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The story
The spark was a Yahoo News article describing how French, Dutch, and Australian visitors to Japan were struck by how different Japanese food tasted. It set off a wave of responses on 5ch’s News Speed+ board. Tuna was the biggest talking point: responding to testimony that “French tuna tastes like blood or iron,” commenters speculated about whether the difference comes down to whether the fish had its blood drained and spine severed (chinuki/shinkei-jime) or to differences in freezing and thawing technique. The thread also brought up the old story that fatty tuna (toro) was unpopular in the Edo period, and the spread of raw-fish culture in Europe — with many posters pointing less to a simple difference in taste buds and more to gaps in distribution and processing technology.
“It basically tastes like blood or iron” — “I can’t eat the stuff back home anymore” — French, Dutch, and Australian visitors stunned by the Japanese food that tasted nothing like what they knew at home
Japanese food is beloved the world over. But it seems quite a few people are surprised by how different it tastes when they try the “real thing,” compared to the versions they’re used to back home.
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Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Nah, there's no way they don't know.
They do blood-draining, spinal severing (shinkei-jime), and rapid chilling as standard practice.
Isn't it just a gap in the rapid-freezing equipment and thawing tech/know-how?
>I heard that in Japan, fishermen drain the blood right after catching the fish
Doesn't sound like the fishermen over there are doing that?
It's just not standard practice in France.
It's only recently started catching on, and mainly for high-end restaurants.
Their seafood freshness/quality certification body was only set up in 2022.
Freezing didn't help either — not even cats would eat the fatty tuna, they just threw it out
Seems that way. It had a strong smell and spoiled fast, and apparently once the "zuke" method (marinating in soy sauce) was invented, they could tone down the smell.
There's Niçoise salad and stuff like that
"In my country~"
Sounds like they only just learned what octopus tastes like, from takoyaki…
What a disgrace to Christians
Does the octopus in takoyaki even have any flavor? Isn't it just chewy and tough?
Spoken like someone who's never worked a day on a tuna boat, know-it-all
So you really did end up on that boat to pay off a debt, huh?
Give us the details, lol
Now that you mention it, yeah. Mediterranean tuna shows up in supermarkets plenty. Since both are just frozen fish that get thawed out, I don't see how there'd be a real difference.
Maybe the fishermen are secretly Italian, lol
And their seafood platters are just shrimp and shellfish anyway — French people clearly aren't great with raw fish!
Fresh raw bluefin? You can get that anywhere, anytime
Who wants bluefin in summer anyway. In summer you eat bigeye tuna (indo-maguro).
French tuna would taste way better too if they drained the blood.
The West has meat-handling down, but when it comes to handling fish, Japan's definitely ahead.
They do blood-draining and spinal severing on tuna too, you know
Japanese people just happen to prefer food that's "no smell, no strong flavor, light and clean."
Foreigners don't necessarily feel the same way.
Don't mistake that for "Japan is just more advanced."
Over there they mostly cook everything through.
And tuna really does get a strong smell once you cook it.
What about marinated fish, or seafood tartare…?
Some parts of Scandinavia apparently had a custom of eating raw salmon, but using raw fish in things like marinades and carpaccio came about through the influence of Japanese cuisine.
Eating salmon raw like that is basically a non-starter unless it's ruibe (frozen-then-thawed raw fish), lol
If we're talking about who influenced whom, no argument there. But if the question is whether the food culture exists at all, then yeah, it exists. If you're only going to call the origin a "culture," let's have that conversation.
But humans never eat the most nutritious part of anything:
・Onion skins
・The white part of watermelon rind
・Pumpkin guts
・Outer cabbage leaves
・Mandarin orange peel
・Pineapple core
・Pumpkin seeds
・Shrimp and crab shells
You actually want to eat the gross parts? I don't get it.
Though I do kind of like mandarin peel.
Shrimp and crab shells are actually huge in French cuisine as a sauce base. Genuinely delicious. Sauce Américaine is in that same family — it's sold canned, and you can even get it in Japan.
I took someone who'd been eating a ¥50,000 omakase in Singapore to a neighborhood sushi place running maybe ¥10,000-something a head, and they were speechless.
Though it cuts both ways — try eating raw pork in Japan and see what happens.
Don't Germans eat raw pork?
Granted it's made under insanely strict sterile conditions, but still, Germans are wild too.
Same deal as Japanese people eating raw eggs.
It lowers the risk by ruling out parasites and such, but people still regularly get food poisoning from it.
Background and key points of this discussion
In Japan, chinuki (blood-draining) and shinkei-jime (spinal severing) are standard processing methods for large fish like tuna, developed to curb spoilage and fishy odor — and the thread cited doing this “right on the boat, immediately” as a uniquely Japanese strength. On the French side, posters noted that a certification body for seafood freshness and quality was only set up in 2022, an interesting episode highlighting the historical gap in processing technology. That said, opinions on what actually drives the taste difference varied — blood-draining, tuna species and origin, freezing/thawing method — and the thread never landed on a single consensus. The anecdote about toro being shunned in the Edo period also came up, but that too is based on individual posters’ recollections rather than any cited historical source.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “French people: “Japanese tuna is delicious!” — shocked: “French tuna tastes like blood, a totally different thing”.”
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