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The story
Mikio Date of the comedy duo Sandwichman pushed back on a web article claiming he “complained to the hospital,” during his radio show on the 7th — his first broadcast since returning from treatment for a cerebral infarction (stroke). According to Date, the only people he told that the hospital’s rice porridge wasn’t to his taste were his co-stars Takeshi Tomizawa and Hidetaka Kano; he insists he never said anything directly to a nurse or the hospital, and never had his meal swapped out. At the same time, on an earlier broadcast he’d said the porridge was served two days running and he didn’t touch it, and that from the next day he was switched to plain white rice — a detail now fueling debate on 5ch, split between those saying “that’s basically the same as complaining” and those arguing “venting to co-workers isn’t the same as demanding something from the hospital.”
11/7 (Sat) 2:12 PM
Mikio Date (52), of the comedy duo Sandwichman, appeared on the 7th on Nippon Broadcasting’s “Sandwichman The Radio Show Saturday” (Saturdays at 1 p.m.), which he hosts. He took issue with some online articles.
Date had been hospitalized after suffering a cerebral infarction (stroke), and returned to the show on the broadcast of the 31st of last month. On this episode he brought in fellow stroke survivor Koki Nasu of the duo Nasunakanishi as a guest, and the two agreed: “Since people like us, who happen to have some public platform, ended up getting sick like this, let’s keep talking about it openly — so everyone else out there can keep fighting too.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, probably this.
It went viral on X with people saying, "What a nuisance patient, getting his porridge swapped for rice! Guess brain illness really does leave you with aftereffects like getting selfish and short-tempered" — but turns out the truth is he just told his buddies he'd rather have white rice than porridge. He never said a word to the nurses, and it was never actually swapped.
It really adds up more than you'd think. I ended up just buying food from the convenience store in the hospital instead.
Even a beef bowl costs ¥500, so that's cheap, no? It's nutritionally balanced too. Though if all you're doing is lying there, two meals a day would be plenty.
You're not moving your body at all in there — do you really get that hungry?
The original article that went around, plus the posts X users spread, framed it as "Date threw a tantrum and complained to the hospital! Told the nurses the porridge was too gross to eat and got them to swap it for white rice!" But the truth is he just told his buddies in a private conversation that he'd rather have rice than porridge — never complained to the hospital or nurses, and never had anything swapped.
On the first day of hospitalization it's unsalted porridge, cooked down all gluey like paste so it's easy to digest — that's why it tastes bad.
Maybe the food at your house is just bad. Households that need a side dish just to get the rice down don't tend to notice how bland their own cooking is.
When your strength is down, you eat easily digestible food, and as you recover you gradually work back up to solid food — that way it's easier on the body. The dietitian and doctor consult with each other to build the menu around how much a patient should be eating at each stage, so it's not something you can just change on a whim. Though some people do sneak in food from visitors, or secretly buy stuff from the convenience store or hospital shop.
Isn't that… basically saying it, though?
Treating "telling a nurse directly to swap your meal" and "chatting with close colleagues about what you ate" as the same thing — Japanese reading comprehension really has cratered.
If he's talking about it on a nationally broadcast show, that's effectively no different from trashing them in public. Honestly, running a public smear campaign after being discharged is arguably worse than any direct patient-hospital exchange. He's probably just desperately trying to walk back the on-air complaint he made about the hospital last time, but can't bring himself to retract it outright.
If your body's asleep, the calories are asleep too, so that's basically zero calories, right? (joking)
You literally just said it lol
Exactly. Looking at Re: #81, he clearly did say it — but if all he did was gripe on the radio like "I hated it because I don't like porridge," that's not the same as "filing a complaint." What did he actually say on the air??
Apparently the porridge came two days in a row, and from the next day they switched him over to white rice.
Background and key points of debate
When hospitalized for a cerebral infarction, it’s generally standard to start with soft foods like porridge to prevent aspiration pneumonia, then gradually return to regular food as the patient’s condition improves. Several posters in the thread also pointed out that since meal plans are drawn up jointly by dietitians and doctors, they’re not normally changed same-day just because a patient would prefer something else. The sticking point here is that while Date himself insists he “never said anything to the nurses or the hospital, only to his co-stars,” an earlier broadcast had him saying the porridge came two days running and he didn’t eat it, and that he was switched to white rice starting the next day. Where exactly to draw the line between venting to close colleagues and directly demanding something from the hospital was left unclear — and it’s that ambiguity, reported by some web articles simply as a “complaint,” that’s now driving both his pushback and the split reaction on 5ch.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Geisokuho+) thread “Mikio Date: ‘I never said that! Complain to the hospital?’ — Furious at online articles over hospital food, demands correction.”
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