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The story
A Kyoto eel restaurant was found to have passed off Chinese-farmed eel as Japanese-grown, and attention has turned to a YouTube video in which celebrity gourmet Terakado Jimon visited the shop and raved about the food. According to the article, only 2% of the eel the shop purchased over the course of a year was actually domestic, fueling speculation on the thread that Jimon may have been served a specially prepared domestic portion. Opinions were split on whether there’s really a taste difference between domestic and Chinese eel at all, with some arguing the gap between wild-caught and farmed eel matters more — and posters also brought up past cases like the clam origin-mislabeling scandal.
What people said
It's come out that Jimon visited the shop in his own YouTube video and raved about it.
What would you think if every country in the world did the same thing [i.e., insisted its own product is superior]?
it was like rubber.
Does where they're actually caught make a taste difference?
I've eaten a ton of both wild and farmed eel —
location matters some, sure, but
with wild eel there's huge variation from one fish to the next.
he took money from the eel shop.
But Jimon didn't know any of this,
he's a victim too.
they bought over the year was domestic,
so they probably fed Terakado Jimon the domestic stuff.
They started using Chinese eel right after Jimon's survey video —
they knew exactly what they were doing.
I once had wild eel at Akabanebashi No◯Iwa [restaurant name partially redacted] and it was dry and mediocre — maybe they rendered out too much fat.
Specialty eel shops don't carry much wild eel —
they don't want to deal with it.
Isn't that backwards?
It's a pain to look it up, so just write it correctly.
I thought Hamamatsu — or Shizuoka Prefecture more broadly — was the big brand name.
Maybe they genuinely did carry that originally?
there have been cases where someone said 'something feels off about this one,'
and it turned out they were actually right.
domestic is considered a cut above Chinese and costs roughly double,
so that'd be far more decent than the sleazy move of passing off Chinese as domestic.
Didn't even notice, lol
It'll make you immortal.
of course he'd say it's delicious.
It was a paid promo to begin with anyway.
Japanese-sourced eel is going to make a comeback —
no need to buy Chinese anymore.
Expensive and bad.
If you read the article, it's clear Jimon ate the domestic eel.
You can catch it in rivers all over the place.
Background and Key Issues
Eel origin fraud has surfaced repeatedly in recent years, including cases involving sellers falsely invoking premium brand-name sources like Lake Hamana or the Shimanto River. As with the clam origin-mislabeling scandal commenters raised on the thread, this counts as “origin misrepresentation” under Japan’s JAS Act (quality labeling standards) and the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations (Japan’s consumer-labeling law). Because there’s a large price gap between Chinese and domestic eel (commenters agreed domestic runs roughly double the price), mislabeling is treated as a form of fraudulent labeling that deceives customers about what they’re actually paying for. The central question on the thread was whether the eel Terakado Jimon raved about on camera was genuinely domestic, or whether the shop had specially prepared it for filming. If the figures attributed to the article are accurate — that only 2% of the shop’s yearly eel stock was domestic, and that it switched to Chinese eel right after Jimon’s review video — that would strengthen suspicions of a deliberate bait-and-switch between what was served to reviewers versus regular customers. At the same time, plenty of commenters were skeptical that origin alone drives much of a taste difference, pointing instead to the gap between wild-caught and farmed eel, or simple variation between individual fish, as bigger factors. One point worth clarifying: the thread’s consensus was that Jimon himself didn’t orchestrate the fraud — he’s seen as someone the shop used for a promotional appearance, not a knowing participant in the deception.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch “Hello! Project” board thread (a fan-community board where off-topic threads like this one often end up) titled “Jimon’s blowing up in flames on social media.”
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