It's dawn, early March, and the wind coming down the Sea of Japan squeals in the rigging of the few boats tied up in the faded fishing port of Misaki. But one area of the quayside is busy: 30 or so men, wrapped up well, are gathered to help the long-line vessel Kaiko Maru I unload half a million pounds' worth of fish. It's a big moment: the first landing of the season, a delivery of the world's most expensive fish to the people who eat more of it than anyone else.
A crane on the dock starts up, winching the first load out of the boat's hold. As the carcasses spin into the cold sunlight a shower of hyper-cooled ice dust whips our faces. The crane swings its load - a bunch of 30 guided-missile shapes in steely grey - and lowers it to the dockside. The planks tremble as the cascade of tuna begins - the carcasses, stored at -60°C, are so cold you think they might shatter if dropped. The fish buyers move forward, each hooking a fish as long as a man through the iced-pink of the gill opening and dragging them off to the refrigerated trucks that wait, doors open. Then the crane swings back and drops its hook down into the hold again. The process takes three minutes.
This will continue all day. There are 8,000 fish in the hold of the Kaiko Maru I: 191 tonnes, mainly of tuna but also swordfish and blue marlin. These are the fruit of five months' fishing around the northern Pacific. After the boat is unloaded, the crew will have three days or so ashore - then it will leave for the seas south of Australia. Yesterday the fish were sold, raising 115.4 million yen (around £570,000). The best of the catch - the 30 tonnes of bluefin tuna - sold for 1,520 yen (£7.50) a kilo.
The bluefin is the black truffle of the tunas: mysterious, rare and stunningly expensive. Its raw belly meat provides the greatest otoro, the fatty tissue that is the most prized for sashimi and sushi. This gourmet's distinction has been unfortunate for the fish, making it 'severely endangered': the Atlantic variety of bluefin is likely to be the first tuna species that will become effectively extinct. But, absurdly, the price of this luxury has collapsed because the market is glutted. That same quality bluefin tuna, from the same fishing ground, raised 2,250 yen a kilo on the Misaki quayside two years ago - maybe twice as much five years ago. Tuna is just 3.6 per cent of the total global fish catch - but the pathetic failure of international attempts to regulate the fishing and halt its terrible decline is typical of the catastrophe facing all the over-exploited fish stocks -; and more than half the total global fish catch now comes from species that are fully or over-exploited. Tuna is the celebrity among them, but less well-known species - the Japanese pilchard or the Alaskan pollock, the world's most fished fish and appearing now in a generic fishfinger in your local supermarket - are also in similarly unstoppable decline. It's a documented and recognised global disaster, but one we can do nothing about. No multinational mechanism exists with the muscle to beat the wallets of the fish-eaters.
Outside Yuji Kawai's office above the Misaki fish market there's a wall poster promoting fish conservation, with a smiling fisherman and a haiku:
Shining ocean Is a big mirror Which reflects our future.
According to Mr Kawai, managing director of the fishermen's co-op that runs the market, the present is pretty bleak, never mind the future. The economy is bad, prices are weak, profits non-existent, 'farmed' tuna is ruining the line-caught business, the small-scale middlemen are going out of business and the big concerns are grabbing larger margins. It's the usual story of the small food producer up against the muscle of the heavyweight retail chains.
Misaki is Japan's primary port for the landing of line-caught tuna, but even here Mr Kawai doesn't list among his problems the fact that the tuna might be running out and that the other prime catches, swordfish and marlin, are far from healthy too. 'Well, scientists, you know what they're like,' he says when we bring the subject up. 'If there wasn't a crisis they'd be out of a job.' Has he seen any evidence of a lack of fish, from his end of the business? He thinks for a moment. 'Maybe. Boats that used to travel for a year to fill their hold might now take 14 months.' But if he blames anything for the problem it is the purse-seine fleet, which uses nets and thus kills indiscriminately, and the governments - particularly the EU - that subsidise the trawlers.
Actually, Mr Kawai is unusually aware of the problem of over-fishing. Most Japanese I've met - chefs, journalists - look amazed when you ask them what their opinion is on the issue. They've never heard there was an issue. They know that Westerners have this thing about whales, and that Japan has a regrettable image problem as a result of the arguments about it. But that one of the staples of Japanese high cuisine might actually be running out. Really? First they've heard of that! And if you suggest that the Japanese might have to curtail their fish-eating habits the idea makes them giggle. 'Come on! It's our culture: we're an island people! Eating fish is what we do,' said Akihiro Izumi, a well-travelled sushi master. I pointed out that we Brits are an island nation, too, one that calls fish and chips a national dish. But we still managed to mess that up, argued about the cod, haddock and wild salmon until they were all fished out, and it's now cheaper to eat roast beef.
The comparison doesn't really wash, though. The British are lightweights when it comes to fish eating. We only manage 20kg each a year - the world average is 16kg. The Japanese put away 10 per cent of the global fish catch - 69.1kg of fish each a year. That's 19 fishfingers a day, every day. And fish eating is indeed central to their culture. For centuries fish was the chief source of protein for the Japanese, because until 1872 it was illegal in Japan, and against Buddhist principle, to eat any four-legged animal - though, then, as now, Japanese gourmets found ways to circumvent the rules, not least by renaming wild boar 'mountain whale'.
Now, of course, the Japanese produce what may be the best beef in the world, but fish still provides 40 per cent of the protein in their diet and, more importantly, is a key to the Japanese self-perception. You are what you eat - and the Japanese like to philosophise about their fish and the way they prepare it. Eating well and expensively is more than just a pleasure - it's a token of success. Here, perhaps uniquely in the rich world, a paunch is something to be proud of - to be told you have a jukayu-bara, the stomach of a company director, is a mark of approval. There's more bad news for fish that swim within reach of Japanese markets (and that, since the Seventies, has meant any corner of any ocean in the world): fish, all of them, are an aphrodisiac and, as a Japanese proverb states, every time you taste something new, you add 75 days to your life.
We leave Mr Kawai's office and go to get some lunch. Before I went to Japan I wrestled, a little, with my conscience. Bluefin tuna: beautiful and near-extinct. I decided I would have to try a little bit for research purposes: rather as the Japanese catch (and eat) whales 'for scientific purposes'. Just a touch of bluefin otoro, the tenderest and most expensive part of the stomach wall, on a finger of vinegared rice - nigiri-sushi. Just one piece, or actually two - sushi comes in pairs, because 'one slice' is bad luck, the words close to those that mean 'murder'. So two slices was what my conscience and I settled on.
When I sat down with Mr Kawai to eat a bluefin from its nose to its tail my excuse was first that it would have been terribly rude to say no - and second, that there wasn't actually anything else to eat in Mizaki. The promenade was a line of tuna cafes and restaurants, and even in the hotel with your green tea you got a complimentary tuna-flavoured cakelet, in the shape of a tuna head. So, with Mr Kawai, I ate tuna rump steak and then sashimi of the upper belly and the lower, and then such novelties as tuna roe and tuna cheek braised in soy, fried tuna entrails and boiled tuna heart (an amazing organ that heats the tuna's blood, enabling it to accelerate faster than a sports car); sliced and pickled strips of tuna skin the texture of thin-cut marmalade. It was very good. There was no waste. And I had added 375 days to my life.
'Enough Japan-bashing, please!' said Mr Kawai at the end of this meal - at which point I was not in a position to argue. And I could sympathise. The Japanese, as a nation, may lead the world in guzzling fish, and they are certainly ignorant of the consequences. But there are a lot of other nations busily, and greedily, assisting them in stripping the oceans.
The European purse-seine fleets, which catch for the canning industry, certainly do more environmental harm than the long-liners that cater for the high end of the market. (Seven percent of the world's total fish catch is 'by-catch', animals caught up in the nets, and thrown away.) Countries like Taiwan and China subsidise their boat-building industry, and tolerate 'pirate' fishing. South American countries won't enter into any quota arrangements. The EU is a major culprit - while preaching in favour of the conservation of fish stocks it continues to hand out massive subsidies to fishing fleets and enterprises involved in aquaculture - the 'farming' of fish. For some species, farming may be a saviour - it offers a chance to restock cod and some of the other lost north Atlantic species. It turned salmon from a luxury to one of the cheapest fish around - though, in its flabby, chemically-induced orange, it is a far cry from the wild animal. But for tuna, farming is - in the eyes of both Mr Kawai and the green NGOs - a disaster.
The EU has put over €26 million into tuna farming in the Mediterranean since 1997. ('Farming' is a euphemism - it isn't that at all, it's 'fattening' - the tuna are wild fish, caught when immature, penned and fed fish meal until they reach marketable size.) Subsidising it has to be one of the most misguided ideas ever to come out of Brussels - and the taxpayers' euros have largely been spent on producing cheap tuna for Japan, accelerating, according to the green groups, the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic tuna stocks' plunge towards catastrophe. Twenty-five thousand tonnes of tuna were produced by this method in the Mediterranean in 2004 - and three quarters of it went to Japan. Many of the Mediterranean companies are backed or owned by Japanese corporations.
The complaints against tuna ranching are many. It encourages the catching of undersize fish, thus damaging the breeding stock and it's near impossible to police. Since there are no quotas on the import of fattened tuna, only on the initial catch, the trade is a gift to pirate fishing boats and 'tuna launderers' - fishermen looking to dispose of tuna caught illegally can easily slip them to a farmer. Further, though the fish will reach adult size, they never breed. It takes a lot of fish feed to fatten the tuna - and so those stocks are coming under threat, too.
The business is also damaging to the environment. As with salmon farms, the chemicals and waste produced by the farming process turns the surrounding sea into wasteland. Meanwhile, the drop in prices brought about by the rise of the fattening trade - which only became significant half a decade ago - has done nothing to help the tuna: it just pushes fishermen to make up the shortfall by catching more fish. The World Wildlife Fund says ranching has brought the Atlantic bluefin 'close to extinction'. Mr Kawai says it's also disgusting - 'full of toxins' - and he wouldn't have a farm-fattened tuna on his table. In Tokyo the smartest sushi bars would only ever buy line-caught tuna.
But in Tsukiji market, Tokyo's fabulous palace of fish-vending and the biggest in the world, the tuna butchers I spoke to were all agreed. Fattened tuna it is, and they would not buy anything else. This is entirely because of the Japanese taste for the fatty flesh from the underbelly. Tuna kept in a pen and given free meals is obviously less fit - built to roar around the sea at 50 miles an hour, the imprisoned bluefin and yellowtail quickly become obese. Thus as much as 30 per cent of the fish is fat-laden, otoro-grade flesh. And that, in the sashimi bars and on the supermarket shelves, is where the money is. It's why, early in the morning at Tsukiji, a good half of the fresh tuna on sale come with labels stuck to their shiny midnight-blue sides - farmed in Tunisia, Turkey, Spain or Mexico.
About a half of the fresh tuna I saw in the market were farmed fish, and a third of those were from Mexico, caught somewhere in the Pacific and penned off Baja California, where 'illegal' fishing is rife because Mexico is not party to any international agreements. When the Tsukiji auction began we watched one 114kg monster bluefin from Turkey go for 450,000 yen (£4,400). This was 150 per cent more than the frozen line-caught bluefin in Misaki and the most expensive dead fish on offer in Tsukiji that morning. But a dead mammal cost even more: whale tongue, a quivering block of mahogany red, flecked with yellow fat, was selling at 4,500 yen a kilo. It was caught in the Antarctic - 'test fishing for science' explained the fishmonger with a smile.
Scientific whale-fishing - 700 whales were killed by Japan under this get-out in 2003, and their flesh sold for £27 million- is one of the cornerstones of fisheries' diplomacy that emerges from the Orwellian vastness of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. From a brutalist palace in Tokyo's government district of Kasumigaseki, this slick organisation has, for years, argued its way through the morass of international conferences and conventions on fish conservation in order to ensure the Japanese can go on eating as much of what they like as possible. Recent triumphs include some diplomatic masterwork to avoid the inclusion of Atlantic bluefin tuna on the Convention on International Trade's list of species threatened with extinction.
The Fisheries Agency fights hard. 'Whales are the cockroaches of the oceans' is one of its greatest slogans.Their latest and most brilliant gambit, unveiled at the 2003 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summit on fisheries, is to tackle both fish conservation and whaling as one – by accusing the whales of eating all the fish. 'There's a common conception,' said the Agency's Joji Morishita at the summit, 'that whales just eat plankton or fish of no commercial value but this is not the case.' Japan's whale-killing research revealed that the whales were, in fact, in direct competition with humans. 'Failure to account for the huge volume of marine resources consumed by whales… threatens to undermine fisheries' conservation efforts.'
International fisheries conferences are not usually hot news and so this amazing statement went sadly unreported. Mr Morishita, all guns blazing, went on to say he believed that whales ate three to six times more of the world's fish than do humans. For political reasons, he complained, policies were being distorted so that now fish were being conserved for the benefit of whales rather than humans to eat. He gave a list of some of the fish that the whales were so selfishly over-eating. Two of them, pollock and Japanese anchovy, also occur in the list of the top 10 most-fished species, and according to the FAO, they are already fully exploited. Japan is under considerable pressure to limit fisheries in those species.
Japan has recently taken on the chairmanship of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), a body that brings together the Atlantic rim countries that have tuna interests with other major fishing and import nations beyond the Atlantic, like Japan and China. ICCAT is the law - it sets the quotas, and tries to regulate the boats and monitor the stocks. Since every species of Atlantic tuna is now over-exploited and the population perhaps 10 per cent of what it was when ICCAT was set up in 1966, there are valid questions to be asked about the organisation's effectiveness. Some people say a better name would be the International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas.
At the Ministry building I met Masanori Miyahara, a senior negotiator for the Japan Fisheries Agency. He has recently become chairman of ICCAT. Was that not a case of putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop? He laughed very politely. Mr Miyahara, it swiftly becomes clear, is not one of those Fisheries Agency warriors, raucously battling for Japan's right to fish. His approach is patient, pragmatic and somewhat weary. Why are you seen as the bad guys in all this? I asked. 'Because the criticism has some truth,' he responded. Japan, he says, is partially responsible for the decline of tuna and other species - 'Of course we are - we are a huge market. But we can't remedy the situation alone. Others are responsible too, and we have to work together.'
Japan, he says, is the nation that has the ideas for conserving tuna. 'We come up with the proposals, loads of good regulations, but implementation is the problem. We need the support of others.' Japan, for example, is busy subsidising the decommissioning of large tuna boats, preventing old vessels being replaced. 'But the EU subsidises the replacement of purse-seiners. Spain is increasing the size of its fishing fleet while ours is contracting. China provides 40 per cent of the production costs of a boat in cash.'
Even the World Wildlife Fund agrees that the Japanese government is now doing as much as can reasonably be expected to conserve tuna stocks. The country has acted aggressively on pirate fishing and fish laundering, blacklisting boats that operate under flags of convenience. It has launched diplomatic offensives against countries like Taiwan and China which fail to police their fleets. It is pushing for quotas to be introduced on fattened tuna. It is also, to everyone's surprise, beginning to move against the giant Japanese corporations; last year, for the first time, a freezer ship belonging to the fishing division of the Mitsubishi conglomerate, which is the biggest of all the tuna trading companies, was stopped and prevented from landing 120 tonnes of tuna that it had taken in mid-ocean from pirate long-liners trying to avoid the quotas. Japan is also starting DNA sampling of caught tuna to try and pin down where it came from, and putting observers onto the freezer ships. This is all very expensive, and Mr Miyahara said politely that Japan would be pleased if the EU followed through on its own promises to regulate the trade and fund proper policing of the Mediterranean tuna farming industry.
Despite all this, Mr Miyahara conceded, perhaps one in 11 of the fish we had seen in Tsukiji market that morning was an illegal immigrant. 'There are,' he said, 'loads of loopholes.' He sighed. 'There's illegal operation, under-reporting, mis-reporting, fish laundering to contend with. The businessmen are very quick to respond to each change. It is an endless game.'
Fish conservation plainly doesn't work. Regulating the fishermen and the traders is impossible - greed always triumphs. No commercially desirable species on the planet - cod, rhinoceroses, American buffalo - has ever won a battle against the market. So if the supply can't be policed effectively, despite all Japan's efforts at turning good cop in this game, the only possible strategy must be to the demand side: to ask fish eaters to control themselves. Mr Miyahara agrees: 'I think we should work on this - educate consumers that we just don't need this much fish.'
Early that morning in Tsukiji I watched my translator, Chie Kobayashi, sampling a scrap of tuna offered to us by one of the fishmongers carving up a blue-fin carcass. It was a little, ragged piece of bright red, a famous delicacy scraped from the hollows between the great ribs of the fish. Chie ate it slowly, solemnly, her eyelids closed, giving little sighs of pleasure: 'That is …so special!' she said after the last morsel. 'I am so lucky!' I thought, how are you ever going to educate the Japanese to give up that pleasure? It would be cruel.
It may not, in any case, be necessary. A brief look at the latest FAO statistics on fish consumption patterns and projections of future demand - on imports and aquaculture investment, on the number of people employed in fishing - shows one nation plainly standing out. It is quite clear that it is in fact the Chinese who are going to eat all the fish. And China's first fish and chip shop has just opened in Beijing.
