INTERLUDE

COMMODITY chains connect producers and consumers, but they also link landscapes. Emergent from and with multiple strands of comparison, they transform tastes and purchasing practices, but they also alter multispecies arrangements. The Chile-Japan salmon trade is indeed a story about the relations and comparisons of hatchery technicians, international development officials, salmon farmers, wholesale buyers, and consumers. But it is also about how these comparisons have bound the salmon populations and biophysical conditions of watersheds in southern Chile and northern Japan into unexpected relations of coevolution and transformation.

When Chilean salmon, along with other farmed salmon from Europe, flooded markets from the late 1990s onward, they depressed global salmon prices.¹ However, these price declines were especially pronounced in Japan, where increased imports of Chilean salmon coincided with a rise in domestic harvests in Hokkaido to produce a glutted market (Shimizu 2005). Although Hokkaido salmon had been a scarce commodity for much of the twentieth century, by the 1990s, when Chilean salmon production began to take off, Hokkaido fish hatcheries had improved their practices and were generating a surfeit of fish. Yet because the comparatively cheaper Chilean farmed fish captured the eyes and taste buds of consumers, the price of Hokkaido fish also dropped, dramatically reconfiguring the island’s fishing industry. Indeed, the prices for a portion of Hokkaido’s salmon dropped so low that it did not pay to process them; while the roe from female fish—a product not produced in Chile—could still fetch acceptable prices, male fish, bearing only the flesh that competes against that of farmed salmon, were often left to rot on the docks, forcing the Hokkaido Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives to take the unprecedented action of using its own financial reserves to buy them and process them into fishmeal.

Although such acute crises have abated, the upending of Hokkaido salmon markets by Chilean salmon continues to have rippling and surprising effects on wider land-water assemblages. While price declines have proved difficult for Japanese fishing communities, they have also opened up spaces for new salmon-human relations in northern Japan. In my initial fieldwork in Hokkaido, I sketched out a suite of new salmon management practices that had emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, often in comparative dialogue with and in counterpoint to North American conservation efforts: the fishermen who were protecting fish habitat to maintain salmon genetic diversity, the citizen groups that were trying to modify dams to aid fish passage and clean up polluted rivers so they could reintroduce naturally spawning salmon, and the earnest volunteers who were teaching schoolchildren to understand watershed ecologies. What became clear only later in my research was the role that Chilean salmon had played in instigating such changes. With the global glut of farmed fish, Japanese salmon were no longer viewed as a critical resource to be strictly managed by the state. The subsequent management shifts linked to such changes spawned new forms of “eco-friendly” fisheries initiatives, citizen-based conservation projects, and Indigenous-rights movements, with significant effects on the watersheds of northern Japan. By yoking together their salmon industries, the supply chain connections between Chile and Japan have simultaneously linked their watersheds in new ways.

In chapter 2, we saw how comparisons made in the name of Japanese nation-state development transformed Hokkaido’s lands and waters throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet there are other ways that comparisons have come to shape landscapes. As we saw in chapters 3 and 4, they are fundamentally intertwined with commodity chains, inseparable from experiments in extraction and production as well as consumer desires and market dynamics. They are embedded within the JICA-Chile project, the subsequent Chilean farmed salmon industry with its links to Japanese traders, and the cultivation of Japanese shoppers’ yearnings for farmed salmon. As they are built into commodity chains that link projects of extraction, consumption, and accumulation, comparisons come to shape more-than-human landscapes in multiple ways.²

The farmed salmon trade that emerged from the historically contingent comparisons of people like Nagasawa-san and Aros played a central role not only by remaking the landscapes of southern Chile through direct impacts of farmed salmon production but also by creating conditions that have fostered surprising new practices of environmental conservation in northern Japan, with their own distinct practices of comparison. Like many other wealthy nations, Japan has an established history of commodity-chain extraction from distant lands.³ Political scientist Peter Dauvergne (1997) has drawn particular attention to the environmental transformations that Japanese importation of raw materials wreaks on source countries, what he calls Japan’s “shadow ecologies.” Dauvergne traces how Japanese demands for wood products drive Southeast Asian forest exploitation. He shows that the supply chains that send Southeast Asian logs northward to Japan at a cheap price are “part of a complex process of interlocked indirect and proximate causes that drive unsustainable production and provide incentives and opportunities for illegal and destructive logging” in countries such as Indonesia (9). What has drawn less attention, however, are the ways that Japanese resource exploitation abroad also affects the ecologies that lie within the borders of Japan. While the production of farmed salmon for Japanese markets has cast an ecological shadow over southern Chile’s coastal ecosystems, the reverberations of this process can be followed back to the landscapes of northern Japan. To borrow Dauvergne’s language, how can we also see the “shadows” of his shadows, that is, the ricocheting effects of resource extraction abroad on Japanese more-than-human worlds?⁴

Tracing these connections is essential for understanding how comparisons and landscapes move and morph together. Doing so highlights how one set of comparative projects—those tied to the making of the Chilean salmon industry and its Japan-linked commodity chains—come to shift worlds in ways that foster new and distinct forms of comparison, with contrasting and divergent effects on more-than-human worlds. While the ecological effects of the farmed salmon industry in Chile confirm expectations about unequal exchange and environmental degradation, the effects of the Chilean farmed salmon industry in Hokkaido—and the comparisons emerging in their wake—are complex and surprising. As suggested above, by the time Chilean salmon finally reached Japanese stores in the late 1980s, the compelling reason for Japanese involvement in the industry—a lack of domestic salmon—had largely disappeared. The Hokkaido hatchery improvements in which the Japanese government began investing in the 1960s finally began to bear fruit, and by 1990, Hokkaido salmon populations had increased more than tenfold (Okamoto 2009).⁵ Yet this bounty did not interest consumers, who gravitated toward the cheaper, fattier, and more brightly colored Chilean salmon that now sat alongside them in fish counter display cases. By the late 1990s, Japanese consumer purchases of chum salmon had dropped by more than a third in comparison with the early 1980s as salmon imports boomed (Criddle and Shimizu 2014, 288).

These Chilean farmed salmon imports dramatically changed the landscapes of salmon management in Hokkaido. During the food shortages that followed World War II, Hokkaido salmon were considered a scarce and critical nutritional resource, and the national government tightly regulated fishing while working hard to facilitate increased salmon production. During that period, the government literally inserted itself—in the form of metal weirs—into as many of Hokkaido’s rivers as it could (Morita et al. 2006). The weirs blocked salmon from migrating upstream so that they could be funneled into further enlarged hatchery production schemes. Building on patterns set out in the late nineteenth century, this time with better technical success, the post–World War II government invested in hatcheries with explicit food security aims.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, with the successes of domestic hatcheries and abundant imports from Chile, Hokkaido salmon have lost their status as a critical food resource. In response to this shift from scarcity to surplus—a surplus that continues today—the Japanese state has radically changed its relationship with salmon. The government has largely withdrawn from the work of making salmon, since there is no longer any reason to do so in the name of national food security. Instead, fishermen’s groups are largely left to fund hatcheries and produce their own hatchery fish. Nearly all of Hokkaido’s remaining hatcheries are now operated by private cooperatives, as salmon production has been reconceptualized as a business venture rather than as an essential state project. While some rivers still have weirs so that hatcheries can acquire their fish, these devices have been removed from a growing number of waterways.

By creating a large supply of salmon, the Chilean industry has helped create a space where Hokkaido salmon management can focus on something other than production logistics in the name of food security. As one retired Japanese fish hatchery technician told me, until the last two decades, with the concomitant rise in both Chilean salmon and Hokkaido hatchery fish, domestic salmon were “only food” for Japanese fisheries managers. They were not ecological beings or even biological creatures at all. “It was just ‘let’s increase, let’s increase the salmon’ [fuyasō],” the technician explained. “From today’s perspective, it’s hard to understand the concerns about food resources then. Now there’s lots to eat, so salmon can be more than just food.” Such abundance is creating new modes of conceptualizing salmon, he said. “Society is changing and salmon are becoming more biological [seibutsugakuteki].” As he describes it, Hokkaido salmon are in the midst of a transformation from a mass-produced food resource into a wild animal with specific genetic and lifecycle traits that should be protected and conserved. Where Japanese hatchery production, like that of the North Pacific at large, was previously conceptualized as “sea ranching,” with salmon positioned as the metaphorical cattle of the seas, they are now compared to regionally charismatic species, such as bears, Japanese cranes, and fireflies, as they are incorporated into frameworks of biodiversity alongside those of commercial value. Working within such paradigms, Japanese scientists and environmentalists are struggling to “un-domesticate” salmon by reducing reliance on hatchery reproduction, returning spawning to rivers, and reconnecting salmon to ecosystems.

In such ways, imports of Chilean salmon—which have set off a cascade of price declines, shifts in state-led salmon management, and reconceptualizations of salmon as wild animals—have significantly altered salmon management practices in Hokkaido. These changes are at once forcing and enabling people to take up new comparative practices, with wide-ranging consequences for both people and fish. These comparisons are emerging in settings such as a fishermen’s cooperative, a set of salmon conservation efforts led by scientists and volunteers, and an Indigenous group’s demands for comanagement. Chilean farmed salmon in no way predetermine these new Hokkaido salmon practices; however, they have so substantially shifted the conditions within which contemporary forms of Hokkaido salmon management come into being that it does not seem a stretch to state that without farmed salmon, these new sets of comparisons and human-salmon relations would not take the forms they do.

Overall, these twenty-first-century changes in the Hokkaido salmon industry seem to be largely positive, with greater commitments to ecologically oriented watershed management. But we cannot ignore that such transformations are coming into being in part through connections with Chile that have had less positive consequences for some of its people and ecologies. This point is not mere background but one that must be held in view when considering shifts in Hokkaido salmon worlds. Focusing on the increase of Japanese salmon conservation projects in the shadow of the farmed salmon trade also gestures toward a more general problem: how conservation projects in one place can be indirectly entangled with practices of environmental destruction in geographically distant locales. While conservation can certainly have positive benefits, environmental problems in sum are not always ameliorated, as production and extraction are often simply moving somewhere else.

Salmon both make large migrations across the North Pacific and remain intimately tied to the streams of their birth, to which they return to spawn. To date, salmon sustainability efforts have focused on improving the conditions of these spawning streams. Although biologically sound, activities such as planting trees, removing dams, and reducing point-source water pollution have led salmon managers to conceive of their work within frames of regional growth and local land-use planning. It may be time to reconceptualize salmon restoration within larger geopolitical frameworks and pose more difficult questions about what counts as conservation and sustainability. The lines of connection between the salmon worlds of Chile and Japan are not straight ones of linear causality but instead webs of ricocheting projects, diffracted and remade through multiple practices of comparison.

Existing and robust social science literature on transnational ties and commodity chains offers critically important conceptual resources for thinking about long-distance ties and, implicitly, the practices of comparison entangled with them, including those of corporate extraction, international development aid, traders, and consumer desires.⁶ However, these approaches need to be expanded to better address the dynamics of the kind of linked landscape changes that appear in Japan-Chile salmon relations. To see these more-than-human aspects of comparisons and connections requires modes of attention that do not end at Japanese fish markets, grocery stores, or even taste buds but reach out into Hokkaido watersheds and its conjoined human-salmon worlds.