Sushi Train restaurants have long been an iconic part of Japanese culinary culture. Now, videos of people licking communal soy sauce bottles and fiddling with dishes on conveyor belts are prompting critics to question their prospects in a Covid-conscious world.
Last week, a video taken by the popular sushi chain Sushiro went viral, showing a male diner licking his finger and touching the food as it comes off the carousel. The man was also seen licking the condiment bottle and cup, which he put back on the pile.
The prank has drawn a lot of criticism in Japan, where the behavior is becoming more common and is known online as “#sushitero” or “#sushiterrorism”.
The trend has worried investors. Shares in owner Sushiro Food & Life Companies Co Ltd fell 4.8% on Tuesday after the video went viral.
The company is taking this incident seriously. In a statement released last Wednesday, Food & Life Companies said it had filed a police report alleging that the customer suffered a loss. The company also said it received his apology and instructed restaurant staff to provide specially sanitized utensils or condiment containers to all upset customers.
Sushiro is not the only company dealing with this issue. Two other leading sushi conveyor chains, Kura Sushi and Hamazushi, told CNN they were facing similar outages.
In recent weeks, Kura Sushi has also called the police over another video of customers picking up food by hand and putting it back on a conveyor belt for others to eat. The footage appears to have been taken four years ago, but only recently resurfaced, a spokesperson said.
Hamazushi reported another incident to the police last week. The network said it found a video that went viral on Twitter showing wasabi being sprinkled on sushi as it is being rolled out. The company said in a statement that this is “a significant departure from our company policy and is unacceptable.”
“I think these sushi tero incidents happened because the stores had fewer employees paying attention to customers,” Nobuo Yonekawa, who has been a critic of sushi restaurants in Tokyo for more than 20 years, told CNN. He added that restaurants have recently cut staff to cope with other rising costs.
Yonegawa noted that the timing of the draw is particularly important, especially as Japanese consumers have become more hygiene conscious due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
Japan is known as one of the cleanest places in the world, and even before the pandemic, people regularly wore masks to prevent the spread of disease.
The country is now experiencing a record wave of Covid-19 infections, with the daily number of cases reaching just under 247,000 in early January, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, sushi chains must review their sanitary and food safety standards in light of these developments,” he said. “These networks will have to step up and show customers the solution to restore trust.”
Businesses have good reason to be concerned. Daiki Kobayashi, an analyst at Japanese retailer Nomura Securities, predicts that this trend could drag out sales at sushi restaurants by up to six months.
In a note to clients last week, he said videos of Hamazushi, Kura Sushi and Sushiro “could affect sales and traffic.”
“Given how picky Japanese consumers are about food safety incidents, we believe the negative impact on sales could last six months or more,” he added.
Japan has already dealt with this issue. Frequent reports of pranks and vandalism at sushi restaurants also “damaged” the chain’s sales and attendance in 2013, Kobayashi said.
Now the new videos have sparked a new discussion online. Some Japanese social media users have questioned the role of conveyor belt sushi restaurants in recent weeks as consumers demand more attention to cleanliness.
“In an age where more and more people want to spread the virus on social media and the coronavirus has made people more sensitive to hygiene, a business model based on the belief that people will behave like a sushi restaurant on a conveyor belt is more cannot be viable,” wrote one Twitter user. “Sad.”
Another user compared the problem to that faced by canteen operators, suggesting that the hoaxes had “revealed” general public service problems.
On Friday, Sushiro completely stopped feeding unordered food onto the conveyor belts, hoping that people would not touch other people’s food.
A Food & Life Companies spokeswoman told CNN that instead of letting customers take their own plates as they please, the company is now posting pictures of sushi on empty plates on conveyor belts to show people what they can order.
Sushiro will also have acrylic panels between the conveyor belt and diner seats to limit their contact with passing food, the company said.
Kura Sushi goes the other way. A spokesperson for the company told CNN this week that it will try to use the technology to catch criminals.
Since 2019, the chain has equipped its conveyor belts with cameras that use artificial intelligence to collect data about what sushi customers choose and how many plates are consumed at the table, he said.
“This time, we want to deploy our AI cameras to see if customers put the sushi they picked up with their hands back on their plates,” the spokesperson added.
“We are confident that we can upgrade our existing systems to deal with this behavior.”
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