“The wastewater is going to be discharged for 30 years, so does this mean Hong Kongers won’t be eating Japanese food until then?"
Thomas Liu, an avid Instagram user who has been reviewing restaurants under the handle @hkfoodiexblogger for the past 10 years, gets ready to visit a new omakase restaurant in Causeway Bay just a week after Japan released radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Despite global press admonishing the country’s decision, Liu remains unfazed. “I trust the UN's report on safety. I don’t see a lot of fear in the city: just look at Sushiro, the queues are still very long,” he says, referring to the budget-friendly restaurant chain that delivers sushi on a conveyor belt. “Hongkongers are going to forget about this in a few months. I expect the response will be like that of the nuclear accident 12 years ago.”
The accident he speaks of was the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that wrecked the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, contaminating the water within with highly radioactive material. Since the incident, power plant operator Tepco has been cooling the plant’s fuel rods with more water—today, that amount is enough to fill more than 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. In anticipation of the possibility of history repeating itself should another earthquake strike, Japan began releasing the treated wastewater into the sea on August 24, kickstarting a process that’s due to last three decades.
Since then, the country has been desperately reassuring the world of its food safety, with prime minister Fumio Kishida going so far as to eat sashimi sourced from the waters surrounding Fukushima in a highly publicised press conference.
Yet China, which imported US$600 million worth of aquatic products from Japan in 2022, has responded by prohibiting all seafood from Japan. Hong Kong has followed suit but only for seafood, seaweed and sea salt products from the prefectures of Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, and Saitama. The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, which endorses Japan’s move, says the fear is unwarranted. Its independent study showed tritium levels from the wastewater to be far below the World Health Organisation’s limit for drinking water. Indeed, almost half a month after the ban, all Japanese imports into Hong Kong have passed the Centre for Food Safety’s surveillance for radioactivity, a procedure that has been ongoing for more than a decade.
On the ground, Japanese restaurants in Hong Kong remain optimistic, crossing their fingers that panic will soon subside as more research comes to light. Some are even making the best of the situation by educating customers that authentic Japanese cuisine isn’t just defined by the country’s ingredients.
Alex Bellafronte, operations director for Asia and the Middle East at Aqua Restaurant Group, says that of the 300 daily covers at the group’s Japanese restaurant Shiro, less than 20 guests have raised questions about the source of ingredients since the ban, though he admits that both Shiro and Italian-Japanese establishment Aqua saw a drop of 10 to 15 per cent in business since the wastewater release. The group has found alternatives for its seafood: tuna now comes from Spain, salmon from Norway, and shrimp from Canada. The one exception is kinki fish, which Bellafronte says he’s yet to find a comparable source to Japan’s and thus is no longer on the menu.
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“For sure there are differences when we use ingredients from different countries, but we take alternatives with a similar flavour profile. For example, Italian sea urchin is too strong in flavour compared to Japanese sea urchin, so we use alternatives from Canada,” he says, adding that the transition was relatively smooth as the group has long sourced from around the world. So far, he has yet to see an uptick in prices from global exporters.
“We also need to remember that not everything that comes from Japan is really caught in Japanese waters. It may be processed and packaged in Japan; it’s only with this ban that this is really coming to light,” Bellafronte adds.
According to the UK’s latest Market Research Report on Japan published in 2020, Japan spent 224 billion yen on Atlantic salmon alone from countries like Norway, USA, Russia and Chile. These were sold at restaurants both budget and high-end.
Executive chef Kouya Takahashi from Yashima, a kaiseki-style omakase restaurant in Central, is turning the ban into an opportunity to highlight seasonality over place of origin. Prior to August, a small percentage of Yashima’s fridge was already stocked with seafood from Europe and even Hong Kong. Since the ban, Takahashi has replaced sea salt with rock salt to offer customers a peace of mind. Shellfish is also taken off the menu until he finds a better source than Miyagi, one of the banned prefectures. Takahashi says his made-to-order cuisine lets him be creative with new sources. Kinmedai from Tokyo and even fruits from Nagano were axed to make way for Russian sea urchin, and sanma (Pacific saury) is now sourced from Iwate prefecture.
“Even omakase restaurants in Japan don’t always use ingredients from its home turf,” says Takahashi. “Hong Kong ingredients like shrimp can be better than the ones from Japan; likewise with abalone from Europe. Of course, most of our ingredients are still from Japan but omakase is about balance, so ingredients must complement each other.” On Yashima’s books, however, business has dropped by 20 per cent since the ban. Takahashi hopes the situation will improve by Christmas but adds that he’s been toying with the idea of shifting the restaurant’s focus to cooked meat from unaffected areas like Kagoshima.
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