Last week, Hiroshi Desaki resigned as president of Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co. to take responsibility for a scandal over menus at the company's restaurants. It has been discovered that since 2006, many of the dishes served at the restaurants were misleadingly presented as containing expensive ingredients when, in fact, they were quite ordinary. Hankyu Hanshin has set aside ¥110 million to reimburse customers who purchased any of the 47 misrepresented dishes between March 2006 and September 2013. As of last Monday, the company had paid out ¥22.6 million.
Food mislabeling scandals are common in Japan. Right now there are at least three others in the news, involving Chinese eel and Chinese rice being sold as domestically grown products and horse meat from Canada being sold as horse meat from Kyushu. The hotel scandal isn't substantively different except for one detail: Though Desaki said during his resignation press conference that his company "betrayed our customers," he remained ambiguous about intention.
The company has insisted that the misleading information on the menus was a "mistake" and not a "deception," which would imply purpose. Desaki said that "it can't be helped" the public will interpret the mislabeling as deception, which is not the same thing as saying that it was.