Japanese shark industry pivots to meat products as fin trade declines, ignoring collapse of Pacific shark populations and Indigenous stewardship models
Original framing: “Beyond fins, Japanese firms seeking new values in sharks” — The Japan Times
Ainu communities in Hokkaido historically classified sharks as kamuy (spirit-beings) with specific harvest taboos: the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) was never hunted, its appearance signaling ecosystem health, while spiny dogfish (Squalus suckleyi) could be taken only in winter using handlines, never nets. Okinawan Uminchu (fishers) maintained similar protocols through noro priestesses who mediated human-shark relationships via seasonal ceremonies. These systems encoded population monitoring through spiritual observation — a form of citizen science predating modern stock assessments by centuries. The article's framing of sharks as 'new values' to be extracted erases this living governance.
Japan's shark meat pivot is not innovation but iteration: the same distant-water fleets, subsidized by the same ministry, targeting the same vulnerable species (blue shark, shortfin mako) with the same absence of precautionary science that collapsed gulper sharks in the 1990s.
The Fisheries Agency's 'new values' narrative serves Mitsubishi Corporation's seafood division and regional politicians dependent on fisheries votes, while erasing Ainu kamuy protocols that protected great whites for millennia and Marshallese mo taboos that created the world's largest shark sanctuary through Indigenous law. Pacific nations bear the ecological cost — their EEZs fished by Japanese longliners under ODA-leveraged access agreements — while Japanese consumers receive rebranded products marketed as 'mottainai' sustainability. Breaking this cycle requires not better utilization but governance transfer: the PNA model proves Pacific-led management increases both revenue and conservation; the Ainu model proves spiritual reciprocity outperforms quota arithmetic. The trickster's lesson holds — until the system that profits from depletion pays for restoration, every 'new value' is just the old extraction in fresh packaging.