PHILIP FONG / AFP
Japanese food on a conveyor belt (descriptive image).
INTERNATIONAL – Earlier this year, viral videos of young people having fun licking food at sushi restaurants before putting it back on conveyor belts sparked outrage in Japan. This Thursday, March 9, police told AFP that three people had been arrested.
Two of them, a 21-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, were arrested in central Aichi Prefecture on Wednesday, a local police spokesman said. A first member of the 19-year-old trio, who allegedly met online, was arrested last month.
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Her video, shot at a Kura sushi restaurant on February 3, had gone viral. The pictures show one member of the group looking laughing, brutally grabbing a sushi on a revolving counter before shoving it in his mouth, then sipping soy sauce from the neck of an ordinary bottle.
Police have accused the three youths who confessed to trying to prevent Kura Sushi from doing business. The chain was bombarded with complaints from customers after the video was broadcast on social networks and urgently needed to carry out an intensive cleaning.
isolated cases
Similar videos from other restaurants had surfaced on Twitter and TikTok, as you can see in our video below. Some appear to have been shot several weeks or even years ago.
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These incidents, although seemingly isolated, had caused a scandal in Japan, known for its strict standards of hygiene and cleanliness, and had quickly been nicknamed “sushi-terro”, an acronym for “sushi terrorism”.
These arrests would be the first in connection with this case. “Forced obstruction of business activity” in Japan is punishable by heavy fines up to three years in prison.
“We sincerely hope that these arrests will make society aware that these pranks, which fundamentally undermine our system built on relationships of trust with customers, are a crime and will not be imitated in the future,” Kura Sushi chain responded in a press release.
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A similar Japanese restaurant chain, Sushiro, was also the victim of similar filmed pranks, which briefly caused its group’s share price to fall in the stock market.
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