The devastation caused to many fishing ports along the Sanriku and Joban coasts by the Great East Japan Earthquake has led to the loss of popular maritime products from the Tsukiji fish market.
The devastation caused to many fishing ports along the Sanriku and Joban coasts by the Great East Japan Earthquake has led to the loss of popular maritime products from the Tsukiji fish market.
The negative publicity arising from the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has also led to comparisons with 1954 when a fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, was showered by deadly radioactive fallout from the testing of a hydrogen bomb at the Bikini Atoll by the United States.
In late June, the first skipjack tuna hauled in at Kesennuma port in Miyagi Prefecture after the quake and tsunami sold for about 3,000 yen ($37) per kilogram at the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market in Tsukiji. The price was about three times higher than the usual level.
One middleman working at Tsukiji said the higher price was meant as a symbol of encouragement for the disaster-stricken areas.
Kesennuma port used to have the largest volume of fresh skipjack tuna brought into a Japanese port, but after the disasters only a handful of the ice companies and processing plants have resumed operations. That means the port can only handle about 50 tons of fish.
According to industry experts, the movement of schools of skipjack tuna that normally swim northward on the warm Kuroshio Current has been slower than usual this year. In late June, the skipjack tuna were still off the coast of the Boso Peninsula in Chiba Prefecture.
The convoys of fishing boats that have pursued the tuna have brought in the fish to Katsuura port in Chiba Prefecture.
If the skipjack tuna should start moving northward, a small number of ports in the Tohoku region have limits to the volume of fish that can be brought in. Under that situation, fishing boats will have to make the difficult choice of using more fuel to return to Katsuura port or to limit the amount of fish caught.
While fish from Tohoku region ports had decreased drastically after the March 11 disaster, boxes labeled with Shiogama in Miyagi Prefecture and Miyako in Iwate Prefecture have become more noticeable at the Tsukiji fish market from early June.
However, the volume of boxes is still nowhere close to average years. The general consensus among market insiders is that it will take two to three years before the volume of fish from the Tohoku region returns to normal.
According to weekly market reports at Tsukiji, in the week following March 12, the day after the quake and tsunami, the total volume of maritime products handled at the market decreased to 75 percent of the previous year.
With products from western Japan making up for the shortage of fish from the Tohoku region, the volume had recovered to about 99 percent by late April. However, the volume of products from the disaster-stricken areas continues to be close to zero.
Kenji Ando, a director with a cooperative of middlemen at Tsukiji, said, "The fish caught off the coast from Iwate to Chiba is called Sanriku-Joban products, and it is traded at comparatively higher prices than other regions. The meat of the flounder and flatfish is more firm and the popularity is high."
Some ports in the Tohoku region used to specialize in certain products.
For example, the Ukedo port in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, was known for transporting live fish kept in tanks on the boats directly to the market. However, because the port is located within the no-entry zone established within a 20-kilometer radius of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, no work has begun to rebuild it.
An official with Otsubo Suisan Co., which serves as a middleman for live fish, said, "From now until summer, Japanese sea bass is popular. While we tried to make do with other fish, there are some restaurants that have taken items off their menus because they are unable to obtain fish from Ukedo."
Wakame seaweed from the Sanriku coast, which used to make up 80 percent of all domestic wakame sold, also cannot be found.
One company has turned to wakame from Tokushima and Aichi prefectures in an attempt to maintain its focus on domestic products, but there has also been an increase in wakame from China being handled at the Tsukiji market.
A company official said, "Many people are waiting for the return of Sanriku wakame, which is thicker and more chewy."
Some veterans of Tsukiji believe the aftereffects from the March 11 disasters may last longer than the aftereffects from Bikini Atoll in 1954.
Takashi Saito, 77, the president of Izutora, a company mainly handling tuna, was 20 at the time and helping his uncle at the company.
On April 3, 1954, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru brought in its catch to Yaizu port in Shizuoka Prefecture after it was contaminated by radiation, and some of the tuna would make its way to Tsukiji.
While there was a huge uproar then about the selling of contaminated fish, Saito said the effect on sales ended after about three months. In the current nuclear crisis, he said his company's sales had dropped by half and still had not recovered.
Because many companies at the Tsukiji fish market deal with restaurants and hotels, there is a noticeable decrease in the sales of expensive fish.
Yasuhiro Yamazaki, an executive with the fish company Yamaharu, said the negative publicity from the Fukushima nuclear accident was a major factor.
A chef at a sushi restaurant that does business with Yamaharu told Yamazaki that customers have been asking where every fish they order was caught. Some customers refuse to order sushi if the fish was caught in a prefecture close to Fukushima.
However, Yamazaki is confident that sales will eventually recover.
"The eating of fish remains strong," he said. "When I brought sashimi to a friend in the disaster-stricken area, they were very happy to receive it."