A Nippon Food Inc. official took responsibility Thursday for ordering imported beef to be packaged as domestic so the company could receive government subsidies implemented after mad cow disease hit Japan last year.
"I ordered the deception," said Shunji Tanaka, chief of the marketing department at Nippon Food's Himeji branch in Hyogo Prefecture. "There was no instruction (to do so) from the parent company."
Nippon Food is a subsidiary of Nippon Meat Packers Inc., which is Japan's largest ham and sausage maker and is better known as Nippon Ham.
"We had excessive inventories at that time," Tanaka said by way of explanation as to why he ordered branch officials in October to repackage the beef.