It was early spring 1968, I had received a Fulbright Foundation educational grant to produce a 16mm movie about Japanese fisheries. The grant provided for the latest "state-of-the-art" Canon 16mm movie camera (there were no video cameras in those days), and with it I had successfully completed and edited a 15-minute film on the hook-and-line mackerel fishery at Zeni-zu, an isolated reef at the western edge of the Izu Islands, many kilometers southwest of Kozu Island.
After that I was invited as a guest aboard a 100-ton offshore tuna longliner heading southwest from Choshi in Chiba Prefecture. Our goal was to catch tuna and various billfishes for the massive and lucrative Japanese market.
So I was surprised when, the first night out of port, I saw that we were approaching the bright lights of the mackerel fleet at Zeni-zu, looking like a small city bobbing on the surface of the sea. I asked one of the fishermen, "What are we doing here -- this is a mackerel fishery."
"We need live bait," he replied. "We have lots of frozen squid, but we always start our trips with live bait."
To provide some sort of protection for the mackerel population, the Fisheries Agency permits only hook-and-line fishing for these fish, allowing only a single short line with a single nonbarbed hook, baited with a strip of red plastic and attached to a thin bamboo pole. Fishing in this way, mackerel boats from Misaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, catch thousands of mackerel every night during the season.
In light of this I was surprised to see that our crew was using miniature longlines with 20-30 hooks on each of the many they deployed. Very soon we had filled all of our aeriated live-bait wells with mackerel. Naively, I asked, "Isn't this illegal?"
"Of course," came the reply. "Didn't you see the mackerel fishermen throwing jagged ice at us? A piece of jagged ice is better than a knife because it melts inside the victim, leaving no finger prints."
"Oh . . . of course," I replied meekly. But I was thinking: "Certainly the Fisheries Agency and the Coast Guard must get frequent complaints from the mackerel fishermen. I wonder why they don't do something about it? Does the tuna fishery have a higher priority than the less-lucrative mackerel fishery at Suisan-cho [where the Fisheries Agency is located in Tokyo]?"
A few days later, we had used our last mackerel and changed our bait to frozen squid, which quickly thawed in the warm waters far to the southwest of the Ogasawara Islands. "Offshore" longlines are about 30 km long, with about 5,000 hooks. We were able to put the line out, fish and pull it back about twice a day. Consequently, we used about 10,000 squid per day (eating several ourselves, after they were pulled in still attached to the hooks). In 10 days, therefore, we used about 100,000 squid.
Meanwhile, pelagic longliners use lines twice or three times longer than ours, with 10,000 to 15,000 hooks each. They also stay at sea for months at a time, selling their catches at various ports worldwide, while loading their holds with tons of tuna destined for Tsukiji market in Tokyo.
Can you even begin to imagine the impact this has been having on the world squid population for the past half century?
I reported elsewhere recently that Japan's 1,600 tuna longliners use a total of about 130 million hooks. Assuming an average of three months' fishing per year (a conservative estimate), roughly 24.5 billion (24,500,000,000) squid a year are being used to bait the Japanese tuna industry's hooks. And as this assumes only one fishing session per day per boat, it is undoubtedly a minimal estimate. And, in addition to Japan, both South Korea and Taiwan operate enormous longline fleets.
These fisheries are not only resulting in massive overkills of tuna, swordfish, marlin and sharks (we caught about 10 blue sharks per tuna or billfish on our trip), but they are obliterating the world's squid stocks. Yet, the Fisheries Agency continues to blame minke whales -- which one senior official has described as the "cockroaches of the sea."
But aren't human "cockroaches" a much more serious threat to our remaining fishery stocks?
Public pressure has recently resulted in reviews and rethinking of government policies, particularly that related to Overseas Development Assistance and the Foreign Ministry. Isn't a review of the Fisheries Agency's policies also overdue?