Since May, the long-awaited long holidays and legal holidays have started to increase. In this season of warm spring flowers and breeze, go to the beach and enjoy a seafood dinner has become the first choice of many people travel.
But at this time of the year when seafood is at its freshest, the country’s major official websites have issued an emergency notice calling on everyone to stop collecting, buying, selling and eating mussel seafood such as sea rainbows. This is because this type of seafood, in the spring and summer season is very susceptible to paralytic shellfish toxins. Ingested by the human body will cause food poisoning, severe respiratory distress and even death and kidney failure.
Once the news came out, many of the long-awaited seafood dinner eaters heart cold half. Although the sashimi mussels are delicious, but for their own safety, or not necessary for food injury. The virus carried in the body of this seafood, is really that powerful? In this matter, once because of the accidental ingestion of the virus carrying a large number of injuries caused by Japan, must be very right to speak.
As one of the world’s most sound and complete countries in terms of food safety management laws and regulations, Japan treats ingredients that can be traced back to the individual producer, a system that many people admire. But the establishment of these mature acts and processes is also based on a bloodbath once caused by food safety ……
At the end of April 2021, Masahiro Konishi, who lives in Tonami, Toyama Prefecture, Japan, once again went to a cemetery near his home to burn incense and pray for his wife and mother-in-law, a habit he has maintained for a full decade.
Every year at this time, Masahiro Konishi prepares the flowers that his wife and mother-in-law liked before they died and goes to the cemetery with his two children. In addition to cleaning and mowing the graves, he also tells the two deceased about the progress of the case. What he couldn’t let go of was the fact that ten years had passed without any substantial change in the case.
In 2011, Masahiro Konishi celebrated his eldest daughter’s 17th birthday by bringing his wife, two children and mother-in-law to Tonami restaurant, a restaurant chain located near their home, to celebrate her 17th birthday on April 23. The family’s happiness that day is still vivid in my mind. Soon after eating the beef sashimi ordered by the eldest daughter, the family suffered from diarrhea and vomiting, abdominal pain and gastrointestinal bleeding. After being sent to resuscitation, his wife and mother-in-law passed away due to serious illness, and the two children also suffered from serious sequelae, relying on drugs and dialysis for ten years to maintain their lives.
This incident cast a shadow of tragedy over the otherwise happy and prosperous Masahiro Konishi family. The death of the two women in the family left those who survived grieving. The eldest daughter even blamed herself for the death of her mother and grandmother because of her own birthday.
For ten years, Masahiro Konishi has been hoping that the company operating the restaurant chain and the ingredient supplier would step up to the plate for follow-up. However, the two companies, which were the parties to the accident, have not yet offered any form of comfort to Masahiro Konishi’s family in the form of condolences or grave visits.
Five years ago, Masahiro Konishi was summoned by the police and went to the police department for an update of his statement. There, he saw an important exhibit that he had kept for ten years – a blood sample left by his wife. This blood sample of only a few milliliters made Masahiro Konishi feel that his wife was still alive on earth. It also inspired him to continue to fight against the accident party all the way to appeal.
However, in October last year, Masahiro Konishi learned that the Toyama Prefectural Court had decided not to conduct a new appeal or search for evidence against the party involved in the accident. This meant that his wife’s blood samples would no longer have a meaningful existence and would be uniformly destroyed in the future.
Upon hearing this news, Masahiro Konishi’s mental pillar that had been in place collapsed immediately. After the blood sample disappeared, all traces of his wife’s existence in the world were also eliminated, and the distance between himself and her became more and more distant. Whenever Masahiro Konishi thought about this, he dared not think about how to live his future life.
Like Masahiro Konishi, Hidetoshi Kubo, who took his family to the Tonami restaurant “Yakiniku Restaurant Ebisu” to celebrate his youngest son’s birthday, Dagui Kubo, on April 23, his son’s 14th birthday.
After returning home from eating raw beef sashimi, his youngest son began to vomit and suffer from abdominal pain and convulsions. After being taken to the hospital, he was diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
After nearly six months of treatment, he died in October of that year due to the lack of effective drugs and interventional procedures.
After Dagui’s death, the Kubo Hidetoshi family’s time stopped at that moment, and they often imagined that if Dagui were still alive, he would have been a university student entering society. Caught up in this nostalgia, the Kubo family no longer had a reason to be happy and joyful.
After being notified that no charges would be filed against the accident party, Hidetoshi Kubo chose to continue collecting evidence to disclose to the outside world in order to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
In addition to the five people who died from the infection, the raw beef food poisoning incident caused irreversible physical damage to hundreds of victims.
Ms. Yuko, a 26-year-old Tokyo-based company OL, went to the Takaoka branch of Yakiniku Restaurant Ebisu with three high school classmates 10 years ago for a dinner party. After eating sashimi, all three of them suffered from vomiting, abdominal pain and other poisoning. After being taken to the hospital, they were treated with a dialysis program, in addition to interventional tube cutting and gastric lavage.
It took more than two weeks of ICU treatment for the three to gradually regain consciousness. For the next four years, they required weekly hemodialysis and anti-spasm suppressant medication to maintain them.
Such treatment not only put a tremendous burden on their bodies, but the whole family felt a tremendous amount of stress mentally as well. Because of the fear of relapse, Yuuko had to choose a school close to her home to facilitate dialysis treatment while she was in college. At the time of her diagnosis, Yuuko’s parents had not yet retired, so they had to quit their jobs and go home in a hurry to take care of her medical care.
To this day, Yuuko worries about her medical history when she is employed or on a blind date, and her personality has become more introverted step by step.
The other victim, a 37-year-old man, did not have serious sequelae after being taken to the hospital, but he also suffered from PTSD, and to this day, he is afraid to eat meat, and his family rarely buys seafood and shellfish.
The food poisoning incident ten years ago caused a huge loss to the Japanese restaurant industry, and the psychological impact on the public is difficult to estimate. In the two days following the incident alone, more than 300 people called to claim they were feeling ill.
Raw beef, which had been popular, also disappeared from tables for a long time. Some yakiniku restaurants were affected by the incident, and there were massive closures.
The police in Toyama and Fukui prefectures have set up a joint search headquarters to collect evidence from the head office of the yakiniku restaurant chain and a meat wholesale company in Itabashi, Tokyo, which supplies beef to the company.
On the other hand, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has set specific penalties for sanitary standards for raw food meat. The Toyama Prefectural Court also ruled that the operating company should pay a civil trial compensation of 169 million yen to the families of all the victims.
However, many of the victims’ families were disappointed when the Toyama Prefectural Court ruled that the company would not be prosecuted, despite a petition by the bereaved families, including Masahiro Konishi, and 25,000 people, to hold the company criminally liable. It is believed that during the past ten years, everyone has made unimaginable efforts to actively collect evidence, and the civil judgment alone cannot make up for the lack of heart of the families.
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