Kirk here with a follow-up to William’s posts about what this Asahi article is calling Kumamoto’s “clam scam.” It’s a fascinating, and also rather disturbing, issue in a number of ways. For quite a long time now, imported live clams have been given a quick bath in Kumamoto’s waters both to reinvigorated them and, more importantly, to make it possible to stamp them, illegally, as “produced in Kumamoto.” Recently, TBS’s Hodo Tokushuu did an exposé on the issue. You can watch it on the web (though it is in Japanese):
https://www.tbs.co.jp/houtoku/archive/20220122_2.html
Hodo Tokushu (報道特集) is a very good-quality news program that features mini-documentaries (“tokushuu”) of over 20 minutes each. I’m a fan and I happened to see the Kumamoto clam exposé when it was first broadcast. One interesting thing is that this was all a well-known secret until TBS quite publicly spilled the beans. By that I mean that anyone who knew anything about Kumamoto’s clam (asari) industry knew that clam production had declined precipitously in previous decades but could also see that lots and lots clams were being sold throughout Japan with the “produced in Kumamoto” (熊本産) label. The discrepancy between production numbers and sales numbers was an obvious red flag but, for the most part, most media outlets and politicians chose not to see what was going on.
In its recent exposé, however, Hodo Tokushu laid everything out in the open – the emperor, er, make that “Kumamoto’s oyster industry,” has no clothes! Faced with a lot of obviously naked oysters politicians and media that have heretofore been complicit in the “hear no evil, see no evil” approach to the problem are suddenly indignant.
That’s my main point for this post. It’s true that it’s a very serious issue but a separate scandal that, as far as I can tell, isn’t being talked about is why government and the media have pretended not to see this for so long. In a way, that’s an even bigger scandal than what people in Kumamoto have done to try to make a living selling imported clams.
I’ll write about another important aspect of this issue some other day.
