Sushi Terror in Japan : Three arressted

Three people have been arrested in Japan because of “sushi terror,” which is a term for viral, dirty pranks that threaten the world-famous feature of sushi restaurants: the moving conveyor belt.

Last month, a video of a man on a sushi train licking a soy sauce bottle went viral. This made a lot of people angry.

In the video, he can be seen at a Kura Sushi restaurant branch rubbing his saliva on dishes that are being passed to him.

Since then, dozens of these kinds of videos have come out, making people worried.

Several sushi train restaurants, which are called Kaiten-sushi in Japan, have asked food saboteurs to stop their bad behaviour.

But some restaurants have stopped running their main attraction all together. Sushi conveyor belts have stopped moving in restaurants all over the country.

After a customer put a cigarette butt in a jar of pickled ginger in eastern Japan, the Choushimaru chain said it would stop using its conveyor belts altogether.

Staff will now bring food directly to customers, and they will only get condiments and sauces after they sit down.

Japan is known for its strict rules about cleanliness and how to eat.

So the “sushi terrorism” jokes have not only scared a lot of people across the country, but they have also caused the share prices of companies like the Sushiro chain to drop.

The people who were arrested on Wednesday were trying to rob the Kura Sushi restaurant chain. A spokesman for the chain said that the viral video trend was “extremely dangerous” and posed a threat to the model of the conveyor-belt restaurant.

“We are proud to be Japanese because we have things like conveyor belt sushi. We want our customers to be able to eat sushi from the conveyor belt in a safe and comfortable way “he said.

People have taken videos of themselves licking chopsticks or touching sushi as it moves by on a conveyor belt.

One video that came out last month showed a customer putting wasabi on another person’s food as it went by on the conveyor belt.

Several sushi restaurants have already said they will go to court, but Wednesday’s arrests are thought to be the first ones.

In Nagoya, a city in central Japan, police say that Ryoga Yoshino, who is 21 years old, licked a shared soy sauce bottle at a Kura Sushi restaurant on February 3.

There were also two kids, ages 19 and 15, who were involved. According to Japan’s Penal Code, what they did was illegal because it got in the way of business.

Police say that all of the suspects said they did something wrong. One is also said to have apologised for what he did.

The weakening of the yen, the war in Ukraine, and the coronavirus pandemic had already made things hard for companies that owned restaurants.