Vegetarian Dinner

Weary of being maneuvered by Gouda, Aramaki resolves to open his own inquiry into the Individual Eleven attacks and to scrutinize the Cabinet Intelligence Agency at the same time. His opening comes from a tip passed by the Nanyou News Agency, itself a repeated target of the terror campaign. Working from that lead, he divides Section 9 into two units, one assigned to widen the intelligence on the twin threads he cares about, the other told to track down a former ground defense officer flagged as a person of interest in a run of shootings at a local television station.

Batou and Togusa draw the stakeout, watching a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant where the ex-officer has been working. There they discover that a rival division has been handed a fabricated story about the very same man and has moved to kill him under the belief that he is a notorious international terrorist.

The two agents reach the scene too late to intervene, and the man is dead before they can act. Comparing what each side believed, both units arrive at the same chilling conclusion: an unseen party is deliberately planting disinformation to turn the two agencies against a target of its choosing.

Aramaki's break with Gouda's guidance marks a turning point, pushing Section 9 to act on its own judgment rather than the CIS narrative. The Nanyou tip and the split assignments set the two investigative fronts in motion. The stakeout at the vegetarian restaurant exposes the manipulation when the rival unit strikes down the ex-officer, and the shared realization of a hidden puppeteer reframes the whole Individual Eleven affair as a campaign of engineered confusion.

The episode carries the on-screen subtitle FAKE FOOD and belongs to the season's dividual-individual thread. The restaurant setting and its imitation cuisine echo the story's larger concern with counterfeit information dressed up to pass as truth. It aired in Japan on April 3, 2004, and in English on January 21, 2006.