Fish, for so long a part of the Japanese diet, hangs in the balance

Japan without fish is like Japan without Zen – less Japanese, somehow. Zen, for centuries scarcely separable from the Japanese mind, survives attenuated if at all. Fish, for millennia scarcely separable from the Japanese diet, hangs in the balance. “Within five years fish will vanish from the Japanese table,” fears Josei Seven (Sept 12).

That’s a worst-case scenario; it may not come to that. Even if it doesn’t, the fishing industry faces so many threats – economic, demographic, meteorological – that a flourishing future seems unlikely.

A pity. Fish is the perfect health food, and sea-girt Japan has been singularly blessed in that regard. Fishmongers crying their wares were a fixture of old Japan, mostly gone now, displaced by supermarkets less picturesque but purveying, economically and in abundance, species whose names are hardly known in less maritime lands.

Fifty years ago “raw fish” was a faintly repellent notion in the West. Who then could have foreseen that sushi would soon be as universal as pizza? Sushi as delicacy rapidly evolved into sushi as fast food, spreading outward from Japan’s kaitenzushi establishments. Fish in all its astonishing varieties is “Japanese soul food,” Josei Seven hears from fisheries analyst Momoro Kodaira.

Warming seas were the first portent of danger, ignored too long. “We first heard warnings of climate change decades ago,” says Tottori fisherman Nobuaki Kawanishi, “but only in the past few years have fish like mackerel and Japanese flying squid began to get seriously scarce.” Measures that might have worked in the beginning are helpless against the fast approaching end.

The demographic factor is, of course, Japan’s rapid aging. Retiring fishermen find no younger generation to pass the torch to. Fewer hands haul in declining catches.

Prices rise. Consumers seek alternatives – cheap imports when available, non-fish products when not. Cheap imports – for now – are available. Japan risks pricing itself out of its own market.

Many overseas fisheries are newer, larger-scale, more innovative and more efficient than Japan’s. The government’s Fisheries Agency calculates Japan’s current fish self-sufficiency at 56 percent – down from 113 percent in 1964. “Soul food” in crisis spawns what Kodaira calls “inland sushi” – hamburger sushi, corn sushi, fried chicken sushi and so on. Need one be a purist to shudder? 

“Twenty years ago,” says Kawanishi, “you’d lower your nets for ridge-eye flounder and draw them up full. Now they’re all but gone. In five years, at this rate, non-imported fish will be a luxury item, beyond the reach of the average consumer.”

What of imports, then? Here too, the prospects are sullen. Plentiful now, they may soon not be. Japan’s ports and processing plants, Kodaira explains, are small and out of date. Rules governing imports, less restrictive than they used to be, are more so than elsewhere, so that producers and transporters find Japan more of a nuisance than an opportunity. They’d rather deal with larger and less finicky markets – the U.S., Europe, China, southeast Asia – that lately crowd the field, thanks to the very success of Japan’s own seafood culture. Japan has become a last stop, an afterthought. It gets the remnants.

Eighty percent of Mexico’s farmed tuna used to go to Japan; now barely over 20 percent does. Chile, the world’s largest harvester of uni (sea urchin), still sends 90 percent of its catch to Japan – it seems one Japanese marine staple that has not (yet) caught on elsewhere – but even that, given the cheap yen and the ever-tightening purse strings of cash-strapped consumers, faces a doubtful future. “Tough negotiations” are in progress with Chilean suppliers.

Can anything save Japan’s fishery? One thing, ventures culinary advisor Tatsuya Kakita: sales, which means buyers, which means ordinary consumers. “By relying entirely on cheap imports,” he says, “we undermine one of Japan’s primary industries. Self-sufficiency (in fish) is already down. If the world situation gets worse” – war and climate, to name the most immediate perils – “imports could seize up altogether and that could precipitate a serious food crisis.” There’s more at stake here than household economy. And when we consider that agriculture is similarly threatened, perhaps a certain uneasiness is called for.

© Japan Today