Demon Fish (19 page)

The tiny factory Murata runs resembles a sausage-making plant more than anything else, with a touch of the assembly-line feel of an automobile factory. Each of the sharks goes through the identical process. A couple of employees skin them and place these skins into thirty-three-pound containers to be frozen, so they can be shipped to a separate facility and made into leather. Then they take out their cartilage spines, tossing them into a large, rectangular plastic bucket that is destined for yet another plant, where its contents can be dried and turned into a medicinal powder. The remaining shark meat is fed through multiple conveyers so it can be washed, sliced, and turned into light pink tubular noodles destined for a massive mixing bowl. (“It’s pure stainless steel,” Murata notes with pride as he takes me on a tour of his plant, pointing to the array of gleaming machines. “It is the best in Japan.”) As the shark meat swirls around in the mixer, Murata’s employees add the specific seasonings that his customers request. Some want sugar, others salt, and a few want some of each. Finally, workers smooth the shark paste that has been formed through this process into twenty-two-pound metal trays that they cover in bright blue saran wrap. It’s ready for freezing in one of the building’s cold-storage units, where it will wait until the trucks come each morning to ship it to different customers across Japan.

There is no waste in this efficient enterprise. Even the least-desirable shark meat becomes feed for cows, and the other shark by-products fetch an attractive price. The factory’s main office includes a glassed-in display of shark leather items such as card holders, belts, purses, and pumps, all of which sell in the hundreds of dollars. Murata, who wears a black shark-leather belt himself, boasts that he has shipped the leather (which goes under the name KSP, or Kesennuma Shark Products) to as far away as Hermès in Paris. He emphasizes that by maximizing what he gets out of each shark, he’s supporting his community and avoiding an ecological disaster at the same time. “Without taking care of the natural resource, we cannot survive, and we cannot make the town prosperous.”

It’s unclear how sustainable this sort of fishing is: while the central government ordered the town to slash its eighty-boat fishing fleet by 25 percent in the spring of 2008, and Murata says the fishermen take pains to avoid areas where they know juvenile sharks swim, that is likely not enough to ensure the sharks here survive. Mako sharks are already vulnerable to extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and scientists believe it’s important to protect older, more fecund females that will produce more offspring than younger females.

While there are other shark processors in town, Murata—who also heads the Kesennuma fish market cooperative—is comfortable with his position of influence here. He bustles around his plant with cheerful authority and speaks glowingly of the financial model that helped propel Japan to global economic prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. He is nearing retirement but has two sons working in the business, and is optimistic about shark fishing’s future here.

Though tuna brings in roughly 30 percent more revenue than shark in Kesennuma, the animal continues to help define the city and its food culture. The local shark museum, located right next to the fish market, includes examples of small, tame sharks visitors can pet as well as a battered diving cage they can enter. The city’s restaurants advertise shark’s fin sushi and shark sashimi on their menus as local delicacies, something that’s rarely seen in other cities. Kesennuma was the first Japanese city to join the Slow Food movement, and the Miyagi Prefecture government has started touting shark as an integral part of the global push to eat locally. Its promotional literature, complete with the inevitable cartoon figures, highlights shark’s nutritional virtues. “Rich in collagen and 6 times as much DHA as tuna!” the pamphlet shouts, referring to docosahexaenoic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid. The handout provides examples of the many shark preparations visitors and residents alike can savor, including shark burgers and shark stew. But even with the local government’s help, businessmen like Murata face a major challenge at the moment. The Japanese, proud members of a marine nation, are eating less fish.

Yutaka Aoki, director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Fishery Division within its Economic Affairs Bureau, flips through the government document before him. His eyes scanning bar graph after bar graph, he finally finds what he wants to show me. “Here it is,” he declares, pointing to a chart of how Japanese protein consumption has evolved over time. For hundreds of years fish has occupied a central place in the country’s diet, but cheap meat imports have begun to change that. In 2007, for the first time since the government has begun keeping statistics about citizens’ daily eating habits, people reported eating an equal amount of fish and meat. A year later meat had edged out fish, by a tenth of a pound on a daily basis.

“The fishery agency is a little concerned about the change in lifestyle,” Aoki admits. “Small children prefer meat.” The Japanese government sees this transition to a more meat-based diet as a challenge on several fronts. It represents an assault on traditional culture. It is helping fuel a weight gain among the nation’s youth. And it threatens what Aoki calls the nation’s “food security.” Few nations rival Japan for its ability to take fish out of the sea, but when it comes to supplying beef, pork, and chicken, most of it comes from countries such as the United States and Australia. Miyagi Prefecture is not the only institution to launch a fish-related public relations campaign; the central government has launched a drive to convince people that fish eating is key. But it may not work fast enough to help the fish-paste industry that Kasumasa Murata supplies.

Just like shark fishing in Kesennuma, Japanese fish paste has a long and storied history. Back in
A.D
. 1115, a minister for the emperor who hailed from the Fujiwara clan built a large house and held a party to celebrate his new home. According to the menu, he served a steamed loaf of fish paste cut into slices. Since it was wrapped around a piece of bamboo and took on the shape of the ear of a bulrush, or
kama
, it became known as
kamaboko
.
¹²
With the minister’s culinary act, fish paste joined the ranks of traditional Japanese cuisine. To this day, the Japanese emperor and empress serve red and white
kamaboko
at official banquets.

But globalization, along with the depletion of fish stocks, has transformed Japanese fish paste over the years. Years ago a dozen regions across the country had their own distinctive form of fish paste, featuring different forms and species of fish. The rural Aomori Prefecture made
chikuwa
, a tube of paste hollowed out in the center lying on a wooden board. They made it out of the small dogfish sharks they caught, but their catch plummeted in the mid-1950s (most likely because dogfish mature so late and have a long gestation period for their pups). At first, Aomori fishermen switched to catching dogfish sharks off Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. But that population dipped, and now they import many of the key ingredients from British Columbia.

A classic fish cake,
hanpen
, has also changed with time. It acquired its name not from its shape but from the chef who created it, Hanpei.
¹³
During the Edo period (which began in 1603), residents of what later became Tokyo caught spotted sharks in Edo Bay and made them into this pillowy white fish cake. No one fishes anymore in what is now called Tokyo Bay, and much of the fish in
hanpen
comes from pollack caught in Hokkaido or elsewhere.

Shigeo Sugie, who heads the fish-paste cooperative at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, spends much of his time thinking about the future of fish paste. (Like Murata, he wears two hats: he is, according to his formal business card, president and “food meister” of Neo Foods Company, a fish-paste producer.) Sugie, with his jet-black hair and the ready smile of a door-to-door salesman, looks as if he would fit better into 1950s America than modern-day Japan. But he is firmly entrenched in one of the most impressive global-trading operations: his office abuts the world’s largest wholesale fish and seafood market, a bustling expanse with twenty-five hundred mechanized trolleys zipping around 760 stalls. There are five wholesalers dealing with shark meat paste, though this pales in comparison with the three hundred tuna wholesalers who operate in Tsukiji every day. Still, these men, along with other fish-paste sellers, are Sugie’s constituency, and he’s doing his best to represent them.

The problem, according to Sugie, is the vast array of food choices Japanese consumers now have. Like Aoki, he has watched meat consumption rise in recent years. “Unfortunately, the demand for fish paste in the market has decreased these days,” Sugie allows. “As we have a lot of different types of food available in Japan, fish paste has come to be picked up less.” While Japan’s royal families may still serve it at their dinner parties, most average Japanese families do not.

The loss of fish cake’s regional character isn’t helping, now that fish paste comes from just a handful of sources: frozen pollack supplies half the fish-cake market, while most of the rest comes from fish imported from Southeast Asia. A few stalls in Tsukiji Market still sell
hanpen
made from shark meat, and Sugie says the viscosity of cartilaginous fish makes all the difference. “It’s like marshmallow,” he murmurs appreciatively as we sample the fish cake at the Tskugon store’s stall. It’s an apt description, because the cake is light and fluffy and features the kind of give that a marshmallow has. Like every other shark dish, it’s the texture that defines it, since the product itself is essentially tasteless. Only after I dip the
hanpen
into a seafood broth does it gain a noticeable flavor and become a tasty snack.

Sugie is still fighting to reassert the role of shark fish paste in the Japanese marketplace. He and his colleagues sponsored a stall at the annual international seafood show in Tokyo, even commissioning artworks made out of colored fish paste to bolster their cause. And just to be safe, they’ve started holding a memorial service for sharks in early September at a fisherman’s shrine near Tsukiji Market. They sacrifice a spotted shark—the kind fishermen used to scoop out of Edo Bay—and show their gratitude to the Shinto spirits. And on the side, they hope for better sales. “We are not just devouring shark meat and utilizing them. We show our appreciation,” Sugie says.

But in a society that doesn’t see the shark as a major status symbol, the animal doesn’t hold the same culinary appeal. Fish marshmallows, after all, only go so far. Perhaps this is the best hope for shark conservation: when the cultural myths surrounding sharks either fade away or are exploded, the value of shark products plummets. Without this added premium the market can move on to alternatives, whether it’s a different kind of moisturizer, bland fish meat, or gelatinous noodle. This doesn’t mean there’s no societal cost: this sort of shift may cause economic dislocation, and it does mean abandoning traditions that have lasted for centuries in some cases. But it’s important to view this in context: eliminating sharks as a widely traded commodity is not the same thing as eliminating their place in global society or in the world’s economy. In fact, the most effective ways of managing this transition involve redirecting our obsession with sharks into a nonlethal form of commodification. Given current economic and political realities, it may represent the most effective method of ensuring enough sharks exist so our fetishizing them doesn’t wipe them out completely.

5

THE SHARK SLEUTHS

If it’s cool, and rare, and unusual, and nobody else has it, I want it. I don’t care if it’s illegal, I want it. I don’t care what it does to the animal, I want it. I don’t care if it’s bad for the environment, I want it.

—Lisa Nichols, Fish and Wildlife special agent, describing the mentality of a wildlife collector

A
t the moment our shark obsession is alive and well, and it’s created a conundrum: sharks are desirable because they are dangerous, but many people want to keep these fearsome animals as pets. Most people might think of aquariums as a hobby for young kids whose parents dutifully bring home an array of aquatic species (goldfish, turtles) only to see them expire within a matter of weeks—or even days—after suffering under inexpert care. But there are plenty of adults who devote a serious amount of time to buying and selling plants and animals that can be displayed in private homes or commercial establishments. An array of Web sites now serve this industry, where aquarium aficionados can log in, chat about their hobby, and order fish via the Internet. But if you are not immersed in this world, it’s hard to break into these online communities, especially if you’re looking for the seedier aspects of wildlife trafficking. Online chats generally take place in a code that is impenetrable to outsiders, and members interested in criminal activity send e-mails to users offline, so they can arrange for the transfer of goods undetected by the authorities.