Is McDonald’s Halal in Japan?

We often get asked by Muslims in Japan whether McDonald’s is halal in the country.  Although the questioner does not make any special reference to Japan while confirming the permissibility of eating McDonald’s foods in the country, we want to make it clear about our view about the chain restaurant chain as we have close knowledge of how all the McDonalds shops in Japan prepare their food.

According to an informal survey conducted by JapaneseMuslims.com, all the McDonalds restaurants in Japan use animal (in fact, pork) oil in preparing all their items including fish. It means that you can not even consume their fish filet product as it is cooked in haram oil extracted from pork. In the same way, they use the same oil to prepare their potato chips.

As far as our knowledge goes about the restaurant, the only items you can consume in there is tea and soft cream. Everything cooked in these restaurants should be considered haram.

However, we are stating this about the McDonalds restaurants in japan only as we do not have any direct knowledge about any of their restaurants in any other country.

We know there are some halal McDonalds branches in countries like the US, UK, and a few other non-Muslim countries apart from their operations in majority-Muslim countries such as Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, etc. However, we have no direct knowledge about the processes they follow to make their products as halal. So, we can not say anything specific about these branches.  You may inquire about the authenticity of their halalness from relevant halal certification bodies operating in these countries.