It’s a cold March morning in Takashima fishing village and everything’s blanketed in a fresh layer of snow. It’s a little after 10 a.m., a time when most people are just settling into the workday. But fishermen have already returned to unload the morning’s catch. Every morning for the last two months, fishermen have been on the water by sunrise, gillnetting for herring. They catch two or three tons on a good day, seven or eight tons on a really good day.
The floor in Hiroyuki Narita’s waterfront workshop glitters with silver scales. A television in the background plays game shows as he and his wife, Satoko, sit on plastic buckets, weighing and packing the herring by the dozen in styrofoam boxes. It’s a family operation: In the workshop next door, his brother and sister-in-law clean and fold the nets for tomorrow. Narita says the work never stops.
“We are very serious so we work every day,” he says. “We take a break on New Year’s Day, but other than that, you know, once we’re done with the herring fishing, the new fishing starts right after herring season, so there’s always something to catch and work every day.”
Like fishing families in Alaska, the Naritas have diversified their catch. They harvest seaweed, sea cucumbers, and so on. But he says lately, herring makes up a bigger share of their work.
“We have a variety of stuff to harvest here. We used to harvest seaweed and sea cucumbers,” he says. “But, nowadays, the herring is increasing, thanks to the Japanese technology.”
The technology he’s talking about is the Japanese herring hatchery program. Since the 1990s, they’ve been releasing millions of hatchery-raised herring fry into the ocean every year. He thinks it’s changing the landscape for herring. That wasn’t the case 15 years ago when herring anthropologist Dr. Shingo Hamada was doing his research here. He says then, fishermen were still skeptical of the hatchery, calling the herring “spoiled.”
“[Fishermen said] they don’t have to find the food by themselves. They’re being fed, then they’re released to the ocean,” Hamada explains. “And a lot of fishermen said they don’t think those juvenile hatchery herring survived in the wild,” Hamada says.
But, now, opinions are changing. Nearly 30 years after the program was established by the Japanese government, the herring population in Northern Japan has rebounded. And the herring are big — much bigger than Sitka herring, which in recent years have been considered ‘marketable’ at around 120 grams. Satoko Narita says these fish can weigh upwards of 500 grams.
To support the hatchery operations, fishermen reinvest 2-percent of their sales into the program. And the fishery’s recovery is boosting the local economy.
“Before [the] herring fishery recovered, during the winter time a lot of the fishermen needed to find another job. Like seasonal work [for] a construction company,” Hamada says. “But now, because of the return of the herring for the spawning season, they don’t have to get another job, you know, they can focus on the herring fishery.”
It’s a striking change from the last 50 years. Japan’s fisheries are catching up with North America, exceeding Canada’s catch of Pacific herring for the first time in decades in 2020 and 2021 (By the way, Russia catches more than anyone, but more on that later).
Ikuo Wada leads the Ishikari Fishing Co-Op in nearby Ishikari Bay, one of 15 locally operated co-ops that manages the herring hatchery operation. In 2023, Wada says 20,000 tons of Pacific herring were caught in Japan, a 21st century record, and double Sitka’s catch that year. He says they’re starting to see it outpace imported herring from North America at the local level, at least.
“If we go to a general grocery store around here, in the past when we saw the kazunoko, it [was] the product of Canada or Alaska, but nowadays we see the domestic product, Hokkaido kazunoko, more and more,” Wada says. “So I think things are changing a bit.”
But the fishery can’t grow indefinitely. Japan’s fishing fleet is aging and shrinking. Fewer people are seeking out fishing jobs since it’s tough, messy work.
“Unless we come up with a more labor-efficient way of harvesting herring than gillnet fishing, which requires lots of manual labor, not sure but maybe pound net and such, the population of herring fishing itself will be forced to shrink in the near future,” Wada says.
Back at Takashima fishing village, the herring is packed up and driven down the street to the local co-op to be auctioned off the following morning, to buyers eager to distribute herring to a regional market they hope is reacquiring a taste for Hokkaido herring
This reporting was made possible with funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
