Every March in Sitka, herring signal the arrival of spring. The cultural importance of herring to Lingít people cannot be overstated: Alaska Native people have been harvesting herring eggs as a traditional food for thousands of years. But in the last century, competition for access to the resource has grown.
For the last fifty years, a commercial fishery has shipped thousands of tons abroad every year. The commercial sac roe fishery is controversial. It’s had good years and bad years, and traditional harvesters have been protesting the fishery for decades.The Sitka Tribe of Alaska even sued the state in 2018 over its management. But the commercial fishery has been meeting an international demand for herring that, in years past, was strong.
Most of that fish has gone to Japan. This series is all about what happens once it gets there. Japan has long been the primary market for the fishery. But that market is changing. New regulations and evolving tastes have led to a dip in Japanese consumption of herring eggs, or kazunoko. So what does that mean for Sitka and Alaska’s other herring fisheries? In the first installment of KCAW’s five part series Phantom Fish: The return of Japan’s vanished herring industry, KCAW’s Katherine Rose went to Japan this spring to find out:
Tokyo’s Toyosu Market is the biggest wholesale fish market in Japan. Every day, vast amounts of fish arrive at this warehouse from around the country and the world. I’m scrambling behind Dr. Shingo Hamada, trying not to slip on the wet stone floor, down row after row of fish stalls, dodging warehouse utility vehicles as they zip around with their loads of fish boxes.
Suddenly, Hamada stops– he’s found what we’re looking for. Among the tanks of live crab and piles of dried shrimp, Hamada points out a plastic tub full of yellow herring egg skeins and spawn on kelp from Bristol Bay and Canada. The skeins are ¥4,700 (yen) per kilo. The more highly valued spawn on kelp is almost double the price.
Hamada is an anthropologist who has been studying Japan’s herring industry for years. In modern Japan, kazunoko is a staple of year-end gift giving and the traditional New Year’s meal. But Hamada says herring is more than just a New Year’s Day specialty food.
“In my opinion, herring is the foundation of the modernization of Japan,” Hamada says.
Fish meal fertilizer made from herring hundreds of years ago gave rise to the Japanese agricultural system. Herring eggs, or kazunoko, have been a traditional food in Japan dating back to the 14th century, and dried herring was a trade staple, though the industrialization of herring came with a history of exploitation and forced labor. Until the middle of the 20th century, that herring was caught in Northern Japan. Then the domestic fishery collapsed, due to a combination of overfishing and environmental change, and the herring became known as ‘phantom fish.’
“So after that [the] Japanese market started looking at the herring resources overseas,” Hamada says.
So they looked to Alaska, and the commercial sac roe fishery in Sitka was born. And it boomed…until it busted. Dr. Gunnar Knapp is a fisheries economist in Alaska.
“You go to the peak year, 1995, $82 million of herring exports just from Alaska…down to less than $5 million in 2023,” Knapp says. “Averaging…sort of in the $15 million range for most of the past decade, and that’s before adjusting for inflation. So it’s really been a dramatic decline.”
One reason for the decline: in the 1990s, the Japanese government banned gift-giving to public officials to prevent bribery, which cut the sale of the traditional herring egg gift boxes. This was a huge blow to the herring market at a time when Hamada says Japanese consumer tastes were also changing.
“Traditional salted kazunoko was kind of the traditional Japanese food, but [now] more Japanese people are accustomed to eating a Western diet,” Hamada says. “Eating the spaghetti, eating hamburgers, eating steak rather than the grilled salted fish or salted kazunoko.”
In the 1990s almost all of Alaska’s herring exports were going to Japan. Knapp says that’s not the case anymore.
“If you look in more recent years, China has become a much more important market,” Knapp says. “Almost on the same scale as Japan.”
In 2023, Alaska exported over three thousand tons of herring to China and around four-and-a-half to Japan. But, as we discover, some of the herring making it to Japan is passing through China first. As Hamada and I pace the aisles of Toyosu Market, we’ll occasionally see a handwritten sign signaling that a bucket of herring eggs is from Alaska. But closer inspection frequently reveals something else printed on the bucket’s label — it’s listed as a product of China. That’s because Japanese law requires the label to note the final stop, often the processing location, before the product enters Japan.
Both Hamada and Knapp speculate that this could be because it’s cheaper to process herring in China, so herring are processed there, the eggs are sent to Japan and the rest of the fish is processed into fishmeal. This is somewhat corroborated by the data: In previous decades, Alaskan processors exported a variety of herring products: fresh, cured and frozen roe as well as whole frozen herring. But in 2023, Alaska only exported one product, whole frozen herring.
Perhaps more interesting is that much of the herring we see in Toyosu and other fish markets in Japan doesn’t say Alaska, Canada, or even China. It’s labeled Hokkaido. Could Northern Japan’s “phantom fish” be returning?
So I’m heading North to learn more about the revival of Japan’s domestic herring fishing industry and the role it plays in changing the landscape for Alaska’s herring fisheries.
This reporting was made possible with funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
Note: This story was updated on 10-2-24 to correct the amount of Alaskan herring exported to Japan in 2023.
