Misinformation about school lunches has sparked a storm in Kitakyushu City in Fukuoka Prefecture. There, false claims of Muslim-friendly meals triggered more than 1,000 complaints and disrupted city operations. The controversy stemmed from confusion over an allergy-friendly lunch served once in 2023 and a petition later scrapped in 2025.
While the city faced backlash, towns in Ibaraki Prefecture have moved in the opposite direction. There, schools have introduced halal school lunches, so Muslim students can eat alongside their classmates.
City denies social media rumors of Muslim-friendly school lunches
False claims spread on social media that Kitakyushu City had decided to serve Muslim-friendly school lunches. The city soon received a flood of protest calls and emails.
The number of complaints, including objections to the city’s international exchange policies, surpassed 1,000 and disrupted municipal operations. On the night of the 22nd, the city’s Board of Education posted a statement on its website, stressing that the claims were false.
The misinformation alleged that an Afghan Muslim woman petitioned the city to provide school lunches for her elementary school child that excluded pork and pork extract, which are religiously prohibited. It further claimed that the City Council’s Education and Culture Committee approved the petition and that “Muslim-friendly lunches” had already begun in Kitakyushu City.
In reality, the council received the woman’s petition in June 2023 and reviewed it in August. The council chose to continue deliberations at that stage, but in February 2025, after a reshuffle, the council scrapped the petition. The council never approved it.
City swamped with complaints
Kitakyushu City never decided to serve Muslim-friendly school lunches. However, in 2023, the city introduced a special meal called “Nikoniko Lunch.”
The lunch excluded 28 specific ingredients, including soy, dairy, and other designated allergens. This enabled children with food allergies to eat safely. The school also removed pork from the menu. That just happened to meet the needs of Muslim students as well.
The “Nikoniko Lunch” was created as an allergy-friendly option, not for religious purposes. However, some people distorted this fact and spread false claims on social media, saying the City Council had approved the woman’s petition and that Muslim-friendly lunches had begun.
The misinformation circulated alongside xenophobic messages such as, “You came from abroad, so why are you making demands?” and “Go back to your country if you don’t like school lunches.”
In 2025, misinformation that wrongly linked the one-time 2023 lunch with a petition—scrapped in February 2025—spread on social media and prompted a wave of complaints.
Between September 19 and 22, the city received about 1,000 calls and emails. Many of them also targeted Kitakyushu’s friendship and cooperation agreement signed in June 2025 with Telangana State in India.
Protesters confused the agreement with the national policy of promoting “people-to-people exchanges of more than 500,000 in five years” and accused the city of adopting an “immigration policy.” City officials said the flood of protests disrupted their operations.
The incident is similar to another recent disinformation campaign in Japan. In-person protests broke out after some news services misinterpreted the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s “hometown” program between cities in Japan and African countries as creating a special immigration status.
Right-wing agitators and politicians have spread other disinformation about foreigners. One campaign accused immigrants of exploiting the country’s high-cost health care system. Another accused Chinese PhD students of taking money away from Japanese college students – a charge with no basis in fact.
Ibaraki towns serve halal school lunches to include Muslim students
Some regions in Japan have, in fact, begun serving Muslim-friendly school lunches. And for good reasons.
Sakai and Goka in Ibaraki Prefecture provided halal food in school lunches for the first time starting in 2024, so that Muslim students could also eat. The Sakai School Lunch Center, which supplies meals to elementary and junior high schools in both towns, said, “We want children to enjoy the same lunch together regardless of religion. We also want Japanese children to learn about global diets and diversity.”
Under Islamic law, Muslims cannot eat pork, and cannot eat meat that is not processed according to prescribed methods. Because of this, 35 students in Sakai and 4 students in Goka were unable to eat school lunches. Instead, they had to pack and bring their own.
In September, the lunch center prepared a special menu that Muslim students could eat. The meal included squid tempura, egg bowl topping, rice, miso soup, apple juice, and frozen mandarin orange.
At Sakai Elementary School, 23 foreign students experienced school lunch for the first time. Fatima Yussuf, a 10-year-old fourth grader from Pakistan, said with a smile, “My first school lunch was delicious. I was happy to eat together with everyone.”
At the time, the Sakai School Lunch Center said it planned to continue offering halal meals regularly. It was also considering menus that meet other dietary needs, including vegan options.
The cases of Kitakyushu and Ibaraki show the challenges Japan faces in handling religious and dietary diversity and the different paths local communities are taking. It also shows how some in Japan are willing to exploit the spike in the country’s immigrant population to stoke division and fear.
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