Deadly Chinese dumplings - Japanese Ninja Style

This topic threatens to get away from me. First some background: Gyoza are wonderfully delicious dumplings, sometimes referred to as potstickers, originally brought over from China. They differ from both dumplings and potstickers enough to make them distinctly Japanese in my opinion. The best gyoza are the ones either hand-made by my friend in Shikaoi, which my mother has learned to make from her, that are filled with pork and lots of garlic and will be nice to come home to. Or the hand-made ones made at a local restaurant. They're crab filled and served with a secret sauce I think is sesame oil and miso that makes an out-of-this-world combination. I had a whole meal of them themselves a little while ago. Not healthy, I know, but I can now die happy.

Following the general trend of news from China lately, it should surprise exactly no one that pesticides have been found in packages of gyoza - organic phosphates to be exact - some quite toxic to humans, as in coma inducing. As Japanese news reporters stumble over complex chemical names, nationalists in Japan have been going crazy, citing all manner of conspiracy theories. Not to be left out, the Chinese government has also said it's being set up. As one can see, between the veracious Japanese media, where exactly the chemicals where found, who knew what when, and conspiracy theories, this story, as they say, has legs. Needless to say I subscribe to the conservative notion to never blame on maliciousness what can be blamed on incompetence.

The whole issue points to some interesting vulnerabilities in the Japanese food system: Japan is singular in the world for the amount of food it imports. I've read as high at 75%. Japan simply couldn't feed itself if we wanted anything other than rice. This ties Japan's food to the price of gas and makes imported food concerns especially troublesome. The price of domestically produced food versus imported food is also shocking. Looking at a grocery store flyer recently, about the only thing I can read fluently, peanuts were on sale. Hokkaido produced peanuts were four times as expensive as an equivalent Chinese produced brand. Even if Japan could produce all the food it needed, the economy would never support a four fold increase in the price of food. Everything would just collapse as the public turned their total income to buying food. No one I talked to ever buys chinese produced food (which is always clearly marked in Japan), so who is buying all this cheap imported food? I think restaurants and institutional facilities but I have never seen any exact data on this question.

The lurer of cheap Chinese labour is hard to ignore. In this case, the pre-packaged, flash-frozen gyoza was hand-folded. Previously, I had incorrectly assumed the Japanese company had invented some kind of robot to automatically fold millions of gyoza. I was surprised to see on TV images of the factory where 250 employees fold the gyoza by hand. Reinforcing this, the package even stated "hand-made" on the front of the package. This preys on our natural reflex to trust anything marked hand-made. Where this story goes from here I don't know? I'm sure we haven't heard the end of it. Will market forces work as predicated by academics as producers realize they are losing business because of the lack of safety standards or will the Chinese and World continue to follow the free market philosophy that got us here in the first place which states, profit before everything?