By Scott Rosenstein

Contamination reports out of Japan have prompted more than just Jeremy Piven to second-guess their consumption of sushi and other Japanese delicacies. With many countries including the United States, Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore banning selected food imports from Japan, fears of a global food supply riddled with radioactivity have been on the rise. The World Health Organization has characterized the situation as "serious." As a result, Japanese food is suffering from a burgeoning branding crisis.

Continued contamination revelations, including recent reports of plutonium in the soil around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and trace amounts of radioactive cesium and iodine reaching the United States, will likely exacerbate the situation. For Japan, the resulting economic dislocation will be a small (agriculture only constitutes 1.1 percent of the country's GDP) but notable addition to the long list of challenges it faces.

But should we all stop eating food associated with Japan? When it comes to food safety, emotion sometimes trumps reality. The United States, for example, imports less than two percent of its seafood from Japan. The Food and Drug Administration is now monitoring those imports closely, and many restaurants have already halted whatever remaining food orders they have with Japan. France, Germany, India, China, and South Korea have announced similar measures. These are prudent steps to take. But whether they reassure consumers remains to be seen. Even if none of the food on diners' plates is from Japan, ongoing fears could dent the popularity of Japanese-style cuisine worldwide.

Either way, the risk of elevated trade tensions remains low. As long as the import bans are temporary and not perceived as blanket restrictions intended to favor domestic producers, it is unlikely that conflict will arise. China, for example, consumes a significant proportion of Japan's food exports -- much of which is sold at a premium to high-end consumers with promises of quality and safety. Beijing will need to appear proactive for the sake of public opinion at home, but it won't be easy to replace Japanese imports domestically, making the government less likely to do anything drastic. China probably also wants to maintain good trade relations with its neighbor in order to increase exports of Chinese-made food into Japan, particularly if food shortages there worsen or if consumer confidence in Japanese food takes a serious hit. (Considering China's poor record on food safety, however, confidence in Japan would need to plunge considerably for the latter scenario to play out.)

To be sure, health concerns about the issue are not unfounded. The majority of illness stemming from the Chernobyl accident in 1986 resulted from contaminated dairy consumption. Simply instructing children not to drink milk from affected areas in Chernobyl would have drastically reduced the suffering there. Continued monitoring of the situation in Japan therefore remains critical. But we are still very far from Chernobyl levels of contamination. And as the headline risk about food safety in Japan continues to rise, so too does the possibility that much more immediate emergencies in Japan will receive proportionately less international attention.  

Scott Rosenstein is an analyst in Eurasia Group's Global Health practice.

By Ross Schaap

The devastation in Japan, the enormous human suffering, and the rising anxiety over ongoing problems in the country's nuclear facilities are well-documented. But assuming the nuclear crisis remains localized with no direct impact on economic activity in Tokyo, here are a few reasons for (cautious) confidence in Japan's resilience.

In 1995, when an earthquake struck the important industrial city of Kobe, many observers forecast that the impact of the disaster on Japanese production would last for many years. Yet, economic activity in the affected area reached 98 percent of pre-quake levels within 18 months, and the cleanup was largely complete within two years. This is a reminder that the seismic magnitude of a quake is a less reliable indicator of long-term economic damage than the strength and resilience of the country in which it occurs.

Long-term damage to Japan's economy is limited by the reality that the country's industrial core lies outside the region most badly damaged by the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear emergency.

Japan's economy has excess manufacturing capacity on most fronts and, in time, will adjust.

As Robert Madsen and Richard J. Samuels have written, the disaster has temporarily secured Prime Minister Naoto Kan's government. For the moment, no one within his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is willing to risk a party split or is strong enough to launch a leadership challenge. Further, the Japanese public will have no tolerance for attempts to oust the DPJ government or for a national election in a time of such crisis.

As a result, Kan should now finally be able to pass budget-related legislation that will authorize the debt issuance needed to execute the government's budget.

Reconstruction will spur industrial activity and long-term investment in housing, commercial and industrial infrastructure. That's a source of long-term economic stimulus.

The magnitude of the government response will be driven by need, not by fear that markets will constrain it. Gross debt has surpassed the 200 percent of GDP threshold, but net government debt is at about 110 percent of GDP. That's high, but it's not above the level managed by other countries in the past. Government notes are mostly held domestically, and Japan has a healthy external balance, with a net international investment position of $2.8 trillion.

Japan, a country already treated in much of the international media as a fading economic power, now faces a crisis of enormous proportions. But it is a mistake to underestimate the country's ability to meet the challenges it now faces.

Ross Schaap is director of comparative analytics at Eurasia Group and an analyst of Japanese politics.

I just spoke at an interesting lunch panel on fragile states, which was surprisingly substantive given that all of the panelists got roughly four minutes for their interventions.

My basic point -- political stability and electoral openness frequently work at cross-purposes in times of state crisis. The West tends to fetishize early democratization, even when it leads to Hamas in Gaza ... or uncontested fraud-ridden polls in Afghanistan. (Quick thought experiment: If we had free and open elections in China, how would the resultant government handle, say, Google?) 

A more interesting and nuanced point: Even when elections are the right way to go, what kind of elections/institutions/legal system/government structure is worth a great deal more consideration and tailoring to on the ground conditions than generally appreciated? The Indian political structure's durability comes in part from being vastly more decentralized than the United States. I'd suspect that's exponentially more true in Afghanistan.

Former Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre Louis was impressive and almost shockingly thoughtful given everything her country has been through. She offered her thoughts on the distractions of elections and governance in "normal times" in Haiti and what that would mean in the context of reconstruction. As a complete outsider, it sounded like she'd like to get back into politics...

Ian Bremmer will be blogging from Davos this week sending reports and commentary from inside the World Economic Forum.