Are the famously fastidious Japanese just imagining flies in their soup cans? No, says Hiroko Mizuhara, secretary-general of the Consumers Union of Japan, “There have been strange objects all along, but consumers settled complaints with makers individually. What’s new about the phenomenon is that they talk to the press, go public and try to share the problems.” That’s too generous, says Koichiro Fujita, a professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University whose best-selling books warn that the Japanese obsession with cleanliness is breaking down their immune systems and threatening to create a new generation of biological weaklings. Fujita believes the “strange object” phenomenon has “become like a group hysteria.”
Yet the sightings began with a very real outbreak of food poisoning. More than 14,500 people fell ill in June and July after drinking milk products made by Snow Brand. An investigation found that a power failure had knocked out refrigeration units, allowing bacteria to grow in raw milk at Snow Brand, a nationally famous and trusted company. Within weeks food-company executives were parading to podiums across Japan to apologize for this or that “strange object.”
It looked like the scare had bottomed out in June when a rural housewife plucked a dead gecko out of a can of baby corn. That low lasted until a suburban Tokyo woman found a dead lizard along with its droppings in potato chips packaged by the Calbee Foods Co. “Though it may not carry germs and there is no health hazard,” says a Calbee official, “we recalled the chips packages because consumers don’t feel comfortable about what’s happened.”
As one unsavory discovery led to another, some companies were battered by multiple complaints. The Nichiro Corp. fielded calls about a fly in its salmon flakes, a piece of vinyl in its sardines and a stainless-steel bolt in its canned meat sauce. For sheer variety, Nichiro was topped perhaps only by the Yamazaki Baking Co., which endured discoveries of a bee, a piece of plastic, a button, hair, insects and other extras in its bread and desserts.
The good news was that there seem to have been few attempts to cover up. An in-house investigation by the Meiji Milk Co. revealed that the rubber slivers in its cheese had flaked off the nozzle of a production machine. Kirin Beverage pulled 617,460 cans of tomato juice from store shelves after a woman found a dead fly in one can. The West Japan Railway Food Service Net closed down a factory for a monthlong renovation after two passengers found flies in its box lunches. If anything, says Fujita, the real concern is that food packagers will respond to the summer scare by loading up products with sterilizers and disinfectant. At least a dead gecko is organic.
