TOKYO — Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has tucked into a slice of octopus caught close to the Fukushima nuclear plant and declared local seafood to be “good and safe”.

Mr Abe visited the town of Soma, 26 miles (41.8km) north of the crippled reactors, at the weekend as part of the government’s efforts to convince domestic consumers and the rest of the world that Japanese seafood and produce can be eaten, reported the Daily Telegraph.

“We will work to wipe out the harmful rumours by giving out accurate information,” he told a group of local residents before savouring the slice of octopus tentacle.

“I want everyone in the country to know they are good and safe,” he declared of the seafood laid out by the local fishery cooperative.

Fishermen returned to the sea in late September on a trial basis, with their catches tested for radiation.

The Japanese leader’s efforts to dispel health concerns are an echo of Mr John Gummer’s famous public consumption of a beefburger at a boat show in Suffolk in 1990, the height of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) scare.

The then-agriculture minister demonstrated his faith in the safety of beef by also feeding his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, a burger.

Sampling local cuisine has long been a favourite way for politicians to express their confidence in produce, with President Barack Obama eating shrimp at a restaurant in Louisana after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister, publicly tucking into fried chicken during the bird flu scare of 2004.

Mr Abe is not the only Japanese politician to publicly consume food thought to have been contaminated by radiation; other politicians have also joined the bandwagon.

Mr Yukio Edano, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, was photographed eating strawberries from Iwaki City, just outside the 18-mile exclusion zone around the plant, a month after it was wrecked in the magnitude-nine earthquake and tsunami, according to the daily Telegraph.

Nonetheless, the latest stunt has failed to convince South Korea to lift its ban on imports of seafood from seven prefectures close to the Fukushima plant.

Tokyo has threatened to take the case to the World Trade Organisation on the grounds that the ban is not based on science and is therefore discriminatory. AGENCIES