It’s another fiercely cold March morning, and a dozen or so local fish processors are pacing back and forth in an icy, cavernous warehouse in Otaru. It’s Saturday, usually a day off for the folks who work at the Otaru Fishing Co-Op, but since it’s herring season they’re hosting an auction this morning. Every minute counts with herring, so they have to move these fish quickly.
The buyers circle each pallet stacked high with styrofoam boxes. One man lingers over a fish box, a cigarette dangling between his lips, trying to discern the quality. When the buyers are done looking, they go to a heated room next door with sofas and vending machines and wait.
Right at 7 a.m. the auction begins. Auctioneers move from one stack of herring boxes to the next, selling off 1,600 boxes of herring in just a few minutes. Then the buyers bring in their forklifts and trucks.
By 7:30 the warehouse is empty. This herring will be processed to separate out the herring eggs mostly in nearby towns, then distributed to grocery stores and restaurants around the region. Hokkaido herring stays in Japan. Shigeo Yamamoto is a processor from Yoichi, a nearby city. He’s bought some herring here this morning, and he’s happy with the quality
“The herring is getting bigger and bigger, and on average the herring in size is like 300 grams [to] 330 grams for individual fish, and also spawning areas are getting larger and more expansive,” Yamamoto says. “When the herring stopped coming in from Togiak (Alaska), the local processors around here started buying more herring locally.”
For the last two years, the Togiak herring fishery in Bristol Bay hasn’t opened due to a lack of buyers. Meanwhile, these domestic herring eggs are steadily cornering more of the market, pushing Alaska’s herring eggs out. He says one reason for that is the exchange rate.
“Now the Japanese yen is so weak, it’s just so difficult for us to buy herring from Alaska with their request of the minimum guaranteed price,” Yamamoto says. “Sorry for the people in Alaska, but for us, the local processors, it’s really helpful that the local herring is getting caught and recovering again.”
Japanese consumers prefer fish caught in Japan, according to Dr. Shingo Hamada, the anthropologist and herring researcher I’m traveling with. But among processors and industry folks, the allure of Alaska herring eggs is still strong.
“The name Alaska has already really established brand,” Hamada says. “Japanese people have the image of pristine nature, the wilderness, beautiful ocean, beautiful mountains, salmon, crab, herring, kazunoko. That’s also a really appealing brand.”
And the quality of herring eggs in Alaska is established. Hamada says many processors believe herring eggs from Alaska and Sitka are stickier than herring eggs from other places because they have to contend with rockier shores and rough waters.
“When Japanese people want to eat salted kazunoko…the stickier, the better,” he says. “And if Japanese processors try to make kazunoko skeins, herring skeins, using the Atlantic herring, the eggs are not as sticky as the Pacific herring eggs.”
And the reliability of domestic herring eggs is less certain.
“It is just recent years that the contemporary herring fishery in Japan started producing a decent amount of kazunoko. I think still the processors and the buyers [are] examining the actual quality of domestic Hokkaido kazunoko,” Hamada says. “This year the product coming from Hokkaido herring might be good, but next year we don’t know.”
One seller we spoke to in Tokyo said that the quality of Alaska herring eggs is higher, that they’re crisper than Hokkaido herring with more of a popping quality. Another said he buys Alaska herring eggs that are unbleached, which he thinks consumers will prefer. And a producer of dried herring products in nearby Yoichi prefers herring from North America over local herring, even though the local herring is more affordable.
At the auction in Otaru this morning, Shigeo Yamamoto told me that he is the only processor in Yoichi who buys Sitka herring. He says he’s been to Sitka several times, and smiles when he remembers Mt. Edgecumbe. He says he bought two boxes of Sitka herring last year. For one reason – size.
“Japanese consumers prefer to buy Japanese products, so if the package said it is a product of Hokkaido they might choose the product of Hokkaido over the product of the United States. But still there are certain processors who need to get the smaller size kazunoko, so those people will buy the Sitka herring,” Yamamoto says. “For sushi, the kazunoko has to be small. Kazunoko here is pretty big, it’s too big for sushi.”
With herring several times the size of Sitka’s, the skeins from Hokkaido herring are far too large to fit neatly over a small handful of sushi rice. Regardless of size, unlike some other buyers, he believes the quality of Hokkaido herring eggs is the same. And if the yen remains weak, it may force other buyers to take a second look at Hokkaido herring over Alaska’s.
This reporting was made possible with funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
