CHAPTER FIVE Stuck with Salmon

A MARGINAL FISHING TOWN

Since the mid-twentieth century, “modern Japan” has become synonymous with its urban metropolises, with their bustling bodies, neon lights, and high-rise offices. In the postwar era, these industrial centers created economic opportunities that drew young Japanese to the cities, creating massive internal migration and rural depopulation. As cities bloomed, the countryside became cast as its outside; urban areas came to embody modern futures, while rural areas were depicted as “disappearing,” with a mixture of romanticism and backwardness (Ivy 1995). As a result of Hokkaido’s Meiji era colonization, the nostalgia that Hokkaido’s rural towns evoke is less a nostalgia for traditional Japan than a nostalgia for dreams of strong economic growth and progress that the island’s initial colonization conjured for ethnic Japanese—dreams that seem to have partially slipped away. Beyond the metropolitan area of Sapporo (Hokkaido’s capital), the island’s rural regions have had to cope with varying degrees of decline for much of the past half century. Beginning in the 1960s, Hokkaido’s rural communities began to struggle as mine closures and agricultural mechanization decreased the number of local jobs, and an increasing number of rural Hokkaido youth, faced with bleak employment prospects, began to migrate to either Sapporo or south to Tokyo and other major Japanese cities.

Although located in the center of Hokkaido’s most productive salmon fishing region, the city of Kitahama is caught up in these trends. Facing north toward Russia and the Okhotsk Sea, Kitahama is literally at the end of the line, about six hours by train from Sapporo. In Japan, train service conveys much about a place’s ranking along the sliding scale of central to peripheral. In contrast to the epitomical bullet trains of Japan’s busy commuter corridors that can travel at speeds of up to two hundred miles per hour, the train to the Okhotsk seacoast lumbers over mountain passes at less than thirty-five miles per hour. Because there is only a single track, the train must stop at a designated pull-off spot to allow the occasional train traveling in the opposite direction to pass. Inside the compartments, the seats are worn and the windows rattle. Unlike the quintessential image of the Tokyo metro trains so crowded during rush hour that white-gloved attendants push people into cars, trains to Kitahama are rarely full. Countless times, I have had the eerie experience during the last hour of the ride to Kitahama of being the only person remaining in my train compartment. Although people in rural Hokkaido most frequently travel by car, the presence or absence of train service still carries much symbolic value. Kitahama residents often told me with pride that unlike several other Okhotsk Sea fishing towns, they had not lost their rail service—yet.

Although the county-like zone of Kitahama has a population of about forty thousand, the city itself feels much smaller. Near the train station, there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut combined into a single store, and a ten-minute walk down the road, there is a small strip of izakaya (pubs), a few sushi bars, and some yakiniku (grilled meat) joints. When I first went to Kitahama for preliminary summer research in 2007, there was a department store, but by the time I returned for longer fieldwork in 2009, it had closed. The town, economically sustained by a mix of fishing, farming, and tourism, is clearly not thriving, but neither is it in its death throes. At the same time that its downtown has nearly as many empty storefronts as it does stores, it also has a couple of new chain hotels and a sparkling hospital. Thanks to public-works monies, which also make up a substantial part of the local economy, Kitahama has a state-of-the-art public library, a community center, a concert hall, and two recently remodeled museums.

More than once, Tokyoites questioned my desire to spend time in Kitahama, a city that for them is synonymous with cold. Temperatures begin dipping below freezing in November and snow lingers as late as April. Kitahama’s climate, and that of Hokkaido more generally, makes it seem temporally out of step with metropolitan Japan. In Tokyo and Kyoto, the cherry blossoms that mark the arrival of spring flower in late March, while Kitahama’s buds do not open until May. As a result, many important community events, from elementary school sports meets to shrine festivals, are held on a different schedule in Hokkaido than in the rest of the nation to accommodate the weather. All this accentuates the feeling that northern Hokkaido, while Japanese, is also deviant in relation to normative Japanese-ness.

Fishing, one of region’s most prominent sectors, is also an increasingly marginal occupation; only about one out of every 525 Japanese adults is employed in a job linked to the fishing industry (OCED 2021). Since the Meiji period, Japanese fishermen have consistently found themselves ensconced in an industry often viewed as less modern than other industrial projects. Japan’s fisheries, rooted in collective sea tenure and hereditary rights transfer, are still sometimes seen as a “feudal remnant,” as a holdover from “premodern” Tokugawa times.⁴ While urban development and corporate innovation are seen as having brought Japan into the present, fishermen, who are seen as craftsmen, are understood as linking the nation to its past. Some Hokkaido fishermen embrace such narratives, which define them as “traditional” (dentōteki). For example, in Yamakawa, a southern Hokkaido town where I conducted participant observation, the fishermen loved to trumpet themselves as men of the sea, in line with the stereotypes that Motozumi-san bucks. Many of the Yamakawa fishermen were proud that they had started working in fisheries right out of middle school. When I asked them what they see as the most important trait for a fishermen, they almost all cited intuition (kan). In concert with classic images of traditional fishermen, they see themselves as strongheaded, set in their ways and beliefs, and wagamama—egotistical, willful, and selfish.

The Yamakawa fishermen want to be “local.” They sell the majority of their catch on contract to a single processing company just up the road, whose buyer shows up every morning with a medium-sized truck to haul the fish away. The fishermen also proudly make personal deliveries directly to nearby sushi restaurants, bars, and acquaintances, while their wives sell salmon, along with handmade seafood items, at a dockside stand. Their office exudes informality; the floor is filthy, and the tables, covered with scattered car magazines, have not been wiped clean. An old yellow fly-strip dotted with black insect bodies hangs from the ceiling, and a large nudie calendar featuring a big-breasted Japanese woman is tacked to the back wall. They scrape by financially, supplementing their fishing income with odd jobs, such as snow removal, during the winter off-season. Although the Yamakawa fishermen often wished for more money, they never expressed desires to be anywhere or anyone else.

In stark contrast, the Kitahama fishing industry professionals desperately want different lives and selves. They constantly chafed against assumptions about what kind of people fishers are, against the classic fishermen identities that the Yamakawa people embraced and embodied. While the Yamakawa salmon fishermen tended to speak in idioms of community, local products, and a sense of place, those in Kitahama did so in languages of professionalization, standardization, and internationalization. One morning, between the first and second waves of boat unloading, Motozumi-san and several of the other set-net group members decided that they wanted to switch their newspaper subscription to stay better abreast of current events. The office was receiving daily deliveries of the Hokkaido Shinbun, the major regional newspaper, but all the fishers gathered in the office already received that paper at home; here they wanted something different, something more focused on transnational political and economic issues to read during downtime at work. They decided that they wanted the Nikkei economic newspaper, the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, which is usually read by businesspeople and college-educated professionals. Motozumi-san dialed the number of the newspaper distribution office to change their subscription. Although I could hear only Motozumi-san’s side of the conversation, things initially seemed to go smoothly. He introduced himself as “Motozumi from the salmon set-net fishing group,” and the newspaper distributor seemed happy to make a simple change from one paper to another. But a problem arose when Motozumi-san tried to explain which newspaper they wanted. “We’d like to switch to the Nikkei,” he politely said. “No, not the Nikkan, the Nikkei,” he clarified. But the newspaper distributor continued to assume that he wanted the Nikkan, a publication roughly equivalent to Sports Illustrated.⁵ After a pause, he continued: “No, no, we don’t want a sports newspaper. We want the Nikkei.” Exasperated, he had to repeat his request several more times before the person on the other end of the line finally grasped his request. After hanging up, Motozumi-san turned to the rest of the office and commented about how the simple order change had proved rather difficult despite his clear pronunciation. “Even Heather-san understood me clearly, right? But that person just couldn’t imagine that fishermen [ryōshi] would be reading the Nikkei!”

GETTING OUT OF KITAHAMA

The figure of the parochial fisherman that dogged the Kitahama fishing industry professionals was a part of their own pasts. Until recently, the lives and identities of people in Kitahama closely resembled those of Yamakawa fishermen. When Motozumi-san was a child, his father, Michio-san, was a quintessential fisherman. Born in Hokkaido, he had moved to Kitahama before the onset of World War II, where he harvested salmon as a laborer, not as a rights holder. During the immediate postwar sea reform, a redistribution of fishing rights from absentee owners to active fishers under the American occupation, Michio-san obtained his own salmon rights by joining with a group of men to form a set-net workers collective.⁶ However, these rights did not lead to great wealth. During Motozumi-san’s childhood, Michio-san’s earnings were not enough to make ends meet, and he proved unable to provide for his wife and two sons. As a result, Motozumi-san’s mother began operating a small drinking club for men (called sunakku, a cognate of the English snack bar) to make enough money to keep the family afloat. With his parents often absent, Motozumi-san was largely raised by a grandmotherly neighbor.

Motozumi-san and others of his generation did not want to follow in these footsteps. Growing up in an exciting postwar moment of increasing educational and economic opportunities in urban areas, they rejected the constraints of a lifetime of salmon fishing in Kitahama, a position they saw as both geographically and occupationally marginal. They did not want to be entangled in what they saw as suffocating structures of family legacy. Motozumi-san and a number of other young people from salmon families (mostly men but also a few women) managed to succeed in school and to make their way to good universities in Tokyo and Sapporo, despite the challenges of doing so from a rural area. Some were the relatively privileged children of Meiji era pioneer families who, in addition to their salmon rights, had significant accumulated wealth from colonization and other business ventures; others, like Motozumi-san, had only their own determination. Motozumi-san and others of his generation left town yearning to become “modern” by joining the massive urbanization movement. They dreamed of “making it” in life by making it out of Kitahama. Initially, their lives went as they hoped. Motozumi-san lived in Tokyo, worked as a journalist, and wrote a novel. Some of his peers became salary men, working for large corporations in several different cities. Still others found jobs through fish-related connections as buyers and sellers at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. One lived for years in England, while another worked in the office of a politician who later became prime minister. Such experiences and travels changed them. As they shifted locations—and moved away from Kitahama—the world seemingly opened up for them, and they became able to see and think in new ways. They were living their cosmopolitan dreams.

GETTING STUCK

But although they ostensibly “made it” in Tokyo and cities abroad, one by one, the Kitahama youngsters felt compelled to return. They were mostly called home to deal with family matters, often ill parents or siblings in trouble. A few were lured home by ailing fathers who wanted them to take over their fishing rights and promised that since more and more fish were returning to the bay, lots of money was bound to follow. As one fisher told me, “Of course, I didn’t want to return to Kitahama. I actually kept an apartment in Tokyo at first. My mother enticed me to come back in part by telling me that I’d make enough money in six months to live on for an entire year.” But of course, things did not go as planned. One year stretched into several, and the promised good money from fishing ended up being so bad that the alleged off-season was spent driving taxis to try to pay the bills.

Although they felt duped, once the young men took over their fathers’ fishing rights, it was difficult for them to quit. Because Hokkaido salmon fishing rights are hereditary, they were prohibited from just selling them off to someone else, as fishers can often do in other national contexts. Furthermore, once a family member gives up his rights, it is extraordinarily difficult—often impossible—to reclaim them.⁷ Even though the fishing was far from spectacular, many of the sons who returned to Kitahama felt reluctant to let their rights lapse since they were part of their family inheritance, but they perceived this inheritance as a burden not a gift. They were stuck maintaining their families’ fishing legacies until they could pass them on to another family member. The social worlds of Kitahama did not look favorably on children who forced their families to abrogate their rights. Gossip was prevalent, and young men and women who fled Kitahama after only a short time in the fisheries were criticized as “running away” (nigeru) from hard work, family, and community.

But after their time in Honshu’s cities or overseas, the now worldly young men and women found Kitahama to be intolerably traditional, remote, and behind the times. They saw going back to Kitahama from Tokyo as just that: going backward. In the midst of their most modern of dreams, they suddenly found themselves entangled in classic filial stories of obligation and hereditary succession. While they yearned for routes, they got stuck with roots. Salmon fishing rights chained them legally and economically to a place they wanted to escape. Under Hokkaido Prefecture regulations aligned with the postwar fisheries sea tenure reforms, in order to maintain their families’ rights, they had to make Kitahama their primary home, maintaining a permanent residence in the area where their net is located. The goal was to block the formation of a system in which absentee landlords—or in this case, absentee “sea lords”—owned net rights that local residents could work only as hired crew. If they had enough money, Kitahama fishers could own a second home in another city, but especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they had few funds, they could not get out of Kitahama. They described themselves as thoroughly stuck.

MAKING MODERNITY IN KITAHAMA

Through their experiences in Honshu and beyond, the Kitahama fishers had become certain about one thing: they now knew what “modern” living was supposed to be. Such knowledge initially heightened their depression about being stuck in Kitahama’s fishing industry. But as they came to terms with the fact that they were not likely to leave Kitahama any time soon, they began to ask themselves about how they might create their own cosmopolitan identities in Kitahama. In the early 1990s, a core group of men, including Motozumi-san, decided that if they were stuck in Kitahama—and stuck with salmon—they might as well make the best of the situation. The younger college-educated Honshu returnees joined forces with a couple of established yet progressive fishers and started a conversation over beers and shōchū, a distilled beverage. What could they do to improve their lot? They soon formed what they called the Salmon Club, a coalition of fishers and local fish processing company leaders. The Salmon Club was a piscatorial consciousness-raising group, a gathering designed to develop what the fishers called mondai ishiki (problem awareness). The group was part of the men’s attempt to see their financial problems as more than the inevitable fate of those dependent on boom-and-bust cycles and their social dilemmas as more than the inescapable consequence of having been born into a fishing family.

When they began assessing their problems, they initially focused on the large number of fishing rights holders in Kitahama. More than 160 people held salmon rights in the area, several times greater than in comparable areas of Hokkaido. How on earth could their modest fishery generate a decent income for so many? The large number of rights holders in Kitahama was something of a historical fluke. After World War II, fisheries throughout Japan—including Hokkaido salmon fishing—underwent phenomenal changes that aimed to democratize them. In a report about their fisheries reform efforts, American occupation officials wrote that they sought to take actions to “encourage the development within Japan of economic methods and institutions of a type that would contribute to the growth of peaceful and democratic forces,” and that they sought “to favor policies which would permit wide distribution of income and ownership of the means of production and trade” (Hutchinson 1951, 6). Fishing was earmarked as an industry that had previously fostered acquiescence to authoritarian rule:

The fishermen—those men who actually went to sea and caught fish—were virtually enslaved by the owners of ancient fishing rights which entitled them to the exclusive exploitation and benefits of the fisheries potentials within the area of the rights. Fisheries associations, dominated by government and/or local bosses, controlled the sale and distribution of the catch. The man who did the actual fishing was practically excluded from the benefits of his labor and was at the mercy of the controlling authorities without any chance of escaping from their grip or bettering his position. Far-reaching reforms of this antiquated structure were necessary to lead the industry into the ways of democratic organizations. (Hutchinson 1951, 6)

Across Japan, new laws established a fish cooperative system focused on developing principles of democratic self-governance. Cooperatives were to manage the resources within their assigned area, select their own members, distribute fishing rights to those members, and craft their own harvest regulations and rules for environmental protection.

In Hokkaido, the distribution of salmon rights took a special twist. Instead of granting salmon net rights to cooperatives to disburse to their members as they saw fit, Hokkaido Prefecture retained direct control over chum salmon, along with the island’s limited runs of pink salmon and small numbers of trout.⁸ In addition to joining their local fisheries cooperative, people who sought salmon rights had to apply through the prefectural government for the right to construct a net on a specific patch of sea floor. In contrast to other forms of fishing, which are usually undertaken with mobile gear such as nets, seines, or hook and line trolls, Japanese salmon are caught almost exclusively with teichiami, or fixed set-nets, also sometimes called pound nets or fish traps. At the beginning of each salmon fishing season, usually in August, salmon fishermen build set-net traps out of heavy nylon mesh, steel cables, and foam floats. These traps are precisely located along the seacoast so that migrating salmon, returning to Hokkaido’s rivers, bump into their guide nets and eventually swim into their holding chambers.⁹ Fishermen check and harvest salmon from these chambers by pulling them up on a regular basis—usually on the order of one to three days—emptying the fish onto the decks or into the holds of their boats. Because of the large size and awkward shapes of salmon set-net traps, they have been entangled with different labor configurations than other modes of fishing. Where many coastal fishermen work alone or with a single partner, salmon set-nets require between seven and twenty people for their construction and harvest.

Because the nets are fixed, salmon fishing rights specify the size, shape, and patch of seafloor that each net is allowed to occupy. As a result of the specificities of salmon migration patterns, not all locations are equal, and during the postwar reassignment of fishing rights, people sought access to the most productive spots. In cases when there were competing applications for the same section of sea, Hokkaido Prefecture used a ranking system for determining who would receive the rights, with highest priority given to applications from workers’ collectives, groups of seven to twenty fishermen who would work a single net together as owner-operators. If there were no such collectives, priority would then be given to smaller groups of fishermen who planned to incorporate. The lowest priority were applications from people who were seeking sole proprietorships. After the initial redistribution of rights in 1952, set-net contracts had to be renewed every five years, with owners retaining the right to renew their existing claim.

When fishermen applied for salmon rights in the immediate postwar period, the way the process played out on the ground varied by location. In many towns, the single-owner applications of prominent citizens went unchallenged, and salmon rights remained in a small number of hands. But in Kitahama, things unfolded differently. Across Hokkaido, prewar sole proprietors of salmon rights had hired migrant laborers from Honshu to haul in their heavy set-nets. In most places, the laborers stayed in Hokkaido only during the autumn and early winter fishing season, keeping their Honshu villages as their primary home. But in the case of Kitahama, a sizable percentage of salmon laborers had permanently relocated to the city. Thus, when a chance at fishing rights arose in the postwar scramble, these laborers were legal community residents who wanted their share. Furthermore, the postwar period brought an influx of skilled fishermen to Kitahama, as many returnees from Japanese settlements in Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands ended up resettling along the Okhotsk seacoast. With so many fishermen in town, people in Kitahama were forced to form seisan kumiai (workers’ collectives) or at least other forms of joint ownership in order to have a chance at securing rights to a net under the preference system, resulting in a fishery whose proceeds were divided into a large number of small portions, leaving most people financially strapped.

TOO MANY FISH

The Salmon Club members also identified other structural problems with their salmon fisheries. While their fathers had struggled with a lack of fish, by the early 1990s they had begun to struggle with too many of them, both in Kitahama and in global salmon markets. Just after World War II, when American occupation officials conducted a survey of Hokkaido’s fisheries resources, there were so few salmon remaining that they did not even seem worth counting. While the survey specifically listed the number of harvested tons for the most commonly caught species such as herring and squid, salmon were simply tallied under the category of “other fish.”¹⁰ In the 1970s and 1980s, however, improvements in hatchery technology and favorable ocean conditions caused a nearly tenfold increase in salmon numbers, transforming northern Hokkaido’s hatcheries, which had failed to boost salmon numbers in the previous hundred years, into fish-making machines (Okamoto 2009).

But this dramatic increase in salmon did not solve the woes of the Kitahama fisherpeople. As discussed in the interlude, in the 1990s, Chilean farmed salmon began to flood Japanese markets, resulting in significant price declines within Japan and on global markets. Although a profitable domestic market remained for a handful of the highest-quality Japanese salmon, the Kitahama fisherpeople were routinely forced to sell the majority of their lower-grade fish at rock-bottom prices, often to fishmeal or fertilizer companies. As their fathers had been when salmon runs were weak, the new generation of Kitahama fishermen remained poor—this time a kind of poor they called tairyō binbo, or “big harvest poor.” On top of sluggish markets and too many fish, they also struggled with uncertainty. Based on the slightest differences in water temperature and currents, the routes that the salmon took through Kitahama Bay varied from year to year, as did the specific nets they entered. In a given season, the salmon flooded some nets, while others stood almost empty. Because individual fisherpeople held rights to only a part of one net (or to parts of a handful of nets in the same area), their earnings swung dramatically from year to year, and a bad season could be exceptionally tough for those with little savings in the bank.

MAKING INTERVENTIONS

What then were Motozumi-san and the other young Kitahama fishers to do? They might be stuck with salmon, but they decided that they were not stuck with this form of fishery and its problems. The trials of local fishing were not inherent, they asserted, but the product of parochial and backward thinking. A good life was possible if they could manage to overcome old thought patterns and ingrained practices. For them, a good life meant many things. It meant having enough money to send their children to college, fly to Sapporo on weekends, take overseas vacations, and pursue hobbies, instead of menial part-time jobs, during the off-season. It meant a world that privileged hard work over seniority. And it meant having a spotlessly clean business office filled with computers and spreadsheets rather than a grimy bunkhouse. To bring such dreams into being, they felt they needed to work together in new ways. In other locales, one might be able to fashion oneself as a self-made cosmopolitan, but in Kitahama, modern identities were going to require collective effort.

The Kitahama fishers decided that they needed to begin by reforming their organizational structures. The sky-high costs of salmon fishing that each set-net group bore were consuming most of their potential profits. Each net group was an independent business unit with its own office, office staff, storage area, and shop building. Each also owned its own boats, nets, and other gear. Furthermore, because the number of rights’ holders was often less than the number of people required to haul in a net, most set-net groups hired migrant laborers from northern Honshu to help them during harvest time, so they also maintained their own residential bunkhouses, providing room and board in addition to salaries. Once all these costs were paid, there was barely any money left. The system was terrifying for rights holders because it created high overhead costs while generating uncertain returns. What were they to do when things went wrong? Each individual group had relatively few assets, so it was difficult for them to get loans for updated equipment or needed repairs.

The leaders in the salmon fisheries community saw a possible solution to what they saw as wasteful inefficiencies; if they convinced all of the salmon rights holders to join forces to create a single organization, they could eliminate redundancies and dramatically reduce their overhead costs. They could easily harvest the same number of nets with only a few collectively owned boats. And if the rights holders banded together, they would have more than enough people to haul in all of the nets themselves, saving them the cost of hiring and housing seasonal laborers. But convincing rights holders with long-standing rivalries and prideful independence to work together in new ways was not an easy task. While the fishers could see the benefits of collective organization, those with the best nets of the bunch worried that they might lose out if they joined with others. However, in 1994, after much deliberation, Kitahama’s approximately 160 salmon rights holders voted to try out a radically different organizational structure, one that combined all the set-net groups into a single entity with one business office and jointly owned gear. Per Hokkaido law, each of the rights holders would continue to have stakes in their original net(s), but they would effectively sign over the rights to manage and profit from those nets to the newly formed salmon set-net cooperative. Instead of controlling their own nets, the rights holders essentially deputized a board of directors to manage their net in concert with all of the salmon nets in Kitahama.

Convincing people to take on new roles and to voluntarily give up direct control over their “own” nets demanded that the set-net leaders credibly conjure the new riches that such acts would generate. At the same time, they had to console some fishers who were saddened by the loss of their boats, which were sold off as the new board pared the number of vessels. They also had to assuage the egos of some rights holders who were initially reluctant to do the dirtiest work that they once assigned to the migrant workers. But perhaps the most challenging was that Motozumi-san and other leaders had to reassure the rights holders that they would not be cheated of their rightful shares of the pie—while also redefining what counted as rightful. Because certain nets had historically greater average harvests than others, the owners of those nets wanted bigger portions of the collective earnings than others. So too did the owners of nets with fewer rights holders and thus greater per-person earnings. But the rising co-op leaders had other ideas. They wanted to value work instead of historical privilege. To reduce overhead costs, they would have rights’ holders staff the office, man the boats, unload the catch, and chase away the birds until buyers came to haul them away. Those who took on more tasks would get more money. The co-op leaders, especially Motozumi-san, saw systems that distributed wealth based on family ties and good fortune as fundamentally backward and those that rewarded work as more modern. While Motozumi-san was not a Marxist, he was a member of the Russian Club—a local study group that focused on Russian literature, culture, and politics—and appeared to draw worldly inspiration from thinking across different forms of economy.

MODERN BUSINESS

The question of what constituted modern business practices was a true question for Motozumi-san and his colleagues, one they contemplated through comparisons. They were inspired by American-style corporate governance structures, streamlining, and rationalization. After studying practices common in US businesses, they began charting which nets were the most productive and how much fuel it took to harvest fish from each trap and estimating the most profitable patterns for checking the nets. As they sought to make fishing a science rather than an art, data became king. Numbers about weather, water temperatures, fish population size, and boat usage were recorded on clipboards, displayed on dry-erase boards, and entered into computers. If a certain practice did not make sense according to available data, they changed the practice. In several cases, they stopped fishing nets that they found to be inadequately productive. When their number crunching revealed that they were spending too much of their gross income on buying ice to chill their fish, they built their own large-scale ice machine so they could eliminate the ice-maker middleman. In addition, based on the data they collected, they upgraded their boats, switching to vessels with higher-capacity fish holds and better fuel efficiency that had lower operating and maintenance costs.

Yet at the same time that they were attracted to American business practices, Motozumi-san and his cohort were also drawn to discourses about perils of the economic inequalities produced by unfettered US capitalism. They compared the poverty rate and lack of universal health care in the United States to the somewhat better safety nets of Japan and Europe. Under unrestrained capitalism, the fishers insisted, you end up with too much inequality. “Haven’t you seen Michael Moore’s movies?” they asked me, referring to documentaries by a popular director that focus on the injustices of American systems. But while they were wary of American capitalism, the fishers also felt that Soviet communism offered no ready-made solutions. “With ‘pure communism’ people get lazy,” one fisher told me. “They don’t work hard.” Through reading, watching, and comparatively reflecting on traveling models in trade publications, business journals, and popular literatures, fishers sought to piece together bits of various systems to create what they saw as the right kind of inequality—a minor amount that motivated people to work hard without creating too many disparities.

Ultimately, they designed a system of fractional shares to divvy up the profits. For example, the top earner, the board president who bears ultimate responsibility for the co-op, receives a full share of “1,” while the vice presidents might earn 0.92, or 92 percent of the largest share, and a hard-working man who volunteered to work on a boat might receive a 0.85 share, or 85 percent of the salary of the president. When Motozumi-san and the other co-op leaders talked it over, they decided that the “ideal inequality” would be for the average dedicated co-op member to earn about 0.80, or 80 percent of the top share. Such differences would reward people for taking on the risks and burdens of leadership without creating hard feelings.¹¹

While this merit-based system proved more egalitarian, it lacked transparency. The spread of the fractional shares was public information. Every year, the set-net group gave each member a list of the distribution—twenty-five people at 0.83, thirty people at 0.80, and so on so that they could confirm that the general schema seemed equitable. Officially, members did not know which share others received; there were rumors, of course, but most people kept their share information secret. The actual allocation of shares was a cryptic process in which the set-net group’s board members, in a closed meeting, privately decided each member’s share. Once, I asked Motozumi-san if I could see a copy of the set-net groups by-laws, assuming that they had written rules and policies for determining who gets how large of a share and for determining who can inherit rights. “We don’t have any,” he replied. Initially I thought this statement was just a tactic to avoid sharing them with me, but I soon learned that he seemed to be telling the truth. Motozumi-san explained that the co-op board members had a shared sense of what was right and that they preferred not to be tied to any written rules. They needed flexibility, he said. The general principles for deciding shares were clear, he said: rights holders who do more demanding work receive larger shares, so that people who work on boats receive more than people who work on the docks. Within a particular category of work, effort and attitude count. For example, a boat worker with a reputation for being a hard worker would get a larger share than someone who chronically shows up late. They are punitive toward healthy but seemingly lazy young men who choose the easier dock work over joining a boat crew, but they are compassionate toward widows and people with physical ailments. During the months I spent at the co-op, I heard some minor grumbling about shares, but no serious dissatisfaction or dissent. Overall, the fishers were convinced that despite some small imperfections, they had come up with one of the most just and logical group structures possible for their circumstances.

IMPROVING PRICES

Once they were more efficiently organized, the fishers also began to seek better prices for their fish. Instead of accepting the abysmal rates for their salmon in Japanese domestic markets after the arrival of Chilean fish, the Kitahama fishers began searching for new buyers overseas who might pay more for their fish. Their salmon had been caught up in global market changes that had driven down their per-kilo value; in response, the fishers sought to make their salmon more worldly in order to thrive within these new economic conditions. One problem that they faced was that high Japanese labor costs made the export of fully processed Hokkaido salmon to Europe or the United States virtually impossible. Japanese companies simply could not produce the frozen salmon fillets that consumers had come to prefer at a cost comparable to those of farmed fish. The Kitahama fishers thus sought out Chinese fish processors who were pioneering new supply chains, linking up with Chinese companies that bought low-priced, lower-grade, wild-caught salmon from around the North Pacific in a minimally processed state. These companies then cut the fish into single-portion sizes, deboned and repackaged them, and sent them off to European and American markets. China’s lower labor costs and the convenient, ready-to-eat portions that the factories produced made otherwise lower-value salmon into a globally competitive product. Although the Chinese factories would not pay top dollar for Kitahama’s salmon, they outbid the Japanese fertilizer plants and raised the price of Hokkaido salmon just enough that, when coupled with cost-cutting cooperative measures, they allowed the Kitahama fishers to reliably generate profits.

MAKING MODERN SELVES

These changes seem to have paid off for the Kitahama fishers. When I arrived in Kitahama in 2009, I encountered signs of salmon wealth. Gleaming stainless-steel boats decked out with the latest sonar lined a newly built concrete harbor, while the cars in the parking lot in front of the fishing co-op included several Audis, a couple of BMWs, and even a Mercedes-Benz. While this new money certainly allowed the fishers to cultivate the personal habits that marked them as part of a transnational cultured class, the fishers were not merely in love with their money. They also clearly loved the aesthetics and performance of being kindaiteki, or modern, as such. They loved their organizational systems and regularized patterns for rapidly and accurately sorting fish by grade and sex as they unloaded them from the boats. They loved that they had designed and ordered wonderfully efficient welded metal sorting tables and trained everyone to carry out their specific sorting job with an assembly-line mentality. They loved that everything on the dock had its place and that gear was always cleaned, stacked, and properly put away. And they loved that they had turned their fathers’ cottage industry into an international export business.

It was Ohno-san who most clearly explained to me that it was the Kitahama fisherpeoples’ worldly experiences and comparative thinking that had allowed them to achieve such success. Ohno-san sat on the floor of his living room cradling his pet Chihuahua in a failed attempt to prevent her from barking incessantly while we talked. Despite the inconvenience of the yapping dog, Ohno-san, a fifth-generation Kitahama fisherperson and the descendent of one of the town’s Meiji era pioneers, very much wanted to talk. After attending an elite Jesuit boarding school, Ohno-san had majored in sociology at Hokkaido University and had written a bachelor’s thesis on the social history of Kitahama’s salmon fishing industry, a copy of which he eagerly loaned to me. Ohno-san’s favorite word for describing Kitahama’s salmon fishing practices was “evolved” (shinkashita), and the word appeared in virtually all our conversations. According to Ohno-san, Kitahama has the most advanced maritime technology of any Hokkaido fisheries group. But what really makes them most evolved is their way of thinking—they have overcome tradition (dento). “Other [fishing co-ops] just keep doing it one way because that’s how they’ve always done it. We kept thinking that there must be a better way,” Ohno-san explains. In contrast to other fishing groups, the Kitahama fishers, he says, are “able to see the world in different ways.”

What Ohno-san calls being “evolved,” other Kitahama fishers referred to as “modern” (kindaiteki). But regardless of the word they used, nearly everyone had the same explanation of what made them who they were: their ability to see the world from multiple perspectives and to compare across them. With such abilities, they are able to reinvent their relationships with each other and to market forces in ways that those without comparative thinking cannot. According to both Ohno-san and Motozumi-san, physically changing places had been essential in allowing them to think in worldly ways. “Living in Tokyo changed how I thought about everything—truly everything,” Motozumi-san once told me. It gave them new models of being and new grounds for comparative thinking. When they returned home to Kitahama, their actions emerged out of their comparisons—between the practices of fishing co-ops and metropolitan corporations, between their lives in Kitahama and visions of who they might have become in Tokyo, and between their initially poor financial situation in Kitahama and their understandings of the resources they would need to cultivate the lives they desired. It was their comparisons between Kitahama and cosmopolitan elsewheres that motivated them to remake their fishery—and to do so in a way that made the fish matter as little as possible to them.

COMMODIFIED RELATIONS TO FISH

By the time I arrived in Kitahama, most of the fathers of people like Motozumi-san and Ohno-san had passed away or were in poor health. But their sons told me of the older generation’s affection for the fish. One of the group leaders gave me a book of haiku that his father had written, which was filled with awe for the region’s salmon and the sensuousness of fishing. In past generations, many Kitahama fishers told me, fishermen had an embodied, affective connection to their fish. However, they stressed that they did not yearn for such feelings or attunements. They did not want salmon to be lively parts of their lives, the stuff of their dreams and poems. Even if they could not completely distance themselves from Kitahama and its fishing industry, they wanted to do the best they could to separate themselves from the fish.

On one hand, the Kitahama fishers knew that their particular form of modern selfhood was completely dependent on salmon. Without the fish, their wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles would be impossible. On the other hand, they strove to be businesspeople who dealt in data, not fishers who dwelled in the materialities of slime and flesh. But there was no getting rid of the actual fish. They were in their nets, on their boats, and on their docks. The Kitahama fishers’ solution to this paradox was to the kill salmon as quickly as possible—not literally, but affectively. Even though the salmon were still physically alive when they hit the boat deck, as fish, they were already dead to the fishers. “I don’t even really see them as fish,” one fisher told me. “I only see them as money.”

Like most Japanese people, the current generation of Kitahama fishers liked to eat salmon—grilled for breakfast, buried inside a rice ball for lunch, sliced into sashimi for dinner. But the fishers were not particularly fond of salmon as creatures. They rarely admired their fish or mused of the wondrousness of the salmon life cycle. When they unloaded the boats, each fisher had a designated task: operating the winch, opening the net chain to deposit the fish into the unloading area, moving the fish into the sorting areas with plastic snow shovels, or sorting the fish by species, sex, and grade. They wanted to get the job done as fast as possible so they could get on with their lives separately from the fish. If they kept on track, they could often be done with work by noon, leaving the afternoons free to play golf.

Before the formation of the unified Kitahama co-op, salmon were less easily contained, and the fish routinely spilled over into other parts of the fishers’ lives. When they ran their own small set-net operations and were financially crunched, the fishers’ needed to enroll the whole family in salmon-related endeavors. They needed wives and sometimes children to help unload the boat, manage the books, market their fish, and hand make products like salmon jerky that they could sell directly to tourists for a bit of extra cash. As part of their initial attempts to raise salmon prices, the fishers spent much of their free time organizing seafood promotional events such as an annual salmon festival complete with a “salmon derby” where people would bet on which fish would swim across a tank the fastest. After the formation of the unified co-op, the fishers stopped all such activities without an iota of nostalgia. “Traditional” fishermen had to do such things to stay financially afloat; “modern” fishing industry professionals did not. For the Kitahama fishers, salmon-centric lives were signs of failure. You hold salmon festivals and wax romantically about your connection with fish when your fishing business isn’t going well, they told me. A well-run salmon group made enough money that its members did not have to spend their time on marketing gimmicks. Because they had overcome traditional modes of thinking to build a business-like salmon group, the Kitahama fishers were freed from having to perform tradition.

When I arrived in Kitahama, I immediately noticed how little the fishers’ wives had to do with salmon. In other parts of Hokkaido, fishermen’s wives were active participants in salmon worlds. They made toba (dried salmon) to sell at local stores and markets and set up food booths at regional events where they made and sold homemade seafood dishes. Sometimes, they also taught cooking classes, operated their own restaurants, or even ran direct-sales seafood stores. But in Kitahama, only a handful of women participated in the fishing cooperative’s women’s division, the entity through which fishermen’s wives typically organize. I initially misread the Kitahama women’s absence from fishing as a sign of potential oppression, and I asked a number of Kitahama wives if they were disappointed that they did not get to participate in the fishery. Was there something about Kitahama fishing culture that was preventing their participation? But as Motozumi-san’s wife explained to me, I was missing the point. When fishing wives work, it is a sign of poverty, not empowerment. It is not that she has been excluded from the fishery; it is that she has the great privilege of not having to do so, because the Kitahama fishers are managing their fisheries well. As another fishing wife told me, Japanese fishermen typically struggle to find wives because women do not want to have to labor in the industry, but young men in Kitahama, who are able to keep their families separate from fishing, have much less trouble finding brides.

For the Kitahama fishers, making kindaiteki and shinkashita fisheries was a project of containment and transformation. They sought to contain the role salmon played in their lives by transforming them into abstract commodities as quickly as possible. As commodities, salmon could move, becoming cosmopolitan themselves. In doing so, they also generated the wealth that the Kitahama fishers used to surround themselves with the trappings—the commodities—of transnationally legible upper-class-ness. Motozumi-san’s favorite story, which he told me several times, was about one of his trips to Europe. On a visit to Paris, he had arranged for a special tour of the central Paris fish market so that he could continue to expand his knowledge about the global seafood industry.¹² Much to his surprise, as he walked through the market’s aisles, he stumbled upon a crate of Kitahama salmon. He had gone all the way to France only to encounter his own fish! I think Motozumi-san was especially fond of this anecdote because it demonstrated both his own cosmopolitanism and his success in turning his salmon into a global commodity. Through worldly thinking practices, he had successfully commodified salmon, freeing them to travel beyond local Japanese markets. In doing so, he had also separated himself from the parochialisms of fishing, instead building an identity as a businessman and creating the financial wealth and confidence that he needed to be able to travel to Europe. While the men of Motozumi-san’s father’s generation had known salmon primarily through bodily intimacies, Motozumi-san’s worldly ways had enabled him to “know” Kitahama salmon from Paris.

Motozumi-san and the other Kitahama fishers liked the idea of salmon-as-commodities—as uniform units that they could convert to money and then to other goods—and they explicitly built the monetarization of salmon into their co-op practices. While salmon fishers in other parts of Hokkaido would commonly select a few of the most beautiful fish to simply take for their own tables and freezers, such practices were not allowed in Kitahama. If Kitahama fishers wanted some of their own salmon to take home, they had to buy them from the set-net group at the day’s per-kilo auction price.¹³ The moment they entered the set-nets, salmon were units of potential profit that belonged to the co-op. By requiring that everyone, including boat hands, buy their fish at the going auction rate, the Kitahama fishers intentionally closed the shortcut by which fish bound for their own tables had long bypassed commodification. Instead, they structured their practices so that salmon had to pass through a commodity-making apparatus—even for it to become their personal food.

The comparisons that the fishers made between their fathers and themselves, between traditional craftsmanship and modern business, and between salmon liveliness and commodity liveliness impelled them to rationalize salmon. Yet as much as the Kitahama fishers found pride in their objectification of fish, their alienation from fish was not complete. Their eyes still noticed differences among salmon, and they still felt something special toward the most perfect fish. One day, when I came home from the docks, Motozumi-san’s wife, Mariko-san, was vacuum-packing salmon fillets at the kitchen table. The night before, I had heard them drawing up a list of oseibo (annual year-end gift) recipients, deciding who should get how much salmon and in what forms. Sending such gifts to family, close friends, and business partners is a common practice in Japan. But while most Japanese sent specialty food items purchased at a department store, the Motozumis sent their own salmon. During a lull in the morning action at the docks, Motozumi-san had brought home to Mariko-san some especially high-quality salmon that he had purchased from the set-net group. Most of the salmon who entered their nets were nearing their spawning areas and were thus beginning to sexually mature, losing some of their color, flesh texture, and fat reserves as they began to reconfigure their bodies for gonad development. However, they also captured a handful of sexually immature salmon with bright silvery skin and higher fat content (and thus more flavor). These special fish, called keiji, were said to be a one-in-a-thousand or even one-in-ten-thousand catch. They never appeared at regular supermarkets, but when I occasionally saw keiji for sale at high-end department stores or specialty markets, they were routinely being sold for the equivalent of about US$300 per fish. You could not tell for sure if a fish was a keiji until you cut it open and saw the absence of developed sex organs, but you could hazard a guess by looking at a fish’s outward appearance. Some fisherpeople in other parts of Hokkaido would sort out the shiniest silvery fish that seemed likely to be keiji or other high-value immature fish such as tokishirazu (literally, “fish that don’t know the time”), selling them individually at premium prices. But the Kitahama fishers did not seek out specialty markets, instead treating their fish as a mass product and sorting them into four simple categories, with one for female fish likely to contain roe and others for general quality grading. If there was a silvery immature fish, it might go right into a crate where it was buried among regular fish and sold at auction in bulk at the normal price per pound. But sometimes, such fish caught the eye of the fishers as they sorted the day’s catch. They might take a moment’s break from their work to grab that fish and stash it aside to buy at auction. Such fish were a bargain deal; they could purchase these salmon at auction prices that hovered around $3.50 per kilo, or about $25, depending on the size of the fish. These were the kinds of salmon that Motozumi-san handed off to Mariko-san, who then gutted, filleted, vacuum-packed, and froze the meat, while also preparing small plastic containers full of salmon roe (ikura) from female fish. The next day, she carefully packaged the frozen salmon and chilled roe in Styrofoam boxes and sent them through refrigerated mail. This process repeated itself for several days until each name was checked off the original list.

After the packages went out, the phone began to ring with expressions of gratitude from gift recipients. But one evening, when Motozumi-san answered, there was a different caller on the line: the refrigerated shipping company. They had some unfortunate news; the company had made an error, accidentally placing one of the carefully packed gift boxes into a regular mail truck rather than a chilled one. Because the product inside would no longer be safe to eat, the shipping company wanted to compensate Motozumi-san for the loss. Although I could only hear one side of the conversation, it was not difficult to imagine the other. “How much did you pay for the fish?” the shipping company representative must have asked. “I’m a fisherman [ryōshi], so I didn’t buy the fish at normal price,” Motozumi-san answered, identifying himself unusually as a fisherman rather than as a fishing industry professional. “Well, how much was it worth?” the company representative apparently replied. “That was the kind of fish you can’t get your hands on, that you can’t buy. It’s irreplaceable,” Motozumi-san said, emphatically. “It was a keiji. You can’t calculate the value of a fish like that!” After more back and forth, the shipping company representative eventually offered an amount of compensation that I was not able to hear, and Motozumi-san, clearly still miffed, reluctantly accepted the settlement.

Most of the time, Motozumi-san was a fishing industry professional, and his fish were uniform commodities, known through spreadsheets and profit reports. Most of the time, he claimed that he did not like anything about fish. Once, when I asked him about what he liked best about working with salmon, he bluntly answered, “Nothing.” He passionately claimed to be passionless about fish. But on occasion, Mariko-san would cut open a fish that was a little more silvery than the others and call out to her husband in a voice filled with wonder: “Keiji da yo [it’s a keiji].” And in reply, even Motozumi-san would smile.