The Seafood Proxy Battle Between China And Japan

March 30, 2026·34 min·2 clips

The best uni in both Japan and China comes from the Kuril Islands, currently occupied by Russia but disputed with Japan — so in China the official line is it comes from Russia, and in Japan they say it comes from the north of Japan, and they are describing the same water.

A crab gets blowtorched. That image opens a story about how China and Japan's strained relationship shows up in ordinary food places. Dan keeps the setup simple. He has been in Beijing and Tokyo, looking at the relationship between China and Japan. The tension is current. At Tsukiji Market, Karumi says she has seen far fewer Chinese tourists since November. Business is not falling apart, though. Other visitors, including Americans, may be filling some of the gap at the shop she is watching. That keeps the story from turning into a clean little lesson about politics crushing daily life. People still eat. They line up, buy pork, ask for tastes, and carry food habits across borders. Char siu does a lot of the work here. The Japanese version Karumi points to is related to Cantonese roast pork, so the market feels messier, and more connected, than the politics suggest. Dan keeps asking the plain question. If relations are this tense, why does the scene on the ground still feel so hungry and full of borrowed flavors? Karumi's answer is close to a shrug. Chinese people love visiting Japan, Japanese diners know Chinese food, and the two cultures keep showing their shared roots. Then the bite arrives. The host gets a sliver of roast pork, a small table appears, and the abstract argument turns into sauce, texture, and appetite. That is the Sporkful move. Food does not solve the conflict. It just makes the distance between official tension and everyday pleasure harder to miss.

As heard by us

A street-level Sporkful report on China-Japan tension, told through markets, tourism, and roast pork.

Dan Pashman uses a seafood dispute as the entry point for a quieter story about China and Japan, where official tension keeps running into everyday appetite.

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Why you'd press play

China and Japan are in a seafood standoff, and Dan Pashman went to eat his way through it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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