Photo/Illutration Customers wait in front of a Japanese sushi restaurant in Hong Kong’s Jordan district on Sept. 21. (Koichiro Ishida)

HONG KONG--Hong Kong’s voracious appetite for Japanese seafood remains undiminished despite stricter inspections that have sharply delayed customs procedures after Tokyo began releasing treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex a month ago.

At 7 p.m. on a recent weekday, 50 or so people were waiting in front of an outlet of a major Japanese sushi restaurant chain in the busy Jordan district, dotted with around 20 sushi restaurants, in the Kowloon Peninsula.

A 65-year-old resident who came with his wife saw no point in worrying too much about the effects the treated water might have on fish and shellfish.

“I feel the Chinese government response is politically motivated,” said a woman on a business trip from mainland China. “But my friends in China do not have access to overseas information and have avoided Japanese food.”

Hong Kong authorities banned seafood imports from Fukushima and nine other prefectures, effective Aug. 24, the same day Japan began discharging filtered and diluted wastewater from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

The nine other prefectures are Miyagi, Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaraki, Gunma, Tochigi, Nagano and Niigata.

Despite the import restrictions, Toshio Himuro, president of the Hong Kong Japanese Restaurant Association, said, “Demand for Japanese food has not fallen.”

However, Himuro, who runs a seafood import company, is concerned that it now takes around three hours for customs inspections, compared with 30 minutes or so in the past.

In some cases, fresh fish and shellfish that arrives in the afternoon does not clear customs until the following morning.

The association put in a request to the Hong Kong government to increase the number of inspectors to speed up customs clearance.

Upscale Japanese-style restaurants in Hong Kong proved popular with their so-called Day Zero system under which seafood purchased at an early morning auction at a Japanese wholesale market is airlifted and served in the evening on the same day.

Still, a long wait at customs could result in restaurateurs staying clear of Japanese products.

Himuro’s company has seen sales fall about 20 percent this month because it has been unable to secure alternative sources for some Japanese food items.

“In case the import controls will remain in place over an extended period, measures to protect the market will be necessary, such as ensuring that only unrestricted products are packed (for the Hong Kong market),” Himuro said.

Last year, Japan exported marine products worth 75.5 billion yen ($509 million) to Hong Kong, the second-largest market after China.

Pearls topped the list with 17.3 billion yen, followed by fresh and dried scallops at 14.2 billion yen and sea cucumbers at 9.4 billion yen.

In Hong Kong and China, pearls are apparently not subject to the import restrictions because they are counted as jewelry, not marine products as under Japanese statistics.

At one of the world’s largest jewelry trade shows held in Hong Kong this month, Japanese pearl dealers reported sales were up by between 1.5 and 2-fold compared with pre-pandemic levels.

More than 90 percent of purchasers were Chinese, they said.

Chinese buyers said they stock overseas pearls in Hong Kong where they are imported tariff-free and send them to China.

A Japanese dealer said he was relieved by the brisk sales as he was initially worried whether Japanese pearls could even be sold to China.

Hong Kong’s import ban appears not to have affected scallops and sea cucumbers significantly because they primarily come from prefectures not covered by the ban.

Hokkaido and Aomori Prefecture have an approximately 98 percent share of scallop production in Japan, while Hokkaido and Aomori and Yamaguchi prefectures account for about 53 percent of sea cucumber output.

The president of a local trading company that imports about 2 billion yen worth of dried marine products such as scallops said sales remain the same as before Aug. 24 and that the reputation of the items is untarnished.

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