Introduction

SCALE AND SPECIFICITY

The humanities and social sciences have much to contribute to more nuanced understandings of multispecies worlds.⁴ Today, it is widely accepted that humans and other beings have long co-shaped each other and that many landscapes classified as “nature” have emerged through relations with people. Yet not all human activities are compatible with lively more-than-human worlds; ecologies are suffering the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, logging, agricultural development, and urban growth. Scientists, writers, and artists grapple for terms to describe the growing scale and depth of the disruption, including the Sixth Extinction, Anthropocene, catastrophe, and crisis.⁵ Although emerging out of natural science conversations, the Anthropocene in particular has raised significant debates in the humanities and social sciences. Scientists initially coined the term to emphasize that human activities have become such a strong driver of the conditions for life on earth that the planet has in effect entered a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, in which people constitute the most dominant world-making force (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). As a concept, the Anthropocene has spread rapidly, generating a new sense of urgency around the mounting ecological crises caused by particular human activities—from species extinctions to radioactive contamination to the proliferation of plastic waste—especially among humanities and social science scholars who had not previously centered questions of environmental damage in their own work.

At the same time, the Anthropocene has sparked vigorous critical debates about the processes it names and thus the time period in which it began (Lewis and Maslin 2015). Some scholars have insisted on terms such as Capitalocene or Plantationocene to emphasize how particular structures and relations of power, such as capitalism or the monocrop plantation, are the driving forces of large-scale ecological harm, not the universal and undifferentiated human conjured by the word anthropos (Haraway 2015; Moore 2017). Such debates have focused attention on three critical processes: fifteenth-century European imperialism, extractive capitalism in the New World, and Indigenous genocide; the invention of the steam engine in 1784 and the subsequent industrialization of the nineteenth century; and the Great Acceleration, the period of rapid economic growth immediately after World War II (see McNeill and Engelke 2016). These transnational historical events are undoubtedly useful for understanding large-scale ecological transformations. Yet nestled within them is a form that has received comparatively little attention in Anthropocene debates: that of the nation-state.

Arising in nineteenth-century Europe and rapidly spreading around the globe, the nation-state was central to both industrialization and the Great Acceleration. As the nation-state coalesced nearly three hundred years subsequent to imperial capitalism, it harnessed and amplified its economic and racial logics. While this book does not engage in debates about the Anthropocene as such, it aims to speak to them indirectly by probing the role of the nation-state form and its political economies, from the nineteenth century onward, in the transformation of more-than-human worlds. Scholarship does not need any more -cenes, but if one were to characterize this book in such terms, it would be fitting to call it a critical analysis of the nation-state-ocene in an effort to highlight the importance of this structural unit to contemporary multispecies arrangements. Economic historians have written extensively about the role of nation-states in processes of industrialization, capitalization, and economic expansion (e.g., Magnusson 2009), emphasizing that nation-states have fostered growth directly through legal and financial instruments as well as indirectly through the construction of hard infrastructures, such as roads and harbors, and the establishment of softer infrastructures such as mass educational systems that prime workers for particular labor regimes (Gellner 1983). Logics of economic growth, one of the prime drivers of global environmental change, cannot be divorced from the nation-state as a unit of political ambition and power. In light of the strong role that nation-states have played in both nineteenth-century industrialization and in the Keynesian economic development of the Great Acceleration, they deserve a more central role in more-than-human scholarship as constitutive forces of environmental transformations. To be clear, this is not a call for a return to nation-state-centric analyses or histories. For anthropologists, an examination of nation-state logics is not merely a study of national policy documents; it is also an ethnographic analysis of how such logics both travel long distances and manifest in everyday life.

This kind of approach requires attention to specificity as well as to broad national and transnational trends. Analytically, it asserts the importance of describing “big” shifts and structural process, such as those of global political economy and environmental change, while also paying attention to the highly specific ways in which people in grounded places engage and shape their multispecies worlds. This book aims to undertake such multi-scalar work by foregrounding how global political and economic processes as experienced in particular places come to shape more-than-human worlds. To put it another way: How are political-economic structures lived as they change the structures of one’s cells?

WHY MATERIAL HUMANITIES?

This question emerges from and speaks back to conversations in cultural anthropology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. In general, the book seeks to engage central conversations in these fields in three ways:

By contributing to a humanistic scholarship that examines more-than-human worlds in their material forms. This book starts with bodily form, and when it describes a given act or process as “shaping salmon bodies,” it means that literally, at the level of genes and phenotype. It explores how humanists might better notice the histories of social relations that shape the forms of bodies and landscapes. This focus on embodied histories has emerged via extended conversations with a group of scholars that has stretched across the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Aarhus University, Denmark, including Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Andrew Mathews, and Zac Caple.⁶ Each uses slightly different terms to explore the jointly social and natural histories that adhere in bodies and worlds. Haraway (2008) asks about inheritances in the flesh as she queries whom and what she touches when she reaches out toward her dog; Tsing (2015) aims to develop “arts of noticing” the social relations that sit in the shapes of forests; Caple (2017) proposes a “critical landscape ecology” that brings landscape patterns into view; and Mathews (2018) probes how the forms of chestnut trees emerge at the intersection of political struggles, trade-borne diseases, and economic policies. This book is indebted to their conceptual work, draws on some of their terms, and aims to advance overlapping conversations (Tsing et al. 2017; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019).

By expanding the contact zone between political economy and biology within multispecies scholarship. Fields such as political ecology and critical cultural geography have shown how state practices, regimes of ownership, and commitments to particular visions of economic development are key to understanding the making and remaking of landscapes. However, such scholarship has rarely followed political and economic conflicts fully into biological worlds.⁷ How might those interested in political ecology expand their scope to explore how the processes at the center of their work take on evolutionary force, affecting the lives of more-than-human beings in addition to those of people? As we will see in the coming chapters, salmon emerge from multiple relations, and thus, a study of them requires attention to geology, hydrology, climate, and ocean conditions. But attention to biophysical characteristics alone cannot explain the evolutionary and morphological shifts in these fish; the role of political economy is too substantial to ignore. Through a range of comparative development and management practices, specific attempts to negotiate the tensions of Japanese political-economic relations make their way into the flesh and bones of salmon, altering their presents and futures. Humanists and social scientists are experts in probing the constitutive force of relations of power and the material consequences of colonial, national, and modernizing projects. Yet it is important to extend this thinking in dialogue with biological scholarship on anthropogenic change to consider how specific practices of political economy, such as those of nation-building, modify genes, bodies, and ecological configurations. In lieu of critiquing biologists for glossing complex and unequal social processes as “anthropogenic,” it is essential to consider how we might better probe the ways that relations of power matter to concrete cases of organismal and ecological change. This is an act of probing the evolutionary agency of politics—not merely the political agency of nonhumans.

By describing the specificity of a natureculture assemblage. In an era of growing awareness about the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives, it is no longer a surprise that culture is shaping nature. Within the social sciences and humanities, terms such as Donna Haraway’s naturecultures, with no space or hyphen in the word, have been particularly important in drawing attention to how human and more-than-human lives are bound up with each other (Haraway 2003). But what about the contingent, historical specificity of such naturecultures? To open up these questions, this book explicitly avoids asking about “nature” and “culture” as general categories. Instead, it asks how practices of enacting modern Japan get inside the bodies of fish. If we are to understand how cultural history, political economy, and identity shape the evolution of animals and plants, we must see environmental changes, such as the physical and genetic remaking of Japan’s salmon, not as undifferentiated incarnations of global industrialization but as the product of specific landscape histories that emerge within situated transnational relations.

COMPARISON: A KEY PART OF MATERIAL WORLD-MAKING

For all readers, one of the book’s core offerings is its attention to comparison, a long-debated and multiply reconfigured notion in anthropology, which also has broader relevance for understanding environmental change. Practices of comparison play a crucial role not only in the discipline but also in the embodied histories of Japanese salmon and thus also sit at the center of this book. Let us return for a moment to the restaurant and to the bites of salmon with which this introduction began. As I dined with Miyoshi-san, the very bones and genes and population structures of the Hokkaido salmon on which I chewed had been shaped by a complex web of connections that stretched to places as far-flung as a row of Oregon canneries, a southern Chilean river, and London dinner tables. Of course, Hokkaido salmon are no newcomers to relations with people. For countless generations, their lives were intertwined with those of the Ainu peoples who harvested them both for their own use and to exchange with ethnic Japanese traders (Walker 2001). But from the second half of the nineteenth century, Hokkaido salmon were pulled into a new set of projects: a series of agricultural and fisheries experiments that sought to make the island’s rivers and watersheds into a model landscape for “modern Japan.” Comparisons sat at the core of these efforts, in terms of both their conceptualization and their implementation. In a world dominated by Euro-American knowledges and gunboats, Japanese officials saw the development of a modern nation-state comparable and legible to those of Europe and the United States as a necessity, first for avoiding Western colonization and later for being recognized as a first-rate power on the international stage.

Anthropologists have previously illustrated how comparison-making is central to acts of nation-building, as well as to colonization. Within such contexts, people often define themselves and others by actively marking similarities and differences. Of course, comparison-making long predates nations, as people have compared their own customs, religious practices, and subsistence practices to those of others, pointing out distinctions and creating group identities. Nation-states, however, have fostered new and distinct modes of comparison. From the nineteenth century onward, the nation-state has been so naturalized as a unit of comparison that one tends to forget its relatively recent origins. It has swiftly become a taken-for-granted ground of comparison not only within geopolitics but also within social science analysis and everyday life. As other scholars have pointed out, the naturalization of the nation-state is integral to the form itself. Nation-states have sought to legitimate their rule by crafting themselves as “imagined communities” with distinct national cultures, as well as units of economic taxation and military/police power (Anderson 1983).

With these intertwined political, economic, and cultural dimensions, nation-states have become central units of comparison and comparability in a wide range of contexts and registers, from GDP metrics to the United Nations assembly to World Fair exhibits to social science analyses. Comparisons of these kinds nearly always take on a de facto mode of evaluation. They are almost never neutral and often recast colonialist tropes of racial superiority and race-based anxieties: Is one’s nation-state lagging in per capita income? Are Chinese students outperforming European and American students in science and math? What can be done about the “failure” and corruption of African nation-states? Is Japan lagging behind in gender equality? Comparing well matters; it establishes geopolitical legitimacy and power. Yet the grounds of nation-state-centric comparisons have been constituted around normative ideals emergent from particular histories. The invocation of Europe and the United States explicitly and implicitly in the examples is not coincidental. While the nation-state form has often served as a tool to resist and oppose European colonial governance, it offers no simple escape from it: to be a “good” and “modern” nation-state requires deep comparative dialogue with structures that take Euro-America as a normative point of reference.¹⁰

Comparative dilemmas of this kind were especially important in Japan beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when Japanese elites began to build new forms of state governance and national identity. Hokkaido was one of the places where experiments with these new modes of being Japanese were especially pronounced—and where they radically remade ecologies and landscapes. Just after the Meiji Restoration, the new Japanese state saw acts of imperial development and settler colonialism as powerful tools for constructing a legible modern nation-state, and Hokkaido became the first place where they experimented with these new genres of territorial control. Since at least 1200 CE, Japanese merchants had traded extensively with the island’s Ainu peoples to obtain a share of the island’s salmon harvests to supplement the much smaller harvests of northern Honshu, generally in increasingly exploitative and oppressive ways (Segawa 2007). But in 1869, the new Meiji government staked an official claim to the island, renamed it Hokkaido, and began to transform it into a landscape of Japanese frontier settlement in a new and unparalleled way, one that more substantially usurped Ainu lands and forcibly assimilated Ainu peoples.¹¹

This northern land, however, was very different from the other Japanese islands; it was too cold for growing rice and was already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. Nineteenth-century Japanese government officials thus sought out overseas models for how they might turn the island into an exemplar of intensive production and modern frontier-making. The nearby Russian Far East offered an example that was climactically equivalent, but the Meiji government quickly classified Russia in official documents as a “second-rate country,” enlightened but not fully civilized.¹² Hokkaido officials opted instead to focus on thinking comparatively with the American West, a place they saw as unambiguously “modern.” Through this work, Japanese officials began to envision Hokkaido as a frontier where they could test and refine the most cutting-edge Euro-American ideas of the times, including forms of scientific agriculture and modern fisheries management. With the help of invited American experts, Japanese officials crafted a suite of transnational comparisons that would radically reconfigure Hokkaido’s landscapes, importing new breeds of livestock and new kinds of seeds from the United States, constructing dairy farms with American-style barns and silos, and planting rows of potatoes and corn with the same sod-breaking plows used to turn under the Kansas prairie.

Such comparisons were material projects; officials drained Hokkaido’s wetlands, converting them into fields for industrial agriculture at the same time that they channelized and dammed the rivers to protect farms and provide irrigation water. These so-called river improvement projects—coupled with increasing agricultural runoff, forest clearing, and chemical use—damaged the spawning grounds for the island’s salmon. Simultaneously, these fish were also directly enrolled in governmental modernization schemes. Inspired by the lucrative salmon canning operations along the US West Coast, Hokkaido ramped up salmon fishing in the 1870s, built their own canneries based on American models, and began exporting tinned fish to Europe on a large scale as they sought to develop comparable products and modes of industrialization.

As high harvest levels and habitat degradation decimated salmon numbers, Hokkaido officials studied and compared the latest in scientific fish propagation techniques from Europe and the United States, quickly establishing a system of salmon hatcheries, as the fish could no longer spawn effectively in Hokkaido’s channelized rivers. At these facilities, technicians bred salmon by hand, mixing together strains of fish from geographically distant rivers (including some from the United States) in ways that transformed the genetic structures of Hokkaido’s salmon populations. Such practices led to a sharp decline in river-spawning salmon numbers and further altered the ecosystems in which they had once been a keystone species.

Today, comparisons and the changes that they have inscribed in landscapes are central to fisheries management in Hokkaido. When I conducted the anthropological and oral history fieldwork that undergirds this book, I encountered ongoing comparisons that at once inherited and differed from those of the nineteenth century: a university fisheries school modeled after an American land grant college, salmon scientists who tried to distinguish their theories of sustainability through comparisons with Canadians, and members of a salmon fishing cooperative who had designed their business practices in comparison with models from Russia.¹³ Everywhere I went in Hokkaido, people cited relations between their own fisheries practices and those of people in Norway, France, New Zealand, and Chile. In northern Japan, no one I met in the field of salmon management did anything—from hatchery fish rearing to post-harvest processing to scientific research design—without constantly referencing geographically distant sites. These ricocheting sets of comparisons continually create cross-border movements, including introductions of new species, exchanges of currency, transfers of scientific technology, and exports of products, which, in turn, remake the identities of Hokkaido’s people, the uses of the island’s terrain, and the genes of its fish. While such quotidian practices may seem far removed from the comparisons of nation-state geopolitics, one of my arguments is that everyday comparisons at the interface of social practice and fish flesh are fundamentally intertwined with geopolitical structures.

I want to emphasize that this book is not a comparative study; it does not analyze salmon fisheries in different places by comparing them. Rather, it is an ethnographic exploration of how people make comparisons and how those comparisons affect material worlds. The following chapters examine the ongoing practices of comparison of fisherpeople, scientists, government officials, Indigenous peoples, and environmental activists in relation to historical practices of comparison-making in Japan, especially those embedded in efforts to make Japan a powerful nation-state comparable to those of Europe and the United States. These histories are significant because past comparisons linger and present comparisons happen in worlds shaped by those made before them. People do not get to craft comparisons de novo but find themselves entangled, even caught, in the living legacies of earlier comparisons.

As we dive into Hokkaido’s salmon worlds, we shall see that people’s practices of comparison shape nonhuman worlds along with social categories. Efforts to perform modern Japanese fisheries are clearly intertwined, for example, with fish harvesters’ intense desires to craft themselves as cosmopolitan businesspeople comparable to other major players in the international seafood trade. Yet the need for comparability and the comparisons they compel are also among the forces that drive the watershed and fisheries management practices that shape the bodies and populations of Hokkaido’s salmon. Comparisons do not stay in people’s minds but instead seep out into the world. They inspire actions that change material arrangements and forms. Consider once again the Hokkaido salmon at the beginning of this chapter. As part of the quest to modernize Hokkaido and to have comparable forms of industrial fisheries and agriculture, Japanese agencies and cooperatives from the late nineteenth century onward have operated large-scale salmon hatcheries that extract eggs and sperm from adult fish, fertilize and hatch the eggs, then rear and release young fish into rivers, from where they migrate to the ocean and back on their own. These hatchery practices have almost certainly altered this fish’s genes, as workers have stirred together the gametes of salmon from different rivers around Hokkaido that would otherwise be unlikely to spawn with each other, at the same time that the facilities’ metal tanks and feeding practices have exerted new evolutionary selection pressures. As salmon like this one have come to start their lives in hatcheries rather than rivers, they have become different beings.

Attention to the salmon that have been so important to Hokkaido’s history reveals how people’s comparative practices are landscape-making forces, not just ways of knowing. Overall, through the case of Hokkaido salmon, this book argues that the ways people make comparisons in a world permeated by nation-state logics constitute a substantial but often overlooked evolutionary force and driver of ecological change. Salmon are often caught in nets, and it is established scientific knowledge that the specifications of fishing equipment and the practices of harvest exert selective pressures that alter fish genes, bodies, behavior, numbers, and more; yet salmon also get caught in—and get made by—structures of comparison.

HOW DOES THIS BOOK USE THE TERM COMPARISON?

The way this book uses the term comparison is likely to be disorientating for some readers. In general, comparison is considered to be a cognitive act, an estimation or measure of difference or similarity. If the length of two straws is compared, comparison is not seen as occurring in the straws but in the mind of the person who compares them. In contrast, this book argues that comparisons are not exclusively mental acts but rather material practices in which mind and body are fundamentally intertwined. Until recent years, anthropologists have typically thought of comparisons in one of two ways: either as analytics, as frames laid on top of already existing worlds, or as modes of thinking that shape our ethnographic descriptions and interpretations. Like a handful of other texts, such as Timothy Choy’s Ecologies of Comparison (2011) and Shiho Satsuka’s Nature in Translation (2015), this book instead explores comparisons as world-making practices. This approach is partially inspired by similar assertions within the field of science and technology studies; STS scholars commonly use the term knowledge practices rather than knowledges to signal that knowledge-making is performative, that is, that it comes into being through embodied acts, institutional arrangements, and more-than-human relations rather than within the confines of human brains (Law 2008; Mol 2003). With a resonant sensibility, this book focuses on comparative practices, with the following propositions about the materiality of comparisons:

Comparisons have material effects and accrete within material objects. When a Japanese consumer compares imported and domestic salmon at a supermarket and decides to purchase the fish labeled “Hokkaido,” when a Chilean biologist compares the temperature of a Patagonian river to one in Hokkaido and determines that it might be possible to transplant fish from one side of the Pacific to the other, or when an Ainu leader makes an appeal for fisheries rights modeled on that of an American Indian group, comparisons reconfigure Hokkaido’s human and nonhuman livelihoods in a physical way. As assertions of value, possibility, and rights, comparisons compel actions that then remain in the material forms they shape.

When I write about comparisons in landscapes or in fish flesh, this is not a loose metaphor. It draws from an established tradition in material culture studies of probing how knowledges and concepts become embedded in forms. One example of this scholarship is anthropologist Alfred Gell’s work (1996) on animal traps. For Gell, a trap is a materialization of its maker’s analysis of a particular animal’s worlds. As Gell writes, “Once the trap is in being, the hunter’s skill and knowledge are truly located in the trap, in objectified form, otherwise the trap would not work” (27, my emphasis). I extend such thinking to propose that knowledges and concepts are found not only inside human-made technologies but also inside landscapes and bodies that are remade by specific human projects.

My approach to the accretion of comparisons is also indebted to work on Japanese linguistics. Japanese is a language that has been profoundly shaped by multiple borrowings—of kanji characters from China and loanwords drawn from Portuguese traders, German diplomats, and English-language television. A single sentence often includes words drawn from different time periods with different histories of contact. While the way that language accumulates histories within it is not unique to Japanese, Japanese marks some terms as “Western” in a special way. Typically, Japanese words made through contact with Western languages are written in a block-style script called katakana, rather than in either kanji or the more cursive hiragana. Each term written in katakana is at once Japanese and not-Japanese; katakana situates words and concepts within Japanese worlds while simultaneously signaling a link to the West, as it is conceptualized and enacted in Japanese contexts. In this way, comparisons of West and East are built into the structure of contemporary Japanese; comparison sits inside the language itself. Comparisons come to be embodied in material forms in a similar way. A Hokkaido fish hatchery can be seen as a form of katakana in the world, a material entity that emerges within the comparisons and juxtapositions between Japan and the West and that holds the histories of those comparisons in its structure.¹⁴

Comparison itself is a material act, but comparisons are never predetermined by material stuff. Consider again the straws mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. When one compares two straws, one rarely uses one’s mind alone; one also use one’s hands. One sometimes brings the two straws together from different places, places them alongside each other, and perhaps nudges their ends so that they align in a certain way. Such bodily engagement in comparison-making is not trivial. In the case of Hokkaido fisheries, Meiji era officials and twenty-first-century fisherpeople alike often physically traveled to other places to hone their comparative sensibilities, to encounter modes of canning and textures of salmon fillets not only with their own eyes but also their own hands. Comparisons create cross-border movements, such as the introductions of new species, exchanges of currency, transfers of scientific technology, and exports of products. Yet movements of materials also spark new comparisons. For example, when farm salmon from Chile entered Japanese fish markets, they prompted a new set of comparisons and a reconceptualization of Japanese-produced fish. It is important to note that comparisons are shaped by happenstance as well as by plan. Hokkaido fisherpeople did not set out to compare the fish they harvested to new imports; they were drawn into a comparison that they did not initiate.

Fish make comparisons, but this book focuses on the comparisons of people. Salmon are agential beings who analyze their world, and they indeed make comparisons as they move through their lives—between different kinds of prey, as they select a meal, as they decide between two rivers with different smells, and as they select a place to spawn. In short, salmon make comparisons that operate via their own logics, and these practices also accumulate in their bodies. Noticing this puts the effects of human actions on salmon into perspective: people shape salmon, but they do not make them. Salmon have countless relationships with other beings and entities—with rocks, currents, caddisflies, and krill, to name only a handful. Salmon entered the global scene long before tensions around nationhood, capitalist economies, or geopolitical maneuvering. According to recent archeological and genetic estimates, Pacific salmon predate humans by more than fifteen million years.¹⁵ These deep time histories remain in their bodies in a big way, and they remind us that while relations with people play an increasing role in the lives of salmon and the waters they inhabit, humans are not the only actors.

That said, I reserve the term comparison for the types of comparative practices and challenges with which salmon become entangled but in which they do not engage—those that invoke concepts such as the West, modernity, and nation-states. Salmon and their worlds are transformed by such comparisons, but salmon knowledge practices are enacted in relation to other kinds of concepts and entities. Furthermore, while intended to raise questions of broad interest, the following chapters are not about human comparison in a generic sense. They are about people who compare from and with Japan. Comparison has taken on a specific and special force in enactments of modern Japan—in a particular historical period (since the mid-nineteenth century) and in relation to particular political and economic structures inseparable from the nation-state form. Thus, the analyses of comparison elaborated here refer to and are emergent from this empirical context; they aim to be useful for thinking about other modes of comparison but not to be directly transportable to differently situated comparative practices.

ANALYTICAL APPROACH: WHY COMPARISON AS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC OBJECT?

What are the benefits, one might ask, of stretching comparison and comparison-making in ways that may seem slightly awkward? Wouldn’t established terms and concepts such as connections, flows, or cultural borrowing accomplish similar work? In choosing to center comparison instead of one of these other concepts, this book takes up broader conversations about who gets to be an analyst and whose analyses gets to count as such.¹⁶ As an ethnographic object, comparison blurs the lines between analysis and the world. In fields such as anthropology and history, when one uses the term comparison, listeners typically assume that one is speaking of a scholarly act, of an analytical attempt to think across two or more cases. Yet scholars are not the only ones who do analytical work; everyone undertakes analysis in their daily lives.

Indeed, for the Hokkaido fishing industry professionals with whom I began my research, practices of comparison-making are intentional onto-epistemological acts that are explicitly discussed and cultivated (see chapter 5). Comparison-making, for them, is at the heart of being what they variously call kindaiteki (modern), kokusaiteki (international), and shinkashita (advanced), concepts at the core of their efforts to improve their fisheries and cultivate themselves. They not only demonstrated but also overtly explained comparison as a technique for crafting oneself and one’s fisheries through consciously learning about and skillfully negotiating worlds of multiple practices and standards. Cultural borrowing or other common academic phrases do not fit with the ways Hokkaido fishing industry professionals consistently articulated themselves as resourceful people who actively analyze, navigate, and intervene via comparison-making. On the contrary, they often emphasized their own innovation and creativity, insisting that they were not just “borrowing” but variously using, juxtaposing, and contrasting.

While they had honed and reflected upon their comparative practice well before I arrived on the scene, the geometries of comparison that Hokkaido fishing industry professionals described to me were also shaped by our relational encounters. As a white woman who grew up in a salmon fishing town in Oregon, along the West Coast of the United States, my very being invoked comparisons from the moment I arrived in Hokkaido, as most of the people I met posed large numbers of queries about my hometown salmon (along with other general questions about the United States) as they interpolated me into their ongoing comparison-making, with the phrase to kurabete (in comparison to) as a regular part of our interactions. Because many of our conversations came to revolve around comparisons between Hokkaido and the Columbia River region where I grew up, I lean into these ethnographically emergent comparisons, even as most salmon fisheries professionals would describe Hokkaido’s twenty-first-century fisheries as more comparable to those of Alaska’s chum salmon industry. This approach also holds true to a key feature of comparison, as the Hokkaido fishing industry professionals described and enacted it: one does not merely compare sites that seem “naturally” comparable; one also makes comparisons across sites that seem radically different.

This book focuses on comparison-making because it draws on and builds from the analytical work of these fishing professionals. This is part of its commitment to a mode of grounded anthropological practice that insists that one’s analytical categories should emerge through fieldwork itself. In contrast to the natural sciences, where once in the field, researchers aim to implement a predesigned methodology as faithfully as conditions allow, good anthropological research is seen as dependent on an openness to having one’s research question, one’s analytical categories, and even one’s most fundamental assumptions about the world upended in the midst of fieldwork.

Yet comparison, as I use it within this book, is more my concept than theirs. While I am inspired by the analytical insights of my interlocutors, I am not translating them. Their notion of comparison defined it in primarily epistemological terms—as a mode of thinking—even as they acknowledged its material effects, in contrast to my analyses of comparison as thoroughly material. Their comparisons also frequently deployed conceptual juxtapositions of progress and modernity alongside backwardness with a less critical approach than mine, as I situate these ideas in relation to histories of the making of the Japanese nation-state and its settler-colonization of Hokkaido. Perhaps most importantly, while I concur with their analyses of their own comparative practices as heightened and more carefully honed than those of many other people, I nonetheless emphasize continuities across time and space that they do not, as seeing their practices as both an intentional and unusual achievement and as one that gestures toward more widespread comparative dilemmas and acts—some linked to the particular contexts of Japan, but many reaching well beyond. Overall, these analytical approaches came into being as my comparisons and curiosities intersected with those of others who have interests in Hokkaido salmon.