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Eating “adults-only” potato chips sends over a dozen Tokyo high schoolers to the hospital

Casey Baseel Jul 17, 2024
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“These chips are for adults only” sounds like a joke, but it turns out it’s a legitimate warning.

Legal adulthood in Japan begins at the age of 18. Because of that, you’ll sometimes see products labeled with “18禁,” which is read “juhachikin” and means “not allowed for those under 18,” designating the package’s contents as inappropriate for consumption by minors.

However, there will always be teens who want to push back when others try to impose limits on them. This week, in Tokyo’s Ota Ward, a group of high schoolers got their hands on some juhachikin items and decided to partake while on school grounds, and, as is often the case with teen temerity, things ended badly.

So were these kids smoking, drinking, or watching porn at school? Nope, they were eating potato chips, and it ended with more than a dozen of them needing to be taken to the hospital.

▼ Video of the incident’s aftermath

During the lunch period at Rokugo Technical High School on Tuesday, a male student brought out a bag of Juhachikin Curry potato chips. Manufactured by Ibaraki Prefecture food/snack company Isoyama Shoji, the chips are an offshoot of the company’s Juhachikin brand of instant curry, so named because it’s so spicy that Isoyama Shoji recommends it only for adult consumers.

▼ Juhachikin Curry potato chips

The boy shared the chips with roughly 30 other students, and before the day was over, roughly half of them ended up receiving medical attention. Soon after eating the chips, a number of the teens began to feel nauseous and experience intense burning sensations on their lips and in their stomachs. Ambulances were called, and 14 first-year students (who would be 15 or 16 years old in accordance with the Japanese school system), were taken to the hospital for further examination/treatment.

Over a dozen people getting sick from outside food brought in by one person might raise suspicion that the boy who offered the chips had first somehow tampered with them as a prank, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. While there’s definitely a comical element to Isoyama Shoji’s branding of Juhachikin Curry and its potato chips, with a package design that evokes the style of Japanese adult videos and magazines, the package does also contain extensive warnings about the extreme spiciness of the product, specifically cautioning those with high blood pressure and/or weak stomachs to refrain from consuming the chips and stating: “If you are under 18, please do not eat these.”

For those who are eating the Juhachikin Curry chips, the package instructs them to add the contents of the included packet of jolokia, a chili pepper that’s 200 times hotter than Tabasco.

But still, what’s the worst that can happen from eating something that’s too spicy for you to handle? Your face gets red, your eyes tear up, and your next trip or two to the bathroom is probably going to be unpleasant, but that’s about it, right? Actually, ingesting spice beyond what your system can properly process can lead to bleeding from the stomach and vomiting blood, which can result in dangerously sudden drops in blood pressure. The determining factor is whether your body’s mucous membranes and blood vessels are strong enough to prevent such a reaction, and since those don’t reach their full strength until adulthood, consuming such heavily spiced food can be legitimately dangerous for teens and children.

Though labeled and marketed as “for adults only,” Juhachikin Curry chips are not, in a legal sense, prohibited from being sold to minors, which likely was a factor in the afflicted high schoolers’ false sense of security. Following the incident, Isoyama Shoji issued a statement of apology, saying “We deeply apologize for the great disturbance we have caused to our customers and related parties. We currently do not have all the details of what transpired, but we are earnestly hoping for the swift recovery of all those who were taken to the hospital and who felt unwell.”

Thankfully, none of the students’ conditions were life-threatening, but as further proof of the potency of the Juhachikin Chips, the fact that the bag was shared among some 30 students suggests that no single person ate more than a few, which was still enough to severely affect roughly half of them. So remember, kids, if it says “for adults only,” it’s probably best to wait. There’ll still be plenty of time for you to experience the Juhachikin Curry spice that turned us into a “whimpering mess” in our taste test once you’re all grown up.

Source: NHK News Web, FNN Prime Online (1, 2), Isoyama Shoji
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Isoyama Shoji
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