Japanese Find Weird Burgers Easy to Swallow

The second-biggest burger market in the world now has rice burgers, chicken sumiyaki burgers and the ultimate bun stuffer, “chopped burdock root cooked in soy and sesame oil, with bacon and seaweed.”

Twenty years and several billion hamburgers after the first McDonald’s opened for business, industry officials fear Japan may face a burger recession.

Industry officials attribute some of the innovations to a decline in hamburger sales that began two years ago, when a price war among the major producers saturated the market.

But a burdock-root burger? “It’s very healthy; forces you to chew,” said Masayo Muto, spokeswoman for Mos Burgers. “And it’s selling very well.”

Burdock is a family name for several hardy biennial weeds similar to the cocklebur. The root is a common side dish in Japan, called gobo.

There is no beef in rice burgers, which the Mos Burgers chain introduced in 1987. They have such ingredients as chicken or the fibrous, gray burdock root wedged into a “bun” of rice. The drink recommended to wash it all down is Oolong tea, not cola.

According to the Japan Hamburger Assn., the number of hamburgers, chicken-burgers and fish-burgers eaten each day fell by nearly 100,000 in 1989, to 1.83 million--after an almost unbroken 20-year climb.

Despite the decline in volume, the number of burger stores continues to grow rapidly. There were 3,039 in 1989, with new ones opening at the rate of one every other day.

“I think we are all feeling the pinch,” said Tetsuo Uchimoto of the Lotteria fast-food chain. “Clearly, the growing number of hamburger restaurants has forced all of us to adjust our marketing strategies.”

McDonald’s, which has stuck to about the same menu used in the United States, has largely avoided the tougher times.

“We don’t keep an ongoing tally, but in 1989 alone we sold 387,381,000 hamburgers,” said spokesman Akira Kobayashi. “That was the most ever.”

Since McDonald’s opened for business in July, 1971, on the main street of Tokyo’s classy Ginza shopping district, it has accumulated 774 franchises nationwide, second only to the number in the United States.

It has a commanding 40% market share that has remained fairly stable over the last few years, Kobayashi said. In 1989, sales amounted to $1.23 billion.

All but 10% of the remaining burger market is controlled by the Lotteria, Mos Burgers and DomDom chains.

Muto said a new menu has helped Mos Burgers gradually increase its sales to about 15% of the total market.

Kobayashi said McDonald’s has no plans to meet the competition’s challenge by sacrificing hamburger orthodoxy, but it did put teriyaki burgers on the menu two years ago.

“It’s our basic policy to produce food that can be enjoyed anywhere,” he said. “If others want to make Japanese-style hamburgers, that is their concern. It doesn’t worry us.”