In the Yoichi Fisheries Museum in Western Hokkaido, there’s an entire section dedicated to the history of herring in the region. Herring was incredibly important to the economy for Yoichi, and that’s demonstrated here on the third floor. Toshiaki Asano is showing me a beautiful wooden model. It’s of the city at the height of the fishery in the early 1900s. A board of buttons controls the model, complete with working lights and moving pieces.
Asano presses a button, and two wooden boats begin to buzz around. The curators who made this exhibit in the 1960s repainted green American army figurines to look like fishermen who now man these boats.
Around the room are different pieces of equipment used in Yoichi over a century ago. Black and white photos of the fish meal fertilizer process line the walls. He points to a poster showing the herring catch in Hokkaido from 1870 to the 1950s.
“So in the high peak, there were close to 1 million tons of herring being caught, like 970,000 tons,” he says. “But you know, herring catch declined over the years and in the mid-1950s the herring fishery collapsed.”
In recent years, the fishermen have tried to manage the fishery themselves, to avoid another collapse in the future. Hatcheries aided in the recovery, but some co-ops and processors are taking the charge to conserve the herring population seriously, with strict fishing management. Ikuo Wada, who leads the Ishikari Fishing Co-Op in Hokkaido, says the shorter fishing period and wider nets made a big difference. And they’ve even secured a sustainability certification from the Japanese government.
But Kouta Fukuhara, a dried herring processor I spoke with in Yoichi, is skeptical.
“The current structure of Japanese fishing is not sustainable. Let me compare with Alaska. Alaska Department of Fish and Game regulates all kinds of commercial fishing — when it starts, how much fish to be caught… In Japan, we don’t have a such a legal structure,” Fukuhara says. “And the fishermen catch a lot of herring, bring it back and take the fish to the market. And the market is saturated with herring. Too much herring in the market, and the price goes down and they don’t make much money.”
It’s early yet to say whether that model will remain sustainable as the domestic herring fisheries grow in Hokkaido. But on the international level, Japan has a good track record with compliance and sustainability. Grantly Galland isa project director at the Pew Charitable Trust who manages international fisheries campaigns. They try to keep illegal fishing at bay and ensure that countries manage fisheries with science-based policy. When it comes to complying with international fishery regulations, Galland says Japan’s reputation is excellent.
“Whatever is adopted, Japan is going to go ahead and implement, and they’re going to do that with essentially [a] 100% compliance record.”
And it’s important to the Japanese government to ensure their fisheries are managed sustainably and they’re not importing any fish illegally.
“So conservation and sustainability have different meanings maybe but they certainly don’t want to be agreeing to policies that can drive fisheries out of sustainability,” Galland says. “Are they conservation champions? I don’t know. But they are certainly champions of good governance and champions of compliance and combating illegal fishing and all of those things add up to a pretty good scorecard if you were to give them one.”
As far as Japan’s domestic herring fishery, he can’t speak to whether it’s managed sustainably today. Seeing signs of growth in any fishery is encouraging, but he cautions that herring are notoriously prone to “boom and bust” — a lesson that applies to herring whether they’re in Japan or Sitka.
“Sometimes there’s enormous numbers of them, and sometimes there’s none. Sometimes they can support huge fisheries and land-based industry associated with processing that catch, and sometimes all of those things go bust,” Galland says. “Considering the the role of herring or other small pelagic species… it’s important to be precautionary, and try to ensure that we preserve those signs of recovery, and we don’t accidentally ramp up our fisheries in response to the earliest sign of recovery, to a point that we knock it right back.”
And that’s not just on the managers. Dr. Shingo Hamada, the anthropologist I’ve been traveling with, says consumer attitudes have to shift as well.
“Generally, Japanese people think that seafood is so abundant, but the fishery resource is limited,” Hamada says. “To be a responsible consumers, we need to think about [the] sustainability issue of seafood more seriously in Japan.”
But while stakeholders in both Japan and Alaska try to figure out how to manage their own fisheries, with increasing supply on one end and decreasing demand on the other, there’s another player in the international herring market that is making a bigger dent in the species every year — that’s Russia. Alaska, Canada and Japan’s catches of Pacific herring pale in comparison to Russia’s. The Russian fleet caught over 400,000 tons of Pacific herring in 2021, more than all other countries combined, and over 80 percent of the worldwide total.
Even with all of these pressures on fisheries, Dr. Hamada is optimistic that with Japan’s herring recovery there’s a way forward supporting a sustainable herring industry in Japan and Alaska.
“In Japanese domestic herring fishery, we’re showing the recovery. And now we have a great chance, great opportunity to think about promoting sustainable herring seafood culture from both sides of the North Pacific. So…let’s think, where we can start.”
One morning near the end of my trip to Japan, Dr. Hamada and I stop alongside the snowy roadside outside of Yoichi. We’ve spotted three faint lights in the distance and want to get a closer look. Beyond the waves crashing against snow-covered rocks, gillnetters are fishing for herring beneath purple skies. They’ll do this every day until April. Then it’s sea urchin season. They won’t take a break until the New Year.
This reporting was made possible with funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
