Please Don't Eat the Blowfish Balls

If you're seeking "thrills," it's probably best to avoid eating blowfish testicles. Try snowboarding. Or skydiving. Even having your friends push you off a roof in a shopping cart, Jackass-style, would be better: It's more thrilling, and, more to the point, it doesn't involve eating blowfish testicles.

Seven men who consumed the offending cojones at a Japanese restaurant were hospitalized on Tuesday. Police in Tsuruoka city were questioning the restaurant's owner, who is also the chef. Turns out he didn't have the proper license for serving blowfish, which the AP reports "is considered a delicacy in Japan and is consumed by thrill-seeking gourmets."

The thrills really began when the men "developed limb paralysis and breathing trouble and started to lose consciousness—typical signs of blowfish poisoning—and were rushed to a hospital for treatment."

One of them, 68, was in critical condition with respiratory failure. Extreme thrillz, bro! Old skool!

For a certain kind of diner, blowfish—called fugu in Japan—constitutes a daring experience. For chefs, preparing it is considered an art. It costs about $40 for a couple of small strips.

The poison, tetrodotoxin, is about 100 times more poisonous than potassium cyanide. Sushi chefs are trained to cut around the bits that contain the poison.

"The most dangerous culprit is the liver, which is regarded as the tastiest morsel of the blowfish," according to Matthew Firestone of the travel site Gadling, who wrote about fugu in 2007. "If you're lucky, the liver will contain only enough poison to numb the palette and raise the adrenaline. If you're unlucky however, the liver will contain enough poison to kill you ten times over."

What it really is, is Japan's version of simple-minded machismo—a badly misplaced declaration of male pride. In America, we buy Hummers or vote for fake cowboys to assure ourselves and others that we are real men. In Japan, they eat blowfish. And lets not even get into the scary psychological implications of eating blowfish testicles.

"It's equal parts stupidity and peril, with a healthy dash of self-reflection and humility thrown in," Firestone, a fugu enthusiast, writes. He provides plenty of evidence for the stupidity and peril, but never gets around explaining where the self-reflection and humility come in.