Oddly green wasabi

I’m not a huge fan of wasabi, but I have never seen anything quite like this wasabi at this restaurant I ate at tonight. Here is a picture of it after we had played with it our fair share:

Now this may just look like any other greener-than-ordinary wasabi, but trust me, this shit was crazy. Firstly, it left the kitchen with a fluorescent glow, which did not fade until we eventually mustered the courage to touch the ominous glowing goo. We asked the wait staff where it came from, and they told us it came from the Watanabe Wasabi factory located at the base of Mt. Fuji. A quick Wikipedia search informed me that this factory uses bioluminescent bacteria found on the mountain to make their product glow. Anyways, apparently they faced some controversy in 2007 when someone ate too much of their wasabi and it literally ate through their stomach lining and dissolved their insides. Their family won an insane multimillion dollar lawsuit, but somehow the Japanese government placed no sort of restriction on Watanabe’s recipe, hence the glowing product to this day. Also, it turns out that Watanabe Wasabi is an official sponsor of the Japanese military, and actually did quite a bit of lobbying that led to the Pearl Harbor attacks. I asked the waiter at the restaurant if they were comfortable serving product from a company responsible for Pearl Harbor, and they said that that was a really long time ago, and that Watanabe Wasabi issued an apology in the mid-50s which made clear that they never intended to cause such a full-scale war and that if they could do it over again they would have attacked somewhere less important like Alaska. I looked up their apology, which was pretty close to how the waiter had described, but ended with the most sincere apology I may have ever heard, which translated to something like “we are very very sorry, please buy our wasabi.”