Yasuhiro Yoshikawa Beef Quotations

I did not expect the latest incident to happen as I had believed the Japanese government would conduct inspections and make sure (that the conditions for beef imports were sufficiently met) before the actual importing.

Based on the assumption that all precautions are taken as requested, we consider the difference in risk between U.S. and Japanese beef to be extremely small.

We had expected that the government would lift a ban on U.S. beef after checking U.S. meatpacking plants by themselves.

We concluded that with regard to the risk of mad cow disease, the difference between Japanese beef and meat from American cattle aged 20 months or below is very small.

If U.S. beef shipments to Japan will come from a limited number of facilities, we can easily check their safety. But if not, it would be very difficult to do so.