Tainted Rice Causes Food Scare in Japan

Japanese consumers are growing wary of food safety after Mikasa Foods admitted it sold tons of contaminated rice

by Hiroko Tashiro

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After an Osaka-based company was found early this month to have sold tons of tainted rice illegally for human consumption, Noriko Takada thought "Not again!" A series of food scandals, such as the fraudulent labeling of meat and sale of food after its use-by date, have convinced the 48-year-old Tokyo housewife that "people in the food industry care little about consumers' safety and more about making profits." "I love senbei [rice crackers] so much that it's possible I have eaten some made from tainted rice."

Even as China's tainted-milk scandal (BusinessWeek.com, 9/22/08) continues to spread, Japanese consumers like Takada worried about a food scare closer to home. Early this month, Mikasa Foods, a rice wholesaler in Osaka, admitted that it purchased a batch of contaminated rice from the government meant to be sold only as an inedible product for industry use. Mikasa then sold it to hundreds of companies across Japan to boost profits. The rice went into sake, shochu (distilled spirit), and rice crackers. Contaminated rice also went to more than 100 hospitals, homes for the elderly, and at least 46 schools.

Behind the current scare is polished white rice that has been found to contain pesticides or mold. The Japanese media are calling it jiko-mai, or problematic rice. The jiko-mai is imported and is the result of a deal Tokyo made with the World Trade Organization in 1995 to open its long-protected market to foreign-grown rice. Thanks to that agreement, Japan imports 770,000 tons of rice every year (BusinessWeek.com, 5/22/08) from the U.S., Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Australia. Because the Japanese appetite for rice has shrunk, much of that rice is kept in storage, where some gets moldy or rots. In 2006 the government found that 2,795 tons of rice in storage was contaminated with excess levels of the pesticide methamidophos, and a large volume of it was sold for industrial use. In the past five years, about 7,400 tons of stockpiled rice unfit for human consumption has been sold for industrial use.

Moldy Rice

Mikasa Foods has purchased jiko-mai more than 50 times directly from the government since 2003, amounting to some 1,779 tons in total, according to the Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries Ministry. In addition to the troubled rice it bought from the government, the company has bought 217 tons of moldy rice from Sumitomo.

On Sept. 6, Mikasa President Mitsuo Fuyuki admitted he gave instructions to resell the rice illegally and to keep two sets of books. "We knew we shouldn't have done it, but we did because of the tough management," said Fuyuki at a press conference in Osaka. He has hidden himself from public view since then.

As the scandal develops, other firms are being implicated. By Sept. 16, three more food companies—Asai, Ota Sangyo, and Shimada Kagaku Kogyo—were found by the agriculture ministry's inspection team to have illegally sold tainted rice, some of which was used for school lunches in Kyoto.

Companies have been able to find loopholes in the government's regulation of rice, says Kazunuki Oizumi, a professor specializing in agricultural management at Miyagi University in the northeastern Japanese city of Sendai. According to Oizumi, the agriculture ministry has streamlined the distribution system for domestically produced rice, making it mandatory to state clearly on a package the place and year of production and the quality of the rice. "But there are no rules in the distribution of rice [imported under the World Trade Organization], and there was room for dirty business practices," says Oizumi. "If it is grained rice as powder, it's difficult to track down who and what had been used."

Mislabeled Eels

This isn't the first such scandal in Japan.