It was supposed to be a celebratory year for Akafuku, a confectioner that had been selling bean-jam sweets here since 1707. On its 300th anniversary, its top-selling sweets were still indispensable gifts to bring back home or to the office after a trip to Ise Shrine here, Japan's holiest religious site.

Instead, Akafuku has become the latest Japanese food company to be exposed for lying about the contents of its products, tampering with expiration-date labels and recycling ingredients. For only the second time in its history, Akafuku, which was forced to halt production during World War II because of a sugar scarcity, has suspended operations, this time indefinitely.

Even as details of a government investigation into Akafuku have come out in recent days, executives at a meatpacking company called Meat Hope were arrested for labeling ground pork, chicken and even rabbit as 100 percent beef. Separately, the 76-year-old president of Hinaidori, a poultry company, admitted to mislabeling his chicken products after he disappeared for several days in the mountains in a failed suicide attempt.

The nearly daily disclosures have shaken Japanese consumers, who have long been willing to pay a premium for Japanese food products that were, or so it was said, safer than imported goods, especially from China. But the scandals involving the freshness of products by Akafuku, as well as two other nationally known confectioners, Shiroi Koibito and Fujiya, have resonated beyond the marketplace in a way that chicken or beef does not.

Akafuku and Shiroi Koibito were two of the most popular sweets in a deeply-entrenched gift-giving culture that requires any traveler to bring local edibles to relatives or colleagues back home. If the practice ensures that every airport and major train station in Japan has a store stocked with delicately packaged sweets, it also helps knit together the fabric of Japanese society.

"I've always received Akafuku sweets," said Yuko Saito, a first-time visitor here, "and so this time I'd been looking forward to buying some myself and giving them to friends."

Saito and her husband Kenji, 56, took turns posing for photographs in front of Akafuku's now-shuttered main store here in Ise, in central Japan. Despite the rain, a stream of visitors posed in front of the wooden, tile-roofed building with an apology by the company posted on the entrance.

As for Fujiya, the company popularized Western sweets in Japan. Its mascot, Peko-chan, a little girl in pigtails with her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, is as recognizable in Japan as Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders are in the United States. Its strawberry shortcake was the staple of birthdays for many Japanese in their 30s and over.

In the minds of most Japanese, the products were associated with happy times, birthdays or days when their fathers returned from a business trip bearing sweets, said Akira Shimizu, an economics professor and expert on product brands at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo.

"In that sense, there is a strong feeling that these happy episodes are being denied," Shimizu said of the scandals. "It's as if the sunny days were all rotten after all."

Whistle-blowers inside the companies appeared to have tipped off the authorities. Fujiya, which opened its first shop in 1910 in Yokohama, was found to have used out-of-date milk to make cream puffs. Ishiya, the maker of Shiroi Koibito, the most popular cookies from Hokkaido, admitted falsifying expiration dates. The two companies have resumed operations and are struggling to win back credibility.

Staging a comeback may be more difficult for Akafuku, whose transgressions are far more serious. The sweets had remained largely unchanged over three centuries, though in 1911 the company switched from brown sugar to white, which was more to the liking of the emperor's wife, according to Akafuku. The confectioner always said it made its bean-jam sweets - glutinous rice cakes, or mochi, enveloped in red bean jam - the same day and disposed of all unsold goods.

But according to a government investigation, for at last three decades Akafuku had systematically reused up to 90 percent of its unsold products, using the ingredients to make new sweets or passing them on to an affiliated confectioner. What is more, the company had forward-dated expiration date labels and had frozen and thawed the sweets.

Noriyasu Hamada, the 11th president in the family-owned company's history, first flatly denied reusing unsold goods but was forced to admit the truth within days. The prefectural authorities ordered Akafuku, which declined to answer questions for this article, to stop business on Oct. 19. It is not clear when or if Akafuku will be allowed to resume operations.

The scandal at Akafuku surprised many Japanese not only because of its long history, but also because of its close ties to the Ise Shrine, the mecca of Japanese Shintoism. The shrine, built some 1,700 years ago, is dedicated to Amaterasu, the sun goddess in Japanese mythology and the spiritual ancestor of the imperial family.

"The mother of the Japanese people is worshiped here," said Kenichi Yano, a retired priest here.

In the past, paying a visit to Ise at least once in a lifetime was considered a religious duty. So it was during a great boom in pilgrims that Akafuku began selling its sweets in 1707, said Yano, 69, who now runs a private organization devoted to Japanese traditions.

Last century, with the establishment of modern transportation, visits to Ise rose sharply, as did Akafuku's sales. After a slowdown in the early 1990s, Akafuku built a $120 million period theme park that became a wildly successful tourist destination, swelling the number of visitors to 3.4 million a year from 200,000.

"Just as we were rejoicing over this, this had to happen," said Yano, whose organization received nearly $3 million from Akafuku to construct its headquarters and other buildings here. "It was a little unfortunate."

"The purer something is," he said, "the dirtier it will become."