had eaten had come from Shiogama!

 

So imagine my horror upon reading this week that Hong Kong's Secretary for the Environment and Ecology, Tse Chin-wan, said this past Wednesday that "the Hong Kong government would immediately ban food imports from Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, and Saitama prefectures if the 1.33 million cubic metres of groundwater, rainwater and water used for cooling at the Fukushima site are released".  And by the way, Miyagi isn't only famous for Shiogama and tuna but also oysters!  As for the other prefectures on the list: Ibaraki is famed for its natto, Nagano for its apples, Niigata for its rice, Chiba for its nasshi pears (think Funassyi!) and so on, and so forth!

And finding out that it was "only" the seafood (“live, frozen, refrigerated and dried products or those preserved in other ways,” as well as sea salt and seaweed) that Hong Kong planned to ban from these 10 prefectures didn't make me feel better.  This because: for one thing, the tuna and oysters of Miyagi still would be included in such a ban; and for another, this revelation made the proposed decision seem even more preposterous on account of four of the ten mentioned prefectures (Nagano, Saitama, Gunma and Tochigi) being landlocked (and therefore having no seafood, right?).  

A closer look at this decision shows that Hong Kong would be following Mainland China's lead in banning food products from the 10 prefectures.  One key difference though is that whereas "the mainland... has banned all food products from the 10 prefectures", Hong Kong is limiting its ban to seafood.  Great, except whoever has made the decision for Hong Kong didn't seem to look all that carefully at what the 10 prefectures that the Mainland Chinese have decided to ban food products from and just went with their selection... and/or didn't seem to lack knowledge of Japanese prefectural geography!

 

This kind of carelessness and ignorance should be inexcusable given that the decision made affects a great many people.  "Among 18,000 licensed restaurants in Hong Kong, about 10 percent - or 1,800 to 2,000 - are Japanese, federation president Simon Wong Ka-wo told The Standard" this week.  

 

At the very least, the Hong Kong government should think carefully what they actually will be implementing.  In the same The Standard piece, Martin Chan Keung, a member of the board of directors of the Hong Kong Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades was reported to have stated that "trade may slump by half once the ban actually takes place, and 30 percent of Japanese eateries in Hong Kong may fold within two to three months".  

 

He also urged the authorities to provide more -- and presumably more detailed -- guidelines, as more than 80 percent of Japanese food products are exported via Tokyo -- where Toyosu, the largest fish market in the world (not just Japan) is located. ""If goods come from outside those 10 prefectures but via the port in Tokyo, will they be allowed into Hong Kong, or what? We want more information on that," said Chan, who owns a Japanese restaurant." 

 

And then there's the question if this proposed ban is a political act (one intimidated to be so in a Nikkei Asia piece entitled "Hong Kong becomes China's 'wolf warrior' in Fukushima water fight") or one that truly is the result of food safety concerns. The case for the former includes it being so that "hours after [International Atomic Energy Agency] Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi defended the agency's approval as scientifically sound, [John Lee] said he believes "there is not enough evidence on the reliability and legality of discharging that contaminated water into the sea at this point."  As the article opined: "Lee sounded very much like the Chinese General Administration of Customs"!  

 

If the latter, check out this explainer (also produced by Nikkei Asia) on how the Fukushima power plant will release its radioactive water.  (In short: with greater care than one might expect would be the case in *cough* certain other countries.)

 

Incidentally, I found this bit from the "Hong Kong becomes China's 'wolf warrior" article to be interesting indeed: Hong Kong currently is "the only place outside Japan where fresh catches brought to Tokyo's Toyosu market in the morning are served as sashimi the same night."  So the sense I've long had that Hong Kong is second only to Japan with regards to the freshness of its sushi and sashimi is indeed correct!  But for how long more will this be the case?  Especially if the Hong Kong government decides to ban seafood shipped from Tokyo (one of the prefectures on its 10 prefectures list) -- something which, remember, Martin Chan Keung feels that the government has not (yet) made clear!