CHAPTER FOUR The Success of Failed Comparisons
JICA and the Development of the Chilean Salmon Industry
IN March 2011, I stood on the metal deck of a salmon farm a few hundred meters off the coast of Chiloé Island. Wearing a bright orange life jacket and swaddled in a plastic gown, I had been required to disinfect my rubber boots and hands twice before I was allowed onto the floating platform. Without the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) project, this farm would almost certainly not exist, and without my connection to Nagasawa-san, I would not have been allowed to visit it. During my travels in Chile, fisheries professionals had repeatedly warned me that I would likely never be allowed to visit a salmon farm because most facilities, worried about disease transmission in the aftermath of a fish virus outbreak, had barred visitors. Furthermore, as a young white woman, I was told that I would face the added burden of fitting the “Greenpeace profile” and was likely to be mistaken for an undercover radical environmentalist on a mission to discredit fish farms. Yet here I was, standing next to Alfredo Fuentes, the company’s production manager dedicated to coho salmon farming. Standing on a scaffold of gently rocking walkways that surround a series of square net pens filled with juvenile coho salmon, Fuentes told me about the life cycle of these approximately three-inch-long young fish. Fuentes is a former JICA project member, and any friend of the project was clearly a friend of his. He was deeply grateful to the JICA project, which he credited with having given him the opportunity to know salmon and to transform the economies of southern Chile, as well as his own life. “Everything I know about salmon I learned from the JICA project,” he said. “It has shaped everything for me.”1
In the 1980s and 1990s, JICA’s own reviews of the salmon project were lukewarm. Quite a few JICA officials saw the salmon project as an embarrassment, as a project that completely failed to achieve its technical goals of transplanting Japanese chum salmon to Chile. According to Nagasawa-san, “The people who authorized the funding for the project said, ‘You spent that much money and don’t have any results? It’s over.’ ” On one hand, the JICA project and its most important comparisons did fail. The rivers of Chile and the water currents of the southern Pacific Ocean were not similar enough for Hokkaido chum salmon to thrive there. The kind of transplantation program that had successfully introduced Chinook salmon from California to New Zealand had proved unsuccessful in this context. But on the other hand, the JICA project turned out to be wildly productive—just not in the ways anticipated. Today, farmed salmon are big business in Chile; they are the county’s number two export, behind only copper, and they generated about US$5 billion in 2018 (Salmon Chile n.d.). On the surface, this industry seems to have little connection to Hokkaido chum. It largely produces Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout, and it grows its fish to maturity in saltwater net pens rather than using the hatchery ranching systems promoted by JICA. Yet the JICA-Chile project has indeed contributed significantly to the formation of the farmed salmon industry in Chile’s southern coastal regions.
The JICA project’s failed comparisons—those that sought to transplant Hokkaido chum to Chile—successfully created a cohort of Chileans adept at both the technical skills for salmon cultivation and the cross-cultural know-how for building business relations with Japanese traders. These included Fuentes, with whom I stood on the deck of the salmon farm, and to whom Nagasawa-san had told me to reach out. A year before I traveled to Chile, as I sat with Nagasawa-san in a smoky Sapporo café, he showed me a Spanish-language magazine circa 2007 with an article that profiled the “Top Twelve” most influential people in Chilean salmon aquaculture. Among the portraits, Nagasawa-san pointed out the faces of six JICA project members who had received training at Hokkaido hatcheries. As the JICA project wound down in 1985–86, Fuentes, Rafael Aros (introduced in chapter 3) and the other Chileans involved with JICA did not give up on the silvery fish. Instead, they founded their own salmon enterprises, hired one another, and began building what would become a revolutionary farmed salmon industry. Through its technical training efforts, Aros and Fuentes insist, the JICA project indirectly provided a foundation for the larger Chilean salmon industry and for their personal successes within it.2 Although the JICA project did not turn out as expected, the knowledge that the Chileans who participated in it gained was key, as there was almost no salmon expertise in Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Salmon ranching did not work economically, but it transferred knowledge,” explained Aros, Nagasawa-san’s closest collaborator, who went on to cofound one of the nation’s largest farmed salmon companies. “We could take parts of that [knowledge] and apply it to farming. And it worked.”
To succeed, the Chilean salmon industry needed to be able to produce healthy juvenile salmon that would thrive once they were put into saltwater net pens. The freshwater production techniques that they needed to make these juvenile fish were nearly identical to those that they learned under JICA’s Japanese-style ranching system. At the JICA hatchery, as at all Japanese hatcheries, technicians must produce exceptionally strong juveniles if they are to have even a modest chance of surviving in the open ocean. “When you’re making a smolt, you’re making a fish that will live one year or more in another environment,” explained Aros, “so the quality of the fish has to be very good so [it] can perform very well in those other conditions.” Such knowledge about how to produce optimally healthy smolts was a major asset for Aros and others as they began producing juvenile fish for their pens. Much of the trick to producing robust juvenile fish, they knew, had to do with proper nutrition. Aros had extensively experimented with fish diets at JICA, and one of his most important insights was the importance of micro-pulverization and blending. Early fish foods were unsuccessful in large part because ingredients—such as fish oils, fish bones, and plant starches—were not well mixed. When tiny salmon took a bite of a fish pellet, they might be getting all fat or all protein depending on the part of the pellet that they munched. The grinding and mixing techniques were not evenly distributing the component parts of the feed, and as a result, the small fish were not getting the balance of nutrients that they needed to grow and thrive. By pioneering improved feed grinding and mixing techniques, the JICA project helped pave the way for more successful fish rearing. With such experiences under his belt, Aros cofounded a specialized feed production plant along with his fish farms when he entered the private salmon sector.
From the JICA project’s efforts to maintain a few brood stock salmon to keep it supplied with eggs, Aros also knew how to raise adult salmon to sexual maturity and how to produce his own eggs for the next generation of farm-raised fish. While other early Chilean salmon farms were dependent on salmon eggs that they imported from Europe or North America, Aros’s company could make their own. By using techniques learned from Japan and JICA to prevent fungus and other diseases, they ensured a ready supply of quality eggs without the costs of egg importation. Based on these kinds of Japanese-inspired hatchery practices, Aros and other former JICA project staff were able to make the most robust juvenile salmon of anyone in the fledgling salmon farm industry. Their production was so good that they began selling their extra smolts to other ocean-based salmon farms, which lacked the expertise to produce vigorous young fish in freshwater environments. Of course, such opportunities were a financial boon, but the benefits of their Japanese training went beyond their business balance sheets. “We developed self-confidence,” Aros said.
The company Aros founded no longer uses practices that closely resemble those of Japanese hatcheries. The farmed salmon industry now rears Atlantic salmon, as well as coho and rainbow trout. The Atlantic salmon—much more delicate and easily frightened—have very different behaviors from their Pacific salmon relatives and thus require other techniques. As Aros explains:
If you have coho in a pen, you take the feed and scatter it like you would with a chicken, and they jump out of the water to get the food. You do that with Atlantic, and they all run away over to the far side of the pen. When you have Atlantic, you have to have special automatic feeders. They have to be European automatic feeders, quiet, not noisy. You can use [Atlantic salmon techniques] with the coho, but the Pacific technique you can’t do with the Atlantic [salmon]. So we mainly use the Atlantic system and put any kind of fish inside of it.
As a consequence of the mixed species production and the finicky nature of the Atlantic salmon, the company Aros founded has almost completely replaced Japanese technologies with Norwegian-based equipment and methods. But although the traces of Japanese influence on the industry have become increasingly hard to see, Aros continues to stress the critical role that the JICA project played. Even without the JICA project, the salmon industry probably would have developed in Chile eventually, he thinks, “but not with the strength that it did. [The JICA project] was very, very important. It was in the right moment.”
The JICA project also gave the Chileans a leg up in building links to possible buyers. Making a new salmon industry required more than producing fish; it also necessitated the construction of supply chains and markets. After their grant-funded travels in Japan as the collaborative counterparts to the Japanese fisheries experts, Aros, Fuentes, and several other Chileans already had professional contacts, insights into Japanese business practices, and a respect for Japanese buyers’ demands for high-quality products. According to Aros:
The Japanese were confident that Chilean products would be good because the Chilean technicians had been trained in Japan and were using Japanese technologies. But more than that, this is something personal, something human, we had spent time in Japan. There had been a change in our minds, and we could see that [the Japanese] were very honest. It was impressive for us—to see the honestness. We could understand what they want. When the Japanese [buyers] came to Chile to deal, to begin buying salmon, the [other] Chileans complained, “Oh the Japanese, they always want something different, they always want something more.” Well, we knew that they are perfectionists. If you go to Japan and you buy something, it is good, it’s perfect.… I took my wife to Japan three years ago. I wanted to show her the Japan that I knew. We went to hatcheries in Hokkaido.… My wife knew a lot of the Japanese experts that had worked here—more than twenty. And sometimes they complained about the quality of things [in Chile, saying], “Oh, nothing is good.” Then she went to Japan, and said, “Oh, now I understand. Everything is perfect [there].”
Because Aros had been trained within the Japanese salmon system, his sense of an ideal salmon and ideal salmon farm practices largely matched those of the Japanese. “That made it easier for us to understand and be with the Japanese,” Aros explained. “We thought that these are the right things. [For example,] we thought that the fish has to have this color.” His company began importing rainbow trout from Sweden and Norway because those fish have the most silver-colored skin, a trait that is especially important to Japanese consumers. “The Japanese want fish that have that silver, which signals to them that it’s not hochare [note Aros’s use of a Japanese classificatory term].3 You can have the best meat, but if the skin is discolored, it is second class. Because it is custom.” Knowing this, Aros was able to improvise with the occasional batches of fish that had slightly darkened skin. “So if we have very good quality of flesh, but discolored skin, we take off the skin [and sell it to the Japanese that way].” Japanese traders looked favorably on Aros’s company because it “followed their instructions.” Even Aros himself saw the profound role that cultural encounters played in allowing his business to thrive, commenting that his stories were likely “interesting for anthropology.”
Aros understood that the emergence of this salmon supply chain was dependent on embodied comparative practices shaped by particular cross-cultural exchanges. His very ability to imagine industrial production in Chile was made possible by his time in Japan and his capacity to think through Hokkaido hatcheries. Furthermore, his success with Japanese business partners was similarly enabled by his ability to maneuver in relation to the tacit understanding of Japanese fish preferences he had gained from his travels in Japan and his years of talking, working, and sharing meals with Japanese fisheries scientists and technicians. This was the ultimate success of the JICA project: it made people who could compare in new ways.
This new competency was transformative for the individual Chileans involved in the JICA project. With the exception of Aros, who had a prior university fisheries degree, the project gave skills to people who had little access to education, so the training had dramatic effects on their lives. In the early days of the salmon industry, people who had worked on the JICA project had such rare knowledge that farms allegedly paid them double the salary of other so-called experts. Although some of them are now retired, the majority of the JICA participants rose to high-level positions, becoming presidents of companies and heads of company divisions. For better or worse, the JICA project did not just produce a new industry whose profits were captured by existing elites; it actually produced new elites, in a process not altogether different from that of the Sapporo Agricultural Collage nearly a century earlier.
Alfredo Fuentes, whom we met briefly at the beginning of this chapter, is one of these new elites whose entire life was remade by the JICA project. He was a Coyhaique local with an education as an agricultural technician, a low-level position in the town’s branch office of the agricultural ministry, and with limited prospects for career advancement when he was recruited to work on the salmon project. “The JICA project was my university,” he said, and he managed to turn that training into wealth beyond his wildest dreams. When Fuentes first heard about the JICA project, he did not really know what to think about it, because he knew nothing at all about salmon. On one hand, he thought the project sounded “loco,” but he also thought that if the Japanese were interested in it, then it was probably an idea with merit. He had faith in the Japanese.
When Aros invited him to join the JICA team, Fuentes had no idea how much the project would transform his life. Almost immediately, his respect for both Aros and Nagasawa-san deepened. “The JICA project was tremendously brave,” Fuentes explained. It was so ambitious, and everyone approached it with so much dedication. The project twice sent him to study in Japan, an experience that was both professionally and personally transformational. Fuentes, a man whose informal, slang-filled speech style reveals a humble background, became a world traveler, a sushi aficionado, a small-plane pilot, and a valued salmon expert.
As the JICA project began to wind down in the mid-1980s, Fuentes, like the others, began to contemplate what he might do with his skills. He debated whether he should remain a civil servant. For him, the public sector offered stability but limited chances for advancement. “In the public sector, you can’t really climb the ranks without a university education, but the private sector is more about skills,” he thought. He had a good skill set for growing the emerging salmon industry, but new salmon ventures also entailed risk. Start-up businesses failed and companies merged, often leaving people suddenly without jobs. “In the public sector, they can’t really fire you,” he reasoned. But ultimately, the possibility of earning big money was too much of an allure, so he joined the other Chileans seeking to start their own commercial salmon ventures. Like Aros, Fuentes felt that he had a leg up on many of the other businesspeople who were also experimenting with commercial salmon farming in Chile at that time because he actually knew something about salmon from his years working with them at JICA. Although their commercial endeavor focused on coho salmon instead of chum, Fuentes found that “the basics are all the same, regardless of species.” When Fuentes’s farm began to produce marketable fish, it was able to build strong connections with Japanese buyers. When I visited Fuentes’s office, it struck me that his basic Japanese, his familiarity with Japan, and the certificates of merit from JICA that adorned the office’s walls all likely inspired a sense of trust and ease on the part of the Japanese traders who began purchasing his fish by the ton. Several years later, Fuentes’s company was bought out by the larger salmon farm owned and managed by Aros and two other JICA project participants. Fortunately, Fuentes’s fears of losing his job in the middle of a corporate merger were not fulfilled, and Aros made Fuentes one of his company’s regional managers.
Today, the several Chiloé Island farming centers that Fuentes manages remain well known for their high-quality salmon (mostly coho), which they continue to sell to a predominately Japanese clientele. I sit in the back of his SUV as he drives at what seems like a maniacal speed down progressively smaller roads. As we head away from Castro, one of the main cities on Chiloé Island, the road is a paved thoroughfare, but by the time we near one of the fish farming centers, the road is a dirt track that seems likely impassable with a bit of rain. I am surprised by the poor road, imagining that a large salmon farm would require truck access for delivering juvenile salmon and hauling grown fish off to processing plants. But as Fuentes explains, only workers and occasional visitors use the road; all other materials arrive and depart by boat. When they harvest the salmon, they suck up the adult fish with a giant vacuum-like tube and take them alive by boat to one of their company’s processing plants.
After passing through a metal gate, we arrive at an old European-style farmhouse on a hillock next to a tidal bay. The building, with its chipping blue paint, has been converted into an office, which is filled with a couple of computers, life jackets, and rubber boots. Some fifteen people work at the farm, but most of them are out on the platform rather than in the office. After getting outfitted with life jackets (for our safety) and plastic gowns (ostensibly as a sanitary measure), we tromp across the muddy tide flat where we stand and gaze out at the large metal grid that is the salmon farm. A small open motorboat suddenly speeds away from the salmon farm to meet us. When we hop aboard, we are instructed to step directly into a disinfecting footbath and to cleanse our hands with waterless alcohol sanitizer. In a few minutes, when we set foot on the platform itself, we are required to repeat the same hygienic procedure.
Fuentes comes here often to simply be with the fish for an hour or so. His office in Castro is where he takes care of recordkeeping, accounting, and other statistical management, but he spends much of his time on the move among the five farms he manages. “You can’t grow a salmon sitting at your computer all day,” he says. “You have to actually go out and look at the fish. The newer generation of salmon industry people just sits at their desks all day, and if something goes wrong with the fish, they just blame the computer.” Through his JICA experience, he learned the value of “hands-on knowledge” gained from direct encounters with the salmon. When he spends time with the fish, he can draw on his instincts to detect problems with feeding regimes or disease long before they begin to affect fish growth statistics. When I prod him about the traits he looks for when judging fish health, he cannot explain it. He just senses it, he says. He just knows.
At the moment, Fuentes is checking out his 290-gram fish, which are set to be harvested in six months in November at between 2.5 and 2.8 kilos, net weight. The fish have come from the company’s freshwater hatcheries in the Los Lagos region, where they were reared in metal troughs and net pens along the edges of freshwater lakes. Fuentes throws the salmon a scoopful of food pellets made primarily from meal derived from small fish, such as anchovies, mackerel, and sardines, produced by a plant a few miles down the road of which his company is a part owner. Thanks to careful management of the fish, he will ensure that most of them are between 2.5 and 2.7 kilos because that is precisely the size that Japanese chefs and housewives prefer. We stare at the clouds of fish in the mesh pens, ten meters square and twelve meters deep, each containing twenty-four to twenty-five thousand fish. As the fish grow, Fuentes will move some of them into thirty-meter by thirty-meter pens and reduce their farming densities.
Although the fish are still only the size of anchovies, their fate has already been decided. They will be headed, gutted, and frozen at a local processing plant, then transported across the Pacific to the Japanese buyers who signed a purchase contract for them about a month ago. Japan is Fuentes’s top client and his top priority because they pay very good prices for high-quality products. But Japanese buyers are no easy sell, he says. “Dedication and hard work” are required to produce fish for them because the Japanese have “very exquisite tastes.” Japanese buyers are “very attentive to everything,” he says. In contrast to buyers of other nationalities, who often transact business by internet or in big city offices, those from Japan typically come to the site to see their fish in production. When the Japanese buyers are on-site, they look closely at the color of the skin, the color of the meat, and what kinds of medications the salmon farm is using, expressing clear preferences based on what sells in Japan. Japanese consumer preferences have indeed shaped Fuentes’s production practices. For example, Fuentes eschews the twenty-four-hour artificial grow lights that are commonplace on salmon farms that produce for US and Brazilian markets. Although the artificial light speeds up fish growth, it also makes fishes’ skin turn darker. While such a practice makes economic sense for salmon that will be filleted and skinned before they reach US restaurants and supermarkets, such a move does not pay off when selling to Japan, where, even though Aros may manage to sell some fish with its dark skin removed, most consumers still gravitate toward bright, silvery fish with intact skin.
Every time he receives a paycheck or sends off another load of fish to Japan, Fuentes is grateful to the JICA salmon project to which he feels he owes his personal financial success. He also praises the effects that the JICA project has had on both regional and national economies. Before salmon, there were few jobs in southern Chile, he says, and many people had to migrate to Argentina in search of work. Now, they can stay here, finding jobs at salmon farms, processing plants, fish feed factories, and other related industries. Salmon have also brought roads, airports, and improved water supplies to rural areas, including the island of Chiloé, where Fuentes lives, and have led to the dramatic growth of cities like Puerto Montt, where the population nearly doubled between 1992 and 2012, with another 12 percent growth from 2012 to 2017 (City Population 2021). On a larger scale, he says, salmon have helped diversify a nation that was too focused on mining and forestry. Fuentes sees the JICA salmon project as a critical part of Chile’s economic progress. The JICA project, he says, was “a huge wake-up call” to the Chilean officials tasked with boosting development. Chileans knew that there were possibilities in seafood, he recalls, but not in this way. They were not thinking about cultivation at all until the Japanese began promoting the idea. From Fuentes’s perspective, JICA’s vision of salmon culture coupled with its investment in Chileans like him has left a powerful and positive legacy—especially in his own life.
CHILEAN SALMON IN JAPAN
One of the surprising dimensions of the Chilean salmon industry, however, is the degree to which Japanese demand for it needed to be actively cultivated. While fish farmers like Fuentes struggled to raise fish that would be appealing to Japanese palates, other Chileans were scrambling to spark interest in Chilean salmon among Japanese fish buyers and consumers. Today, it is hard to imagine that Japanese desires for Chilean salmon were not preexisting, as the fish are such a ubiquitous and naturalized part of Japan’s seafood offerings. Based on my observations from 2007 to 2011, it appeared that even in Hokkaido, the majority of the salmon at supermarkets and sushi bars were imported from Chile. Such a phenomenon, however, was far from preordained; indeed, it seemed distinctly unlikely. In 1986, the first year that sizable amounts of Chilean salmon reached international markets, there were so many salmon from Alaska that the Chilean fish seemed unnecessary, one salmon trader told me. Although the JICA project had conjured a Japanese market hungry for South American salmon, that moment had passed. By the time Chilean salmon producers began making commercial quantities of fish, there was no longer a critical need for such salmon in Japan. Improved hatchery techniques had boosted domestic salmon harvests, and the booming Japanese economy meant that average Japanese families had no trouble paying top dollar for expensive sockeye salmon imported from Alaska. As a result, there was no ready-made market into which they could effortlessly slip. Chilean salmon farmers thus had to cultivate desire for their product as much as they had to cultivate salmon. And to do so, they had to tweak Japanese tastes.
During that first season in 1986, only a handful of Japanese traders had any interest in Chilean salmon products. ProChile, the government’s trade promotion arm, hired Enrique Castañeda to expand this potentially lucrative, but seemingly difficult, salmon trade with Japan. Convincing Japanese traders to buy Chilean salmon seemed complicated, mysterious, and downright difficult. Castañeda’s job, as he described it to me, was to open up the “black box” of Japan to the Chilean salmon trade. Although his background was in fisheries science rather than in business, Castañeda soon found himself in the role of promoter and cross-cultural negotiator. On the surface, selling fish to Japan would seem as easy as selling umbrellas in the middle of a sudden rain shower, since per capita, Japanese fish consumption is the highest in the world. But when Castañeda went to Tokyo to spread the word about Chilean salmon, the unfamiliar product received a lukewarm reception, one not altogether different from that faced by the first Hokkaido canned salmon in Europe. His fish were not only unneeded but also illegible. “Nobody understood about the salmon in Chile,” Castañeda said. He encountered all kinds of confusing category problems. Before farmed salmon began to make their mark in Japan, sake, the Japanese word for “salmon,” typically referred only to chum (shirozake), sockeye (benizake), and coho (ginzake), while other species, such as pink (karafuto masu) and Chinook (masunosuke), were grouped as “trout.” Castañeda was marketing multiple species from Chile (including coho, Atlantic salmon, and steelhead/rainbow trout), all of which he saw as falling into a single generic category of “salmon,” but he quickly found that category much less solid in Japan. Could farm-raised Atlantic salmon be sold as sake, or should it just be called sāmon, a Japanized version of its English name? Were steelhead sake or trout? “And the most difficult part,” Castañeda said, “was explaining how we were producing ‘Atlantic’ salmon in the Pacific Ocean. ‘No, no, no.… It is just a fantasy name,’ [I explained]. It is the same species. It is the same fish.” How could he make sushi shops comfortable with the idea of buying Atlantic sāmon at the fish market while selling it to their customers as sake?
When he arrived at the ProChile office in Tokyo, Castañeda spoke no Japanese, had no connections, and did not know what to do. So he began by phoning the Japanese Seafood Importers Association, which gave him a book with the names of all of the members of the association. Castañeda combed through the book and made a careful list of all the companies, big and small, that were dealing in salmon. Then he went to visit them in person, one by one. Although all the companies received him politely with a cup of green tea, only about four or five out of approximately two hundred companies showed any interest in Chilean salmon. But it was a start. Castañeda then began working with the ProChile office to organize salmon trade tours to Chile. “We paid for the tickets and selected and invited people. That started working,” he said. Enticed by such free trips, more Japanese importers visited Chile, learned about its salmon, and became acquainted with Chilean salmon farmers.
But generating interest in Chilean salmon among Japanese salmon traders was only the beginning. The Japanese traders had to negotiate a market for the new Chilean products, which were noticeably different from other salmon at Japanese stores and restaurants. As we sit at his desk in a Chilean city, Shinji Aoki, a Chile-based Japanese salmon trader, pulled out his salmon color fan, resembling strips of paint samples, and pointed at a very pale pink color.4 “At the beginning, it was like this,” he said of the flesh color of Chilean salmon. “We were like, ‘That’s enough already. We don’t need [such poor- quality salmon].’ ” Based on their experiences with Norwegian salmon, Japanese traders also had prejudices against farm-raised fish. “The first Atlantic salmon that entered Japan was from Norway, and the food pellets they use are different, I think. When you eat [that farm-raised salmon], it really stinks [of fish food] [kusai n desu yo]. It tastes bad, you know [mazui n jya nai desu ka].”5 But in the late 1980s, Chilean salmon was so cheap that Aoki-san decided to take a gamble: “The first offer of Chilean salmon sold for a little less than three dollars a kilo. At the time, Alaska salmon was selling for two thousand yen per kilo [roughly $14].”6 When we looked at the color we were like, ‘We don’t need it, but if it’s only three dollars, well, I guess let’s buy some.’ ”
To his pleasant surprise, in his opinion, the Chilean fish did not stink of fish food like those of Norway, something he attributes to Chile’s high-quality fishmeal (“It just smells like furikake!7 Also, if you chew on the pellets, they aren’t stinky or bad tasting”). But he had to figure out who might buy these new salmon, each species with its own traits. Coho flesh was so soft that it did not make good sashimi, because it was, in Aoki-san’s words, gucha-gucha, or mushy. Coho did not work especially well in Japanized “Western” cuisine either, because when chefs took the skin off and the bones out to make fish easier to eat with a knife and fork, the coho meat would fall apart. But when grilled in the context of katei ryōri (Japanese homestyle cuisine), the bones and skin left on and the flesh firmed up by salting, the rich fatty flavor of the coho made it an appealing salmon choice. In contrast, both Atlantic salmon and trout-salmon are firm when raw, retaining their shape when sliced into sashimi and sushi and making them perfect for uncooked preparations. When he began importing Chilean salmon, Aoki-san was working for a Sapporo-based importer, and they quickly found that Japanese willingness to eat Chilean salmon varied geographically across Japan. For example, Aoki-san discovered that Hokkaido residents were willing to purchase Chilean-produced trout-sāmon, but they wanted nothing to do with the softer coho. “People in Hokkaido aren’t afraid of new things,” Aoki-san told me. “But they do know a lot about [seafood] quality.” Because Aoki-san could not sell coho locally, his company began sending it to the Kanto and Tohoku regions of northern Honshu, where people liked the rich flavor so much that they did not care about the soft texture.
Over time, fish farmers, exporters, and importers all kept tinkering with words and equivalences in their attempts to build desires for Chilean farmed fish. While Chilean salmon might not be essential to Japanese fisheries markets in the sense that there were plenty of fish in the global market, Chilean salmon producers and Japanese importers worked hard to make their fish seem necessary. They needed to convince Japanese housewives and restaurant chefs that Chilean salmon matched perfectly with their emerging needs for cheap, healthy, and easy-to-prepare seafood. When it came to the allure of their low prices, Chilean fish had a stroke of good luck. In the early 1990s, the Japanese economy crashed. As the need to cut household expenses rapidly displaced desires for opulence, the charms of cheap farmed salmon began to draw consumers away from top-dollar Alaskan fish. But farmed salmon promoters did not just count on such historical conjunctures to create a market for them. Piggybacking on state-sponsored nutrition and diet programs, farmed salmon producers and traders promoted their fish as kenkō ni ii (good for health). In the past two decades, the Japanese government has encouraged increased consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, found in abundance in salmon flesh, and reduced intake of sodium. Japanese chum salmon, which have relatively soft, mild flesh, were typically firmed up and flavored through heavy salting, but the firmer and more flavorful farmed salmon are attractive even without salt.
Most importantly, however, farm-raised salmon boosters have promoted their product as benri, or convenient, for everyone. They are benri for wholesalers and supermarkets because they are available year-round rather than in a seasonal pulse. They are benri for convenience store obento lunch-box makers because farmed salmon can be made to order so that their fillet size fits perfectly into standard plastic trays. And above all, farmed salmon are benri in the kitchen. Traditionally, housewives bought and filleted whole salted salmon. But as an increasing number of women work outside the home and family life becomes more hectic, fewer people are interested in cooking labor-intensive food. In this context, many people in Japan told me that they see whole salmon as mendokusai, a bother or an annoyance. To prepare a meal with Chilean salmon, a wife need simply pick up a package of precut trout-sāmon sashimi from the grocery store and set it on the table next to the rice from an automated cooker. Added to curries, made into burgers, tossed into soups or chowders, breaded and fried, or simply grilled, farmed salmon can be served for breakfast, lunch, or dinner within the wide range of washoku (Japanese), yōshoku (Western), and category-bending recipes that are common in Japanese kitchens. Farmed salmon are also benri in that nearly everyone seems to like their taste. Because of their species, diet, and moment of harvest, they are generally oilier and richer in flavor than Japanese chum. This higher oil content tends to make them more appealing to young people raised on diets rich in foods such as meat and mayonnaise while remaining tasty to older people who prefer simple grilled fish and vegetables.
As a result of such conjunctures, by the early 2000s, farm-raised salmon had become so common in Japan that they came to define normative salmon. While people once yearned for the delicate taste and light pink flesh color of Hokkaido salmon, most Japanese now describe domestic salmon as dry and tasteless, preferring the fatty, bright-red flesh of pellet-fed and additive-dyed farmed fish. For the most part, Japanese consumers have literally swallowed such changes in salmon species and culinary practices without much thought. “Frankly, Hokkaido salmon just isn’t that good,” I once heard a Tokyo resident offhandedly comment. “The taste of farm-raised salmon is just better.” Overall, Japanese consumers have become hooked on Chilean salmon. In 2010, salmon bested mackerel to claim the title of most commonly consumed seafood in Japan, a major accomplishment for a fish that did not even make the top five in 1965 (IntraFish Media 2010). Without the flood of Chilean fish, such salmon abundance would never have been possible.
RETHINKING “SUCCESS”
In the 2000s, JICA officials reassessed the Chile salmon project. In an about-face, they reversed their initial assessment of the project as a failure and heralded it as one of JICA’s most illustrious achievements. After all, the JICA salmon project had incited real changes in Chile’s economy and developed a solid new source from which Japanese consumers could obtain desired seafood products. Instead of interpreting the Chilean salmon industry as a fortuitous unintended consequence of a failed project, JICA officials began to narrate it as an outcome of smart project design. By emphasizing human capital development, technology transfer, and the formation of transnational business connections, the JICA project had allegedly built flexibility into its plans so that even if its original tack failed, its larger goals would succeed. Indeed, the JICA project did a superb job of meeting the goal initially identified by the Japanese fish processors who prompted government aid investment in Chile: creating supply chains that would feed Japan with reliable and cheap imported salmon. By the late 1990s, Chile had become the world’s second largest salmon-producing nation after Norway, with Japan consistently ranking as one of its most important markets.8
Regardless of its inability to directly produce fish, the JICA project linked Japanese and Chilean salmon worlds in a profound way. By fostering human connections, the JICA project ultimately played a significant part in linking Japanese markets with Chilean salmon producers. Such connections were a boon for people like Aros and Fuentes, but they were also important for Japanese buyers. The JICA project not only increased Chileans’ familiarity with Japanese salmon markets; it also increased Japanese familiarity with producers in Chile. JICA’s involvement made Chile seem simultaneously less risky and more accessible to Japanese companies and made Japanese involvements in Chilean fisheries seem less threatening to people in Chile. In short, JICA paved the way for corporate investment in Chile, alongside salmon purchases. For example, aided by the rapport established by the JICA project, Nichiro, a Japanese seafood giant, successfully created a Chile subsidiary that established an early commercial salmon farm in 1981.9
As Chilean salmon have slipped into Japanese supermarkets, the Japanese government has increasingly trumpeted such successes. JICA has published a Japanese-language book that celebrates the salmon project as a model endeavor, and more than one person described the JICA-trained Chileans who are still working in the salmon industry as JICA’s “crowning achievement” (gyōseki). In 2011, the emperor awarded Alejandro Aros the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, for his contributions “to the promotion of the technical cooperation of Japan in Chile and the stabilization of food supply to Japan” both in his capacity as a JICA project member and as the CEO of a major private salmon company.
But not everyone is convinced that these efforts to link Japan and Chile through salmon have been an unmitigated success. Aliaky Nagasawa, for one, was concerned that the industry had not benefited as many Chileans as he had hoped. Although he remained a staunch supporter of Chilean salmon, even Nagasawa-san sometimes gave its outcomes a mixed appraisal. On one hand, he was deeply proud that he had helped empower Chileans to start their own salmon businesses. When we shared meals, he enjoyed showing me pictures of the well-built streets, tidy sidewalks, and new buildings of Chilean salmon industry towns, changes that he saw as both valuable and linked to his contributions. But Nagasawa-san also regretted that rural Chileans had not benefited quite as much as he had hoped. He was frustrated that high-quality salmon were not fully available in rural Chile, as the best fish are usually exported. In addition, he was dismayed that Chileans have increasingly ended up becoming laborers for salmon companies owned by Norway-based multinational companies rather than their own Chilean compatriots. This corporatization also worried him when it came to management practices; while he had faith in his trainees’ abilities to make sound decisions about disease control and environmental issues, he was less optimistic about large-scale corporations where the managers who make decisions are too distant from the fish.
In Hokkaido, a number of people also began to worry about the effects of the Chilean salmon industry. Osamu Yamada is a retired hatchery manager who now teaches salmon education classes that try to persuade Japanese consumers to avoid farmed salmon. The classes, ostensibly for children, are equally targeted at their mothers, whose purchasing patterns Yamada-san hopes to change. Yamada-san begins his class by dissecting a large female salmon full of the roe that is considered a delicacy in Japan, encouraging the children to touch various fish organs and guess their physiological functions. Then Yamada-san turns his attention to the parents. Although he participated briefly in the JICA-Chile project, Yamada-san is strongly anti–farmed salmon. He sees imported Chilean salmon as essentially devil fish, fish who lead Japanese consumers to stray from the goodness of Hokkaido’s salmon. In Yamada-san’s talks, he explicitly seeks to reeducate Japanese taste buds that he sees as hijacked by the seductive and dangerous “other” of the fattier Chilean salmon. When Yamada-san asks the children to raise their hands if they like sake, the word that connotes domestic chum salmon, one child blurts out, “I like sāmon, not sake,” meaning he likes imported farm-raised salmon but not domestic fish. “That’s the problem,” Yamada-san says. “[Japanese and Chilean salmon] are fundamentally different [konponteki ni chigai ga arimasu].” Chilean salmon are merely a product; they do not bring Japanese people into connection with their landscapes.10 Japanese salmon, he says, also more properly nourish Japanese bodies. Yamada-san distributes a pamphlet that links the intelligence and high standardized test scores of Japanese children to their mothers’ consumption of healthful fish. Such benefits, he says, are weaker for Chilean salmon, who, because of their pellet diet, have lower levels of beneficial nutrients such as omega-3s than Hokkaido fish. In contrast to the stories above about Chilean familiarity with Japanese protocols, Yamada-san describes Chilean salmon farmers as generic foreign producers, who, driven by profit motives, are unlikely to follow Japanese guidelines for producing a clean, safe product. Chilean salmon, as he describes them, are unnatural, contaminated with antibiotic residues and artificially colored.11 Yamada-san aims to challenge the easy acceptance of farmed salmon by pushing people to reevaluate how they judge the oishisa, the tastiness of salmon. At the supermarket, farmed salmon, with their pretty red color, are oishisō, tasty looking. But such salmon present a false sense of oishī, he says. They taste good on the tongue but are not nourishing to bodies that would be better filled by Japanese chum. Yamada-san explains that despite their lighter color and less flavorful flesh, nutrient-rich Hokkaido salmon are the ones that are truly oishī.
Such critiques sit alongside other concerns about the ecological impacts of the Chilean salmon farming industry. While the exponential growth of salmon farms caught JICA officials, traders, and even fish farmers themselves by surprise, the outcomes of its proliferation were not entirely unforeseeable. As one Japanese fish trader told me,
When I came to Chile, I thought that the industry would grow, but I never thought that it would become this big. I’ve also been to Asia and seen a lot of aquaculture there—shrimp, unagi. The final destination for all of these is always the same, I tell you. Increase the size of the industry, make a lot of money, there’s a [fish or shellfish] illness, and then everyone runs away and the cycle starts over again. Unless we fix it, it is just going to be the same thing [with salmon in Chile].
The general problems of rapid aquacultural expansion have been made more acute by the specifics of southern Chile—particularly its relatively shallow bays and weak fisheries laws—which have exacerbated the spread of fish diseases. One can see the toxic conjunctures of geology and neoliberal economic policies in statistics about antibiotic use on salmon farms; despite its smaller total fish production, the Chilean salmon industry used almost 350 times more antibiotics in 2008 than did the Norwegian salmon industry, located in a region of deep fjords, strong tidal flushing, and stricter government oversight (Barrionuevo 2009).12 Fish diseases and the chemicals used to treat them are only one of the ways salmon aquaculture affects its surroundings. As a result of the high densities of fish in small pens, fish excrement and uneaten fish food can sometimes become a pollution problem, killing nearby aquatic plants and shellfish on both ocean and lake bottoms. In addition, salmon who have escaped from the fish farms have become an invasive species in southern Chilean rivers, altering food webs, displacing native species, and changing watershed ecologies (Pascual and Ciancio 2007; Quinones et al. 2019).
As salmon farming has expanded in southern Chile, it has also remade the lives of its human residents. The industry has undoubtedly brought more cash to coastal communities, along with better roads, telecommunications, and other infrastructure (O’Ryan et al. 2010). Many Chileans living in salmon farming areas cite such benefits of the industry, along with increased local employment. However, not all residents feel that fish farming has been a turn for the better. Discharges from large-scale salmon production can damage the ecological assemblages of lakes and marine waters that have long been sites of artisanal fishing and shellfish collecting, while property concessions to salmon farms tend to enclose lacustrine and estuarine commons, further limiting local access to aquatic resources.13 Such negative impacts—disproportionately located in rural areas with higher proportions of Mapuche Indigenous people—are not especially surprising. But as the following chapters explore in detail, Chilean salmon have also had less expected and frequently overlooked effects on the salmon worlds of Hokkaido—along with the comparisons entangled in them.