Between 20 and 30 percent of Japan's marine fisheries production was lost in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake that struck the Tohoku region of northeastern Honshu on March 11, 2011, followed by huge tsunamis and explosions and reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. In consequence, the importance of the nation's western and southern ports and fisheries has naturally increased.

A typical example is Kagoshima Fishing Port. Opening onto the East China Sea, and with the Yellow Sea to the west, this is located in Kagoshima City (pop. 600,000), the capital of Kagoshima Prefecture at the southern end of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. The prefecture also administers the Amami Islands and the northern part of the Ryukyu chain (the southern part of which is Okinawa Prefecture). The port's location gives its fishing fleet access to both temperate and sub-tropical zones and as a result hundreds of varieties of fish, copepods, mollusks, crustaceans and seaweeds are landed there each year.

Kagoshima Prefecture is home to 9,000 of Japan's 222,000 commercial fishermen and hosts more than 4,000 fishing boats. Of these, the city's fishing port berths more than 300, which together produce around 25 percent of the prefecture's average annual total of 90,000 tons — constituting about 1.8 percent of Japan's annual average of 5 million tons from its 47 prefectures combined.