It’s warm and bright inside Sushiya Kodai, an eight-seat sushi bar in Otaru, and dinner service is about to begin. As a handful of regular customers trickle in, ready to get their fill of fish, Chef Kodai Sanada is alone behind the bar, thinly slicing fatty tuna.
High-end sushi restaurants like this one serve omakase, or “chef’s choice” where the chef prepares one piece of sushi or sashimi at a time for diners at the bar. Over the next hour, Chef Sanada prepares around 18 courses of fish: everything from tuna and salmon, to less common bites like whole skewered squid and cod milt surimi. Each night during the spring season, he fillets a male herring or two. While female herring are prized for their eggs, he says the firm flesh of male herring is better for sushi. It’s special because it’s laborious to filet a bony herring.
Kazunoko – or herring egg – sushi is not on his short list.
“Kazunoko didn’t go well with the vinegared rice because kazunoko has a firm texture, a crunchy texture. In the meantime, rice is softer so when you put kazunoko sushi into the mouth, it doesn’t mix well. They don’t come together as one,” Sanada says.
More mid-range sushi restaurants might serve kazunoko sushi. After several failed attempts, I was able to find herring egg nigiri in an airport sushi restaurant in Sapporo. Sanada says 80- to 90-percent of kazunoko sushi is from Alaska or Canada.
“There’s no kazunoko sushi using domestic kazunoko,” Sanada says. “If you find kazunoko sushi, its likely from Alaska.”
Another niche for Alaska herring is even smaller. In Yoichi, I talked to someone else who uses Alaska herring. Kouta Fukuhara is a second generation dried herring producer. Dried herring is a traditional food in mainland Japan. It’s long been a key ingredient in slow-cooked broths simmered with mountain vegetables, and Fukuhara is passionate about it. It takes a particular kind of herring: he says Atlantic herring is too soft, and local herring isn’t quite right for his product. His top choice, when he can get it, is Alaska herring.
“The number-one brand or number-one source of the ingredient comes from Bristol Bay,” Fukuhara says. “In the past, Bristol Bay provided the really stable price, stable amount, and the quality is also highly stable. So herring from Bristol Bay was the first choice to make dried herring.”
That is, if he’s fortunate enough to get it. There was no Togiak herring fishery last year due to the same commercial challenges Sitka is facing. If Fukuhara can’t get herring from Bristol Bay, he looks for herring from Russia, then South Korea.
But people aren’t cooking traditional dishes that rely on dried herring as much anymore. Sales have dropped and Fukuhara is one of a few left in his region specializing in dried herring.
“When I started working for this industry in here in Yoichi, about 20 processing companies specialized in dried herring,” Fukuhara says. “Now eight. So I will say I think the demand for the dried herring decreased over 50-percent in the last 25 years.”
Fukuhara is diversifying. He now makes rice bran pickled herring and fermented herring. And he’s not the only one trying to find a new market. Ikuo Wada, who leads the Ishikari Fishing Co-Op, says they partnered with a soba noodle company to sell herring and the effort was very successful, and now they’re trying to find more markets for male herring.
“For the male herring, the market has not yet been established. Yes, you know, we can eat the male herring grilled, then we can make sashimi by using male herring, but still, the market still has a limit,” Wada says. “Hokkaido as a whole, we need to think about a way to promote seafood consumption in mainland Japan.”
Perhaps one of the biggest success stories for herring egg marketers in Japan is a surprising combination – kazunoko and cheese, or Kazuchee.
Haruka Hozumi is a spokesperson for Ihara Company. For the past 70 years they’ve been producing kazunoko in Japan. Like many other Japanese kazunoko manufacturers, Ihara Food’s kazunoko sales were slipping, and they were struggling to find a new product.
“Young people still eat and do eat kazunoko, but that’s basically limited only on the New Years Day and New Years season. So the kazunoko industry as a whole, including this company, you know, the main issue is how to make consumers eat kazunoko throughout the year,” Hozumi says. “So that’s how we started thinking about new products like Kazuchee.”
Kazuchee is made by taking the herring egg scraps from the kazunoko gift boxes the company produces. The scraps are mixed with processed cheese, then sliced into bite-sized discs and individually wrapped, just a handful of pieces to a bag. After a few months on supermarket shelves, the product started taking off, spurred by a strong social media campaign and popularity at high-end “hostess clubs” in Tokyo.
“So those elite businessmen had a bite of Kazuchee, and they found it very tasty. So those people started telling other people, ‘I had a new product called Kazuchee in Ginza, and it tastes really good,'” Hozumi says. “And just through word of mouth…the information spread.”
Kazuchee now makes up about one-third of Ihara Company’s sales. They’ve taken the byproduct of that and dried it into dust to make pretzels that have also become popular. And about 70-percent of the herring eggs to make Kazuchee come from Canada and Sitka.
“For our company, we believe that the quality of the Kazunoko from Canada and Alaska is really good, especially like the crunchiness, the texture is really good,” Hozumi says. “So you know, our company still really thinks that products of Canada and Alaska are primarily wanted.”
That keeps their costs high though, and they’re still seeing a slow decrease in sales of the traditional kazunoko gift boxes. After seven decades importing North American herring, for the first time they’re considering making kazunoko gift boxes with Hokkaido herring.
With the challenges of marketing kazunoko, will Ihara Company move away from herring? Not likely. And she says after all, kazunoko may be a luxury product, but one that’s culturally significant to Japanese people. The word she uses is “shikohin.” That’s something that’s not nutritionally necessary, but still psychologically necessary, like chocolate.
And for producers like Fukuhara in Yoichi, pivoting away from herring entirely isn’t an option. Herring is his life’s work.
“Right now we still have kind of traditional local food, fermented herring food. And if I and the current generation stopped making those, the food culture will will become a thing of the past,” he says. “People will have access…only through the books and museums…I want to keep that culture in the present rather than in the past.”
Fukuhara says yes, people can survive making a living without traditional food, but he doesn’t want the younger generation to miss out. “I don’t know anyone else who can do this,” he says. “It’s my ‘iji,’ my stubbornness, my ethos, my persistance, my determination. As a Japanese person, I have to keep doing this.”
This reporting was made possible with funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
