Any advice on how to avoid Chinese produces in Japan for a non japanese speaker?

7 comments

1. I don’t know anything about the testing of products.

   But all produce are labelled with the country of origin. So just don’t buy the ones labels “中国産” if you’re concerned.

2. Reality is, china exports an astronomical amount. Avoiding any type of item would be difficult.

   Even is If a product is not from China, there’s a good chance a product within that product is.

   It’s not impossible. But the only sure way to know the origin and contents of things is to get it from a local/mom and pop/small family owned source.

3. [deleted]

4. [made in japan](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=made+in+japan+&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.shopify.com%2Fs%2Ffiles%2F1%2F0277%2F9175%2Fproducts%2Fmade_in_japan_a04ac01c-a950-46fd-81fc-1af1f654821c.jpg%3Fv%3D1436217244)

   That is a picture of what a made in Japan kanji label looks like at least on cloth (no it is not usually near a bar code). The last one is the made in, after you just need to memorize the kanji for China and switch. Bunch of countries will have their name in katakana, so brush your katana skills if you want to look for some specific countries.
   Regarding food, I do not see that so often, I think.

   Your chance to avoid 100% China products is pretty low.
   You will find bad qualities products from everywhere it is a matter of bad luck : some issues during fabrication and the lot managed to not test positive. Like, the issues happened in the middle of the lot production and the randomly tested items was not concerned.

5. Like any other country, you cant check all products thats being imported. Local supermarket keeps good security so I think its safe. If you dont trust these products, then dont buy from import shops, usually at chinatown, chinese companies does the importing and could not have as strict security check as a japanese import company. I mean, if they screw up, close up the company and make another one new and there is no way to trace it down.

6. I don’t buy food products (including dishware or anything related to eating in general) from China and a few other countries. All products say on their tag where they are made. If you can’t read Japanese, look up the characters for when the label says what country the product is from. Sometimes country names are listed in kana like アメリア but sometimes they will use the kanji variant like 米国 so use a dictionary app if that’s going to be hard for you to discern between. Worst case scenario, I’m pretty sure the Google Translate app can translate from text in photos so that’s probably decent as a fallback option.

   Products in some stores, like the dishware in Daiso, say “made in China” in plain English despite the rest of the tag being in Japanese.

   In my experience it’s usually frozen foods and anything with a long shelf-life which are the biggest culprits, so be careful with those. Stuff like frozen chicken, frozen vegetables, and peanut butter. But honest anything could potentially be from China or other bad countries so you should always check the label before buying a product that you’re not familiar with. Some stores have more products from China than others, for example Gyoumu has a lot of products which are made in China (and other countries like Belgium or Brazil), so be sure to always check the labels when shopping there. The normal grocery stores tend to have much less than the discount stores.

   With foods you sometimes have to pick and choose because some products just aren’t widely produced in Japan, but when it comes to dishes and cooking utensils I absolutely refuse to buy anything that’s not made in Japan.

7. Don’t eat out ever again because most places use produces from China due to cost.

   Also, try working in the food industry in Japan.