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The story
A video showing Chinese napa cabbage being “chemically treated” with formaldehyde has gone viral, prompting Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare to say it is “still checking” whether the produce has entered Japan’s supply chain. On 5ch, posters worried about routes into children’s mouths, like school lunches, while others pointed to everyday Chinese-made foods — frozen gyoza, processed eel products — raising questions about how big the risk really is.
“Formaldehyde” Found in Chinese Napa Cabbage After “Chemical-Soaked” Video Spreads Online — Fallout Reaches South Korean Kimchi Too — What Does It Mean for Japan? Health Ministry Says “Still Checking”
Napa cabbage — a staple in hot pots, kimchi, and everyday cooking — is one of the most familiar vegetables on the dinner table.
On the 25th, in China, the world’s largest producer of the vegetable, a news crew witnessed cabbage being pulled from store shelves and thrown out.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
True for home cooking, but school lunches could be feeding this to kids without them having any say in it.
Who needs to go report when they've got plenty of "experts" sitting right there in-house?
When it hits close to home they'll just wheel out a commentator, gloss over it, and call it done.
Pretty sure frozen gyoza made with Chinese napa cabbage is on shelves everywhere.
"Meanwhile, China has for many years been gradually building a relatively rigorous end-to-end food safety and traceability system, including multiple stages such as soil testing, pesticide residue testing, finished-product inspection, and customs inspection."
Self-praise much.
Note the word "gradually." At least they're not telling a bald-faced lie — I guess that counts as progress lol
https://x.com/BlueHawk1378/status/2058535219771424853
The worker's getting exposed just from breathing the fumes.
Chinese napa cabbage barely circulates in Japan — never even heard of it being sold here — so if that's your worry, it's gotta be something else.
Frozen food, restaurants, retort pouches… like that Nagatanien miso soup that's been in the news lately.
It's not just China with the formaldehyde thing — Southeast Asia does the same. It's been standard practice there forever.
Their whole value system boils down to "does it make money or not." So they'll do something shady if it turns a profit — and sometimes they don't even register it as wrong in the first place.
① Frozen vegetables
② Onions
③ Green onions
④ Carrots
⑤ Wood ear mushrooms
⑥ Boiled bamboo shoots
⑦ Garlic
⑧ Eel
⑨ Frozen shrimp
⑩ Frozen gyoza / Chinese-style side dishes
Of all eel sold in Japan, about 89% is Chinese-made (2023). For processed products like kabayaki (grilled eel), a staggering ~99.6% is Chinese-made (2023).
Basically we're talking 90-100% Chinese-sourced across the board 😂
https://x.com/Ondoreahoka/status/2090356465060188503
Even people in China were speechless, saying "this is industrial-grade stuff." The horrifying "formalin eel."
https://bunshun.jp/articles/-/5204
lol
People won't buy it though.
Japan lost on price. "Cheap and a good deal" — meanwhile there's rice even Chinese consumers won't touch.
Same reason detergent was a big trend in Japan back in the day lol
For what it's worth, studies haven't confirmed a link between low-dose formaldehyde and cancer. If you only ate it occasionally you're probably fine. Eating it every day, though… who knows lol
No way that's related lol
Not eating enough vegetables and eating too much meat is definitely a bigger factor.
https://x.com/kuniyoshi_shino/status/2038787482456895577
Flies rolled up in the spring rolls is bad enough, but the filling itself already looks like some unidentifiable paste.
For one thing, the vegetable varieties are different from Japan's. Japanese vegetables are bred to be really sweet. You might just be perceiving the lack of sweetness as bitterness.
Even cucumbers have that harsh bitterness if you don't draw it out first. Same with potatoes and eggplant — that's why you soak them in water.
Background and Key Points
Formaldehyde is not a novel toxin here — it’s a colorless preservative/disinfectant banned as a food additive under Japan’s Food Sanitation Act precisely because of this kind of misuse: applying it to fish or vegetables to mask spoilage and extend shelf life for the trip from farm to market. Japan’s own quarantine system does not inspect 100% of imported produce; it relies on spot sampling, which is why the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s response was a noncommittal “still checking” rather than a clearance or a recall. That caution also reflects institutional memory — Chinese food-safety scares (melamine-tainted milk in 2008, gutter oil, and now this) have repeatedly turned out worse than initial official statements suggested, so a “checking” label from Tokyo reads to many Japanese consumers as “assume the worst until proven otherwise” rather than “nothing to see here.”
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t over whether formaldehyde is dangerous — almost no one defended the practice — but over how much individual choice consumers really have. One camp treated it as a simple market decision (pay more, buy domestic, problem solved), while others pointed out that school lunches and processed staples like frozen gyoza or kabayaki eel leave no such opt-out, especially for children who can’t choose their own food.
What the thread never addressed is that formaldehyde also occurs naturally at trace levels in many everyday foods — pears, shiitake mushrooms, smoked fish — and even in the human body as a metabolic byproduct. The real distinction, which the posts collapse together, is between negligible natural background levels and the concentrated industrial-grade application shown in the viral video, which is a food-safety violation regardless of dose.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Formaldehyde Found in Chinese Napa Cabbage After ‘Chemical-Soaked’ Video Spreads Online — What Does It Mean for Japan? Health Ministry Says ‘Still Checking’.”
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