Japan should have more thoroughly inspected US cattle facilities before easing a ban on US beef last month, Japan's Agriculture Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said yesterday.
Nakagawa apologized in parliament for the lack of inspections. Japanese inspectors checked 11 US facilities only after deciding to ease the import ban, but did not inspect some 40 others on their list, as required by the Cabinet.
"I apologize for not fulfilling the requirement to conduct inspections prior to the resumption," Nakagawa told a parliament committee. "I will think about how to take responsibility for that."
Responding to demands by Seiji Maehara, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, that Nakagawa resign to take responsibility for the mishandling, the agriculture minister said that he would leave the decision up to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Kyodo News Agency quoted the minister as saying.
But Nakagawa defended himself by saying that it would have been impractical to evaluate compliance by the US beef processors when shipments to Japan had not even started.
Unsatisfied with his response, opposition lawmakers walked out the parliamentary budget committee, forcing the meeting to be suspended.
Tokyo's ban on US beef imports was eased on Dec. 12, but imports were halted again this month after a beef shipment arrived in Japan with banned spinal bones in it. Japan considers such bones to be at risk for mad cow disease.
The admission of inspection lapses followed comments over the weekend by the head of Japan's beef safety panel, who said Tokyo should only import US beef from slaughterhouses inspected by the Japanese government.
According to Kyodo News Agency, Yasuhiro Yoshikawa also recommended separate processing lines for beef destined for the Japanese market due to different rules in the US and Japan regarding what cattle parts are acceptable.
The Food Safety Commission late last year approved lifting the previous ban, which was imposed in 2003 following the discovery of the first case of mad cow disease in the US.
Japanese officials have criticized the US inspection system and refused to reopen the country's lucrative market until the latest mishap is fully investigated and Washington comes up with sufficient countermeasures.
Mad cow disease -- whose medical name is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE -- is a brain-wasting disease in cattle. In people, eating meat products contaminated with BSE is linked to a rare, fatal human disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
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