040137 Ban on U.S. Beef Hardship on Japanese

Tokyo - Japan's decision to ban the import of American beef after the discovery of mad cow disease in Washington state may be squeezing U.S. cattlemen, but it's strangling one of Japan's biggest fast-food chains - Yoshinoya.

Yoshinoya has more than 900 restaurants spread throughout Japan, and they are about to run out of the key ingredient of their most popular dish: strips of USDA choice beef.

"It has to be American beef," Shuji Abe, president of Yoshinoya, moaned recently. Yoshinoya simmers the beef in onions and herbs and piles it on top of steamed white rice. The concoction is served almost instantly to customers who sit themselves down at counters in the restaurants. Starting at 280 yen, or $2.65, a bowl, it's one of the most popular meals in Japan, and it may soon run out.

"We have a one-month stock of beef. But as soon as stocks run out, we have to stop serving our beef bowl and find alternatives," Abe said.

Yoshinoya, which started out serving quick meals to Tokyo fish market workers in 1899, imports 99% of its beef from the United States. The company says there's no substitute for it.

"U.S. cattle are raised on grain," said Haruhiko Kizu, a Yoshinoya spokesman. "That's different from Australian cattle, which mainly eat grass. The American beef contains just the right fat to make our beef bowl juicy and tasty."

U.S. beef is also produced in enough quantities to make it cheap, and its quality is consistent, so it can support a huge international operation such as Yoshinoya. Yoshinoya has 199 restaurants overseas, including 83 in the United States.

"We spent more than a century developing the juicy taste of the Yoshinoya brand," said Kizu. "The taste of Yoshinoya has to be the same all over the world. You can't get the Yoshinoya taste without juice from American beef."

In any case, Japanese customers like the taste.

"I compared beef bowls with other restaurants. But Yoshinoya is the best of the best," says Haruyasu Toda, 40, who dropped in for lunch at Yoshinoya's Yurakucho branch in downtown Tokyo. Toda, who works for the electronics company NEC, ordered the regular beef bowl for $2.65 and a 40-cent bowl of miso soup, made from fermented soybean paste. "I come here four or five times a month. It's tasty, fast and cheap!"

Yoshinoya has been forced to draw up a survival business plan.

"This is not the first crisis for us," Kizu said. "We experienced a Japanese mad cow case two years ago."

At that time, sales at Yoshinoya dropped by almost half. By last fall, sales had recovered.

"So, we have developed a so-called risk management strategy," he said. "We have developed other menus such as curry, chicken and salmon bowl for the future."

But the food business isn't so easy these days. Earlier this month, an outbreak of bird flu killed 6,000 chickens in Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan and led to the slaughter of 34,000 chickens to halt spread of the disease. This flu was the same type that killed five people in Vietnam.

Even though Yoshinoya doesn't use domestic chicken, "it is not good news," Kizu said. "I just feel unpleasant to hear the news of bird flu."

"The world has become too sensitive about food, I think," said Masaki Kadokura, 57, after finishing his lunch at Yoshinoya. "There have been SARS, chicken flu in South Korea, herpes for carp in Japan."

SARS, an acute respiratory infection, is believed to come from civet cats in China. A herpes virus outbreak decimated carp farms in Japan in November.

Source: The Billings Gazette (Montana)

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