A policeman named Bakichi suspects that a farmer has been selling tainted meat and visits his farm. He discovers that the farmer has, against the law, recently sold flesh from a cow that died of tuberculosis. But Bakichi returns to the police station and falsely reports that the farmer buried the cow's body and sold only its hide.
I will return to this story about how poor-quality, and possibly dangerous meat has come to be consumed by humans.
These days, stories like this are legion. Perhaps the most shocking is the case of the Nagoya-based glue-maker Asai. Coming hot on the heels of the Mikasa Foods scandal, in which that company was found to have sold tainted rice as "edible" to 370 companies, the Asai case, now unfolding, compounds our anxiety about the safety of Japanese foodstuffs. This is rice we are talking about, the very staple of the Japanese diet.