After a Lunchtime Joke, I Split What People Say About Japanese Fujisu Into Two Stacks

That day at lunch, when the office ordered boxed meals, Lao Zhang, sitting across from me, suddenly blurted out, "Has anyone here heard of Japanese Fujisu?" The whole table went quiet for two seconds, and then people of three different ages spoke up at once, making it sound like a wet market. Lao Zhang, fifty-eight, said someone in his classmates' group chat had forwarded something about it, with all sorts of wild claims, and he was half-believing, half-doubting. Xiao Chen, twenty-nine, was quick on his phone and said that kind of wording looked like a one-page ad at a glance, and he didn't even want to click it. I'm forty-three, stuck in the middle—I'd heard the four characters, but I couldn't say what it actually was. Before we even finished our boxed meals, the topic jumped to the afternoon meeting, but that sentence stuck in my throat like a fishbone.

On the MRT ride home, I lined up the three views in my head. Lao Zhang's was the vaguest, sourced from a "classmates' group chat," and that kind of forwarded message usually has no original source. Xiao Chen's was the most blunt, but he hadn't actually looked it up either—he was just going on instinct. My problem was the most practical: I didn't even know whether I was talking about a drug, a health supplement, or something that had been described as a health supplement. The three attitudes sounded different, but they shared one thing: no one had actually seen the packaging or labeling. That made me think of the recent chaos with one-page ads for online drug purchases, where phrases like rapid weight loss and blood sugar lowering are everywhere. The more miraculous the claims, the more you should stop first.

The next day, during my lunch break, I did something pretty silly: I wrote down each claim I'd heard on a piece of paper and split them into two stacks. The left stack was "rumors"—for example, someone said it made them feel more energetic, someone said only a certain brand works, someone said it's cheapest to buy online. The right stack was "verifiable information"—for example, what category it falls under, whether the packaging lists ingredients and warnings, whether a pharmacist needs to be involved, and whether it can legally be sold in Taiwan. After writing it all out, I realized the left stack was frighteningly thick, and the right stack was pitifully thin. That ratio itself was a reminder: what we usually receive is mostly other people's experiences, not data we can check.

What really tripped me up was the classification. If it's a drug, then it's not something you can just take whenever you want. If it's a health food, then labeling and claims are governed by a whole set of rules, and you can't casually claim therapeutic effects. When I looked for information online, I saw plenty of discussions mixing things of different natures together, and some people directly asked about Japanese Fujisu, while the replies below each said something different. At that moment I understood that what I needed wasn't an answer to "which brand is good," but an answer to "what is this thing under the system." Because the classification determines every step after that: whether it can be sold publicly, whether a prescription is needed, and who to go to if something goes wrong.

So I changed my approach. Instead of asking "does it work," I started asking four questions I could check myself. First, does the packaging have clear Chinese labeling and a source? Second, is it managed as a drug or as a food? Third, is the sales channel legitimate, and can it issue a receipt? Fourth, if I have other health supplements or medications I'm taking, who should see that information? These four questions don't involve any judgment about efficacy, yet they can filter out more than half of the claims of unknown origin. I also sent these four questions to Lao Zhang, and he replied with a sticker, saying he'd never thought to ask these things.

Xiao Chen joined in later, taking charge of checking the regulatory side. We found that claims for health foods have been tightening in recent years, and some words that used to be common can no longer be used freely. On the other hand, over-supplementing can also cause problems—like someone taking so much zinc that other minerals became imbalanced, or aggressively taking a certain trace element and actually harming their body. These examples aren't directly related to Japanese Fujisu, but they illustrate the same thing: treating health supplements as "the more you take, the better you maintain your health" is a dangerous assumption. There's research at Yale discussing anti-aging, and the conclusion also leans toward self-discipline over supplements, which actually matches the intuition we had at the lunch table.

On the weekend, I went with my family to a community pharmacy to pick something up, and I casually asked the pharmacist at the counter a very ordinary question: if people bring in a box of a product they don't understand, how do you usually look at it? The pharmacist said they first look at the labeling and license number, then at what else the person is taking, and finally suggest they ask the doctor who originally prescribed their medication. The whole conversation didn't mention any specific product, but it confirmed that my direction was right—get the information together first, then go to a professional, rather than first finding something online that makes you feel reassured.

Now that piece of paper is still taped above my desk. I didn't throw away the left stack, because it reminds me how powerful rumors are. I keep adding to the right stack, because verifiable information will always be less than rumors. Lao Zhang still occasionally sends new links, and I no longer rush to reply, "That's useless." Instead, I ask him: Who is the source of this article? Is it talking about a drug or a food? If he can't answer even those two, then set it aside for now. That joke at lunch had no conclusion, but it gave the three of us each an extra step: before making a judgment, first confirm what we're actually talking about.