CHAPTER SIX When Comparisons Encounter Concrete

THE INERTIA OF CONCRETE

Shinji Nakamura wants to return wild salmon to Hokkaido’s Ishikari River, but it is hard work. A sixty-five-year-old retired high school teacher, Nakamura-san is the head of a local nature society that dreams of restoring wild salmon to the river’s upper reaches, which flow through Asahikawa, the second largest city in Hokkaido, with a population of about 360,000. Nakamura-san was no newcomer to environmental advocacy; he had been protesting road-building, dam construction, and the overcutting of national forests for decades. “But I was tired of anti-this and anti-that activism. I wanted to make something, not just oppose things,” Nakamura-san said. “That’s what led me to salmon.”

Since 1983, Nakamura-san has been trying to restore naturally spawning salmon to a place where they should be. In a nation where short, steep coastal rivers predominate, the Ishikari is one of the few that winds its way far inland, stretching 268 kilometers from its mouth on the Japanese seacoast to its headwaters in Daisetsuzan National Park. For millennia, salmon flourished in the watershed, and both archeological and historical records indicate that it may have had the largest salmon populations of any river in Japan.³ Although some salmon climbed all the way to the river’s tiny headwater streams, many spawned in its central stretches, located inside a large bowl-shaped basin called the Asahikawa bonchi. Because of the basin’s unique shape, its waterways are hydrologically exceptional for incubating salmon eggs. Clean groundwater—percolated precipitation from the surrounding mountains—bubbles up through riverbeds, forming pockets of springwater that make perfect salmon spawning grounds, with stable year-round temperatures and high levels of oxygenation.

From the late nineteenth century onward, however, Asahikawa’s salmon populations have faced more than their share of environmental insults. Traveling through the region by train, the view is one of seemingly endless irrigated paddies and fields. The river had to be diked and dammed to make such landscapes possible; marshes needed to be drained, violent spring floods controlled, and waters made available for agriculture. The remaking of this waterway has transformed Asahikawa into Hokkaido’s largest rice producing region and promoted the expansion of other crops—but at great cost to its riparian worlds. The concretization of the river has been widespread; cement lines not only its sides but also its bottom, where it is used to prevent the river from cutting deeper into its bed and undermining its berms. Of course, the raw material for all that concrete had to come from somewhere, and that place, too, was often the river, which was mined for gravel. As Asahikawa industrialized, the river also became a convenient location for waste disposal. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese government established a wood-pulp processing plant upriver from one of the region’s major salmon spawning grounds; soon, the river’s water began to smell.⁴ Despite this litany of damage, a handful of salmon managed to return to Asahikawa every year until 1963, when the construction of a downstream agricultural diversion dam without a fish ladder put a final end to their migrations.

The disappearance of Asahikawa’s salmon was not a primary concern for twentieth-century fisheries management. To maintain fisheries, managers divorced salmon from their rivers; they collected the fish at river mouths, then moved them directly into hatcheries, minimizing their interactions with waterways given over to agriculture and industry.⁵ From the perspective of many twentieth-century fisheries managers, the Asahikawa River’s lack of salmon was not a crisis; hatcheries replaced its fish. However, not everyone agreed with this dominant management paradigm. Nakamura-san was one of the early dissenters. A lifelong lover of mountain climbing and wildflower identification, he was awed by ecological connections before such a position became popular. He was distraught by the ways hatcheries disconnected salmon from watersheds. “They [hatchery-produced fish] have no relation to rivers [tsukiai ga nai],” he says. “They are not real salmon [honrai no sake de wa nai].” “[Hatcheries] are just factories at the mouth of the river.” Ecological connections, he claims, are what make salmon “real.” One of his greatest dreams, he tells me, is for the bears in Hokkaido’s Daisetsuzan National Park—one of the island’s largest undeveloped tracts—to be able to dine on salmon once again as they did before the dam cut off the fish runs. The bears gesture toward a larger problem: that Hokkaido’s watersheds are starving from a lack of salmon. Before hatcheries, post-spawning salmon carcasses would rot and be eaten by a variety of beings, including birds, mammals, and insects, their bodies fertilizing upland watersheds with the marine-derived nitrogen and phosphorous contained in their flesh. With hatcheries, these carcasses are primarily shunted into industrial processing chains rather than watershed nutrient cycles.

Nakamura-san is trying everything he can to make salmon once again part of ecological webs, but again and again, his efforts come up against the inertia of concrete. One Saturday, I joined Nakamura-san and other members of the nature society—mostly retirees, housewives, and families with young children—as they hauled rocks from a mid-river gravel bar to a side channel.⁶ Their goal was to build a salmon spawning bed into which they might plant a few hundred eggs. But the most promising stretch of river they could find—a quiet stretch with some newly planted trees and some winding side-channels between relatively widely spaced dikes—was still decidedly unpromising. The diking had altered the area’s groundwater flows and impaired the upwellings of springwater so essential for the survival of chum salmon eggs. “When you turn the sides and bottom of a river into concrete, you just don’t have much left,” Nakamura-san commented. Channelization had also increased the speed of the river’s flows and thus scoured out much of the small-sized gravel that salmon need to spawn. Every year, Nakamura-san and his group nonetheless do the best they can. With shovels and bare hands, they build salmon spawning nests, selecting a place where at least a little fresh springwater seeps through the dikes. There, they dig a small channel, trying to shunt enough river flows over the eggs to keep them oxygenated but not so much as to wash them away. As a final step, they arrange rings of rocks to try to keep predacious fish such as rainbow trout (introduced from the United States) away from the eggs.⁷

The following week, they will return to the site with eggs from a local hatchery, burying the eggs into the nests they have prepared. The volunteers will also deliver some of the eggs to sixty local families, who will hatch them in aquariums in their homes, a practice that provides an opportunity for members of the public to learn more about the fish. Every year, at a community ceremony, the families release their young salmon into a tributary stream, hoping that someday they will return to repopulate the river. In early April 2010, I watched as the families gathered just upstream from a bridge, where they had staked a bright banner with the slogan Asahikawa wo yasei no sake no furusato in shiyō (Let’s make Asahikawa a hometown for wild salmon). There, engineers had built steps into the concrete flood-protection structures, making it easy for the parents and children to descend to the river’s edge. Each family had cared for about a hundred eggs, closely tracking their development over several months as they first developed eyes, then turned into tiny alevins (early life phase where newly hatched fish are fed by a pouch of egg remnants on their underbellies), then into hungry young fish. At the edge of the river, the families gently poured their fish from plastic buckets into the river while shouting itterashai (go and come back) to the young salmon, the same words one would use to send off a family member for a day at work or school. The chances are slim, however, that any of their fish will return. Even in the best of conditions, only about 2–5 percent of similarly sized salmon survive to reproductive maturity, and for these salmon, the odds are still worse. Among other challenges, the dam that killed off the region’s salmon in the 1960s remains. Although it was retrofitted with a fish ladder in 2000, the structure was poorly designed and does not function well. The entrance is too narrow and the water flows too quickly, forming small eddies and whirlpools that make it extremely tough for fish to ascend the river. “It’s not enough, but it’s all we can do,” one volunteer says about the society’s fish rearing and nest-building activities.

In 2003, Nakamura-san received the phone call for which he had been praying for two decades: a fisherman had found the decomposing bodies of two spawned out salmon along the bank of a nearby Ishikari tributary. Nakamura-san had those first two fish preserved in alcohol and put on display at a local museum as a symbol of hope. If two fish could make it to Asahikawa, others could, too. It is a long way from two fish to a self-sustaining natural population, but it made him believe it was possible to restore some fish to the river. As they struggled to make their local waters more hospitable to salmon, Nakamura-san and the nature society did not invoke the kinds of cosmopolitan comparisons common to most other Hokkaido salmon contexts. Instead, they focused on temporal comparisons across pasts, presents, and futures as they cultivated a new sensibility: that watersheds where naturally spawning salmon have been extirpated are missing something that should be there.

At the same time, their work—undertaken in comparative idioms of past/present and ecological connectivity/broken-ness—is underpinned by broader changes in transnational salmon worlds. During the years I spent in Hokkaido, Nakamura-san was also cautiously optimistic about his organization’s new collaboration with a government-funded fisheries research institute. For years, Nakamura-san had prodded various agencies to provide him with larger numbers of hatchery salmon eggs to plant in the rivers around Asahikawa. Initially, no one was willing to consider doing so. Hatchery eggs were seen as a valuable resource, as the key raw material for their production; it made no sense to managers to waste eggs on a seemingly frivolous project that was unlikely to produce many harvestable fish. Yet in the midst of the changes in salmon management entangled with both the Chilean salmon-driven market shifts and the growing traction of comparisons between salmon conservation in Japan and North America, there is a new willingness to do so. As wild salmon promotion has become an increasingly important part of twenty-first-century transnational fisheries worlds, Japanese government agencies and research institutes that would have previously nixed the idea are willing to take up the restoration-oriented endeavors that have become a new comparative norm. These agencies are now more open to promoting stream-spawning salmon in the name of genetic diversity, and thus in collaborating with initiatives like Nakamura-san’s volunteer-run project.

In 2009, the salmon research institute agreed to release young salmon into a tributary tied to Nakamura-san’s project for three consecutive spring seasons. These releases were essential for Nakamura-san’s group as they allowed for an infusion of fish on an otherwise impossible scale. The nature society can rear only a few thousand salmon through their network of household tanks and handmade spawning beds; in contrast, the government institute was able to release 250,000 juvenile salmon each year from 2009 to 2011, dramatically increasing the odds that enough fish would survive to reestablish meaningful spawning populations in the waters around Asahikawa. By autumn 2012, that indeed seemed to be the case; a friend in Sapporo phoned me in the US to tell me that he had just seen Nakamura-san celebrating on a Japanese Broadcasting Corporation program. Scores of salmon had returned to Asahikawa and were starting to dig spawning beds of their own.

Yet while large-scale releases created hopeful pulses of fish, their success remains uncertain. As the research institute’s hatchery fish returned, trained observers documented more than 1,617 spawning nests in the area in 2012. But sadly, those nests did not lead to an equally robust second generation. By 2020, the number of returnees had fallen, and observers noted only two hundred nests. Even with more public and management interest in wild salmon, it seems that the ability of many of the rivers to sustain them remains limited. How can salmon eggs thrive in a river lined with concrete, where the waters no longer bubble? How can juvenile fish find anything to eat when dikes have replaced food-rich riparian borderlands? For new salmon populations to stick in the river, it might require hatchery supplementation for years, if not decades. And for self-reproducing salmon populations to survive, it could require the removal of the dam and the restoration of large areas of the river—major relandscaping projects for which there is not yet adequate political will. Asahikawa remains a landscape oriented toward mass production of grains, not fish. What kind of salmon populations are possible in rivers so tightly bound up with projects of industrial modernity?

THE CONSTRAINTS OF HATCHERY SUCCESS

Regardless of its limited success, the Asahikawa project exemplifies a mounting willingness in Hokkaido to experiment with wild salmon as a management category. Until the 2000s, there was no commonly used term for “wild salmon” in Japanese. Now, there are several, including wairudo sāmon and yaseigyo. The side-by-side use of these terms is emblematic of Japanese salmon management. The first word is written in katakana, a script used to mark terms as “foreign” loanwords. The second is written in kanji characters, a script originally borrowed from China but now largely domesticated as Japanese. As these two terms indicate, wild salmon are sometimes marked as a conceptual foreign import, but at other times, they slip into the language as a more Japanese concept. Hokkaido fisheries managers describe having a complicated and sometimes fraught relationship with wild salmon as a category that they take seriously yet whose accompanying conceptual frames sometimes seem overdetermined by others. Fisheries scientists in Hokkaido have contributed to scientific research on wild spawning salmon populations, differences in run timings between hatchery and non-hatchery fish, and genetic diversity among hatchery and wild stocks, to name just a few. But Hokkaido fisheries managers still feel caught in the comparisons of North American fisheries experts. No matter how hard they try, they cannot perform wild salmon management in ways that measure up to the ideals that emanate from North American fish worlds, a by-product of the material legacies of earlier comparative practices.

During the past decade, “wild salmon” has become a category of transnational environmental action taken up by North American–based salmon-focused scientific organizations and NGOs, which aim to conserve fish biodiversity through the protection of naturally spawning fish. Hokkaido fisheries managers participate in meetings of such groups, but they often find themselves on the margins as they struggle to make their salmon worlds legible. As one Japanese scientist explained, “For people who only want to protect wild salmon, Hokkaido just isn’t very interesting.” Hokkaido has comparatively few wild salmon, in part because Japanese officials put so much effort into modernizing and rationalizing them in the spirit of one kind of comparative modernity. Yet through the contingencies of evolutionary histories, they also had salmon stocks that were more amenable to hatchery cultivation (at least for a while) than were many in North America.

The material affordances of Hokkaido’s salmon proved exceptionally well suited for industrial production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chum salmon, which currently account for more than 90 percent of salmon harvested in Japan, proved comparatively easy to cultivate once one had a basic understanding of fish nutrition and migration. After they hatch, young chum spend only a few weeks in freshwater before migrating to the ocean, in stark contrast to the extended freshwater residence times for sockeye (ranging from one to four years), coho (typically about a year), and Chinook salmon (ranging from three months to about a year), species that predominate in much of North America.⁸ Such quick migration is a useful adaptation for life in Hokkaido’s rivers, which are generally short, steep, and prone to high-velocity floods, as juvenile fish need to be ready to be swept downstream shortly after they emerge from their rocky nests. These high-speed rivers tend to have few marshy wetlands and provide relatively little food for fish, so it is also advantageous for salmon to quickly leave these barren natal streams to seek out the bounty of the sea. This short freshwater residence time makes Hokkaido chum a good fit for industrial hatchery production. Held in tanks for only a few weeks, there is less time for the fish to contract diseases or become dependent on human feeding. Such traits also make chum cheap to rear, as they have low feed costs and hatcheries can get by with hiring temporary staff to care for the fish during the brief time they are there. The fish are also so small that millions of them can be kept in relatively little space, lowering per-fish production costs.

Hokkaido’s geology and geography offer still other advantages to fish cultivation. In early life stages, salmon growth is closely linked to water temperature. In Hokkaido, groundwater temperatures are warmer than the autumn and winter temperatures of many northern latitude rivers, so the water that hatcheries circulate through their pipes helps the fish to develop more quickly than in many other regions, giving them a developmental jump-start. Hokkaido salmon also have a migration pattern that is especially kind to young fish. Hokkaido salmon spend the first year of their lives feeding in the Okhotsk Sea, where the high nutrient inputs from the Amur River allow zooplankton to flourish, providing young fish with a bountiful buffet. Japanese chum feed in this watery nursery for a year before moving offshore in search of bigger prey. As Hokkaido hatcheries ramped up production, this gentle entry into the world proved ideal for hatchery fish to transition from industrial facility to open ocean, ultimately increasing fish survival and enabling Hokkaido hatcheries to become profitable ventures. Hatcheries, however, were not equally successful for all parts of Hokkaido; they worked best along the Okhotsk seacoast, where the number of returning chum jumped from an average of 1,369,000 annually during the years of 1959–70 to 16,998,000 annually during 2008–12—about 12.4 times more fish (Kitada 2014). Researchers and managers widely attribute this success to the regional hatchery production association’s innovations in hatchery technique, including better egg handling and juvenile release times more closely matched to ocean conditions (mimicking natural out-migration patterns) (Kitada 2014).

While the concretization of rivers is one material force that wild salmon management must confront in Japan, this success of hatcheries is another. Today, the comparative practices that birthed and shaped the Hokkaido salmon hatchery system have been transfigured through their daily production practices into the bodies and population structures of the island’s salmon. Since 1980, Hokkaido’s approximately 150 private and ten national hatcheries have consistently released about one billion juvenile salmon annually into about 140 rivers and from eighty temporary net-pen rearing sites, an act that in its repetition has substantially modified the region’s fish (Hokkaido National Fisheries Research Institute 2020; Kitada 2014).⁹ Because they usually return to the river of their birth, salmon develop distinct populations in each of the waterways where they live, with genetic, morphological, and behavioral differences attuned to that river’s specific conditions. Hatcheries, however, have long swapped fertilized eggs among them, transplanting fish from one part of Hokkaido to another and scrambling the links between fish and their rivers; such processes of homogenization have left Hokkaido’s salmon with weak remnants of what was once likely substantial variation among multiple regional populations (Sato et al. 2014). At the same time, by disproportionately releasing salmon juveniles in certain rivers over others, they have also redistributed the salmon that remain. Areas without hatcheries often have very small numbers of salmon, while those with hatcheries have a superabundance of fish—albeit fish who are mostly either caught in commercial fisheries or trapped for hatchery use rather than dying in streams, feeding other animals, and thus participating in ecological relations. Furthermore, because hatcheries have repeatedly propagated the earliest returning fish as they have rushed to fill their incubators as soon as fish runs begin, their labors have consistently selected for early returning fish, thereby moving the peak of the salmon spawning season earlier in the year (Sahashi 2021). These are merely a few examples of the changes that Hokkaido hatcheries have produced in the evolutionary trajectories of these fish.¹⁰ Over their nearly 150 years of operation, they have inscribed the quotidian practices of comparative industrialization and modernization into flesh, genes, and relational worlds with durable and intransigent material effects not unlike those of dams and hardened river embankments.

In contrast, in much of North America, hatcheries simply did not work as well. This was particularly true in places like the Columbia River basin.¹¹ In chapter 2 we saw how the Columbia River served as a key comparative site in the making of Hokkaido’s salmon canning industry in the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has played a new role in the emergence of the forms of wild salmon management—which call for reductions in hatchery salmon releases—against which Hokkaido fisheries managers worry that their fish and landscapes cannot compare well. The development of wild salmon as a management category (not simply as a market category vis-à-vis farmed fish) is itself partially attributable to the failure of Columbia River hatcheries. Like their counterparts in Hokkaido, Columbia River officials constructed a number of salmon hatcheries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, touting them as a technology that would augment the region’s fish runs. But while hatchery managers released hordes of juvenile fish every spring, the return rates of those fish remained dismally low, as evidenced by ongoing total salmon declines. In the 1960s, US federal and state agencies invested in hatchery research, as the Japanese government had done, but found less success. Why did hatcheries in Japan become so productive while those in North America did not?

The specificities of the fish, it turns out, mattered tremendously to hatchery success. The lengthy freshwater residence times for Chinook, coho, and sockeye, the species that composed the majority of Columbia River stocks, make them less ideal for ranching, in contrast to chum, which migrate to sea soon after hatching. When cultivated in a hatchery setting, these species require extensive feeding and care prior to their ocean migrations, and this extended freshwater phase magnifies the challenges and costs of their rearing. Diseases can more easily sweep through tanks and thus must be more carefully managed and treated. Fish behavior also changes as young salmon became accustomed to lives in which they swim in concrete raceways and food falls from above on a regular schedule. When they are released from hatcheries, some salmon seem to confuse the movements of predatory birds with the hands of the hatchery workers who would sprinkle food pellets into their tanks; rising to the surface of the water expecting to find food, they themselves are often devoured. Holding fish in hatcheries for months also proved expensive. The cost of the feed was one factor, but so was staff time. In contrast to Hokkaido, where young salmon demanded only a few weeks of care each year, Columbia River hatcheries need to pay year-round staff to do a range of labor-intensive tasks, such as tank cleaning, that must be repeated again and again during the fishes’ long hatchery period. Moreover, once they are released from hatcheries, Chinook and coho rely much more heavily on riverine and estuarine habitats than do chum, who head directly to the ocean. Yet those essential habitats have been hammered by flood prevention and drainage practices throughout the past century, with an approximately 74 percent loss of estuary wetlands—prime feeding areas for these juvenile salmon before entering the ocean—thus leading to less robust fish and higher mortality rates (Brophy et al. 2019).¹²

Due to the coupled effects of species differences, hatcheries yielded much less impressive results in Oregon, Washington, and California than they did in Hokkaido.¹³ By the 1990s, the profound failure of these hatcheries became clear in the Columbia River, as salmon populations dipped to such catastrophically low levels that several subpopulations of the basin’s salmon were placed on the national endangered species list, and commercial fishing was so severely curtailed that fishermen turned to federal disaster relief funds to pay their bills. As fish numbers plummeted, distrust of and distaste for hatcheries began to rise (Cone and Ridlington 2000). In the Columbia basin as in Hokkaido, hatcheries were integral to the dream of “salmon without rivers,” of being able to sustain a flourishing fishery while freeing rivers for other uses (Lichatowich 1999). In the Columbia, however, fishermen and fishing-dependent towns ended up feeling duped. They gave over their rivers to the schemes of government planners, but they did not get the bountiful salmon runs they had been promised. As salmon populations bottomed out in the 1990s, scientists and the general public became alarmed by declines in wild fish populations. The Redfish Lake sockeye, a unique subspecies that migrates more than nine hundred miles inland to Idaho and turns bright red when it spawns, became the “poster fish” for such losses. In 1992, only a single male fish returned to Redfish Lake, drawing mass media attention. Sometimes compared to the last surviving passenger pigeon, the fish was given the name Lonesome Larry, sparking political appeals for new forms of fish conservation (White 1995, 104). That same year, the Redfish Lake sockeye, along with a number of other salmon populations, were listed as endangered species under US federal law, an act that brought salmon into legally mandated management schemes as wild animals. Because endangered species laws are designed around logics of nature protection not commodity production, fisheries biologists and legal experts decided that only non-hatchery fish should be eligible for its benefits including wide-ranging safeguards against habitat damage and excessive harvest.¹⁴ Fisheries managers suddenly found that they needed to reform all of their management strategies, aligning them with endangered species goals of sustaining wild fish, a new entity that they sought to better research and define.

An increasing amount of such research indicated that hatchery salmon themselves might be exacerbating declines in wild salmon numbers. Instead of returning to the facility of their birth, some hatchery salmon inevitably strayed and spawned in creeks, where they mated with wild salmon, diluting their genetic diversity with that altered by decades of hatchery production. Scientists began to fear, with good cause, that hatchery fish strays would endanger salmon diversity and well-being. Research was beginning to show that salmon that lacked local adaptations to their specific watershed showed a significant reduction in fitness, meaning that the descendants of mixed hatchery and wild salmon parentage produced fewer offspring than did fish of exclusively wild parentage (Araki et al. 2008). Through this and other mechanisms, hatchery fish were likely edging naturally spawning salmon populations closer to extinction. In response, new approaches to wild salmon management have included attempts to spatially segregate wild and hatchery fish so that they do not breed with each other, alongside calls for reductions in hatchery salmon production in some contexts. For example, in 2013, wild-fish advocates successfully sued in US federal court to reduce Chinook salmon hatchery releases by a third in a Columbia River tributary, and more generally, in 2017, government fisheries scientists recommended that releases of hatchery fall Chinook in the Columbia drop from about eighteen million per year to about fourteen million per year (Learn 2013; Milstein 2017). In Oregon’s smaller coastal rivers, which are closer in size to many Hokkaido waterways, some hatcheries have been shuttered entirely. In the 1990s, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reduced annual releases of coho salmon in such rivers from between four and five million to fewer than a million, while in 2007, it discontinued additional hatchery programs. For a couple of years after closing hatcheries, fisheries officials often trap and kill hatchery fish when they return to the river—rather than allowing them to spawn—to prevent hatchery fish genes from adversely affecting wild fish populations, even when that meant sharply reducing the total number of spawning salmon. In one controversial case, Oregon officials decided to kill and remove about 6,600 hatchery-origin salmon from a creek after a hatchery closure instead of allowing them to breed on their own, to protect the genetic potentialities of the thirty-two wild fish that also sought to spawn in the creek (Foster 2002).¹⁵ In places where hatchery programs continue, managers sometimes attempt to spatially separate hatchery and wild fish to foster the harvest of hatchery fish while minimizing that of the wild fish. In the lower Columbia River, for example, hatchery fish are specifically reared and released in side-channel areas to entice them to return to those sites, where commercial gillnet fishing is allowed, while reducing the capture of wild fish who most frequently swim up the river’s main channel.¹⁶

Within such contexts, US Pacific Northwest biologists, fishermen, and members of the general public began to harbor serious wariness, if not passionate dislike, toward hatcheries and hatchery salmon, which became symbolic of a broad overreliance on technological fixes and a neglect of ecological integrity. An essay by a US Northwest fisheries biologist illustrates the sentiments that became common in these salmon worlds:

The real danger of hatcheries and other forms of artificial production is that they provide an excuse for habitat loss and poor fisheries management. If we believe in hatcheries, then we can allow the rivers to be dammed, silted, and destroyed. Just mitigate with a hatchery. Although it seems we should know better by now, the lessons haven’t really sunk in.… Even more dangerous is the spread of the technological fix syndrome. If hatcheries don’t work now, we will try some other form of hatchery technology. (Hilborn 1992, 7)

HATCHERY SALMON IN HOKKAIDO

In Hokkaido, however, a contrasting set of hatchery salmon policies and sensibilities around hatcheries developed in the late twentieth century in light of its industrialized salmon system, which functions relatively well. This moderate success has jointly material and affective consequences, as it is harder to be troubled by that which appears to work. Keiichi Yamada is among those who insist that hatcheries have saved Hokkaido salmon, not contributed to their declines. In his late seventies, Yamada-san is a retired hatchery researcher and director who held numerous salmon-related positions across Hokkaido during his thirty-five-year career. Unable to fully retire, he subsequently served as the director of a salmon museum, published a trade press book on salmon, and sat on the boards of at least four salmon-related nonprofit groups. If it hadn’t been for hatcheries, Yamada-san tells me, Hokkaido salmon would have gone extinct. During World War II and the immediate postwar period, hatcheries were what protected salmon from poaching. People were hungry, Yamada-san says. They would have harvested every last salmon from the streams. But the fish were saved because the hatcheries collected them at the river mouths before poachers could get their hands on them and brought their gametes into protected locales, before selling their flesh onward.

In Hokkaido, hatcheries are also widely credited with making more sustainable salmon fisheries. Many people, including Yamada-san, describe the 1950s and 1960s high-seas salmon fishery as an example of an environmentally exploitative industry; although seen as “necessary” in the context of postwar food shortages, the factory ships are commonly described as a bad system that only harvested, without giving back. The transition from high-seas salmon fisheries to coastal harvest of hatchery stocks was widely celebrated as a switch “from fisheries that take to fisheries that make” (toru gyogyō kara, tsukuru gyogyō e), a line repeated again and again in cooperative association materials and by fishermen themselves. Hatcheries, which made the entities that fishermen caught, were at the heart of notions of responsible fisheries. For most Japanese salmon industry people I met, the financial structure of Hokkaido hatcheries were also key to their sustainability. In contrast to the Columbia River, where salmon hatcheries are primarily funded through federal allocations (with minor contributions from general state budgets and license fees), Hokkaido hatcheries are directly funded by the fishermen, who pay a set percentage of their gross income to their regional hatchery network each year. The system is seen as a stable cycle in which profits from the harvest of hatchery fish fund the production of the next generation of salmon. Overall, in the context of booming salmon population numbers and international pressure to abandon high-seas fishing, people in Hokkaido came to experience hatcheries and hatchery fish as good rather than as dangerous and inferior to wild salmon.

MATERIAL DIFFERENCES

The different histories in Hokkaido and the Columbia River have produced different material possibilities for wild salmon management. While it is important not to romanticize the state of the Columbia River, a watercourse I once heard described as “lobotomized,” it nonetheless offers more affordances for enacting wild salmon than do the rivers of Hokkaido. On the Columbia, hatchery production was never as comprehensive as it was in Hokkaido. Weirs, for example, were not used to block salmon runs and collect fish near river mouths, in part because of the differences in the hydrology of the Columbia and its physical size; the river—1,243 miles long and draining an area about the size of France—is more than four miles wide at its mouth. Furthermore, while the Columbia and its Snake River tributary are dotted with eighteen large hydropower, transport, and irrigation dams, its tributaries have not been as extensively modified as those in Hokkaido. The streams of the Columbia River basin have been routinely silted by runoff from logging sites and stripped of their riparian vegetation, but they have not been subject to the mass construction projects that have turned Hokkaido’s waterways into channels of concrete.

These material conditions have made it possible to implement elaborate forms of wild salmon management focused on the protection of existing wild fish stocks with at least some hope of success. As wild salmon have gained traction as an object of concern in the Columbia River basin, state and federal agencies have designed ambitious policies to try to save them—policies that alter water quality standards, fish harvest regulations, hatchery management policies, scientific research priorities, and hydroelectric dam operations. These new regulations have had profound effects on regional agricultural, logging, and ranching practices, requiring a reduction in irrigation water, forest buffers to shade streams, and fencing to keep cattle from trampling spawning grounds. Inspired by the material conditions of rivers and salmon, environmental managers and advocacy groups have used the legal frameworks of the US Endangered Species Act, which privileges species rights over economics, to compel such changes, even when they have severely curtailed industry. In the case of logging, efforts to protect wild salmon have reshaped policies and limited cutting to such an extent that I once heard a resource manager quip that Pacific Northwest logging regulations are “basically a salmon management plan.” Since the 1990s, salmon have impacted a large fraction of decisions around land and water use in the Columbia basin; they determine who gets to fish, how much power gets generated, and who gets to develop property.

Since the early 2000s, the category of “wild salmon” has become ubiquitous across wide swaths of North Pacific salmon worlds. It has come to dominate international salmon scientific conferences and make a claim to a sizable portion of the global higher-end salmon market share. As talk of wild salmon has proliferated in North America, it has created ripples that salmon managers in Japan cannot ignore. As in the nineteenth century, international legibility and comparability still matter in Japan, and just as during the colonial settlement of Hokkaido, practices of land-use and environmental management continue to be key modes for enacting modernity. In the intervening century, the goalposts for “modern” human-nature relations have certainly shifted—frontier expansion is out and environmental conservation is in—but the desire to compare well remains. But how can one compare well when one’s landscape and fish have been more severely altered and one’s legal and policy frameworks have fewer affordances for protecting stream-spawning salmon?¹⁷

WILD SALMON IN JAPAN

Despite more than a century of intensive harvest, hatchery production, and river channelization, there are still some stream-spawning chum salmon in Hokkaido. Until around 2010, it was widely assumed that nearly all (greater than 95 percent) of Hokkaido chum salmon were of hatchery origin, and there was little optimism around the possibilities for substantial stream spawning (Kitada 2014; Miyakoshi et al. 2013).¹⁸ Yet in 2008, island-wide surveys for chum documented their presence in 104 of 239 streams (Nagata et al. 2012), including sixty-five rivers that have never been stocked with hatchery fish (Nakagawa 2009). Revised estimates have indicated that while wild-spawning salmon were thought to make up less than 5 percent of total chum production, that number may instead be a little over 25 percent (Morita 2014).

Other research has also shown that despite decades of hatchery influence and significant homogenization, Hokkaido’s fish populations indeed retain some genetic and life history diversity, especially those fish who spawn in rivers, often later in the season, and that may have been less incorporated into hatchery regimes (Beacham et al. 2008; Nagata et al. 2012; Sato and Morita 2019). But for the Kitahama fisherpeople, these discoveries did not seem enough for them to make internationally legible wild salmon in Japan without broader structural management changes. In 2014, after a series of private exchanges with the Marine Stewardship Council, the fishers decided to withdraw their application for its eco-label. The Hokkaido fishers had many doubts about the program, including the degree of financial benefit, especially after Alaskan salmon fisheries announced their withdrawal from the MSC program in 2012. In principle, groups such as the Kitahama fishing professionals supported the calls to support wild fish; they consistently embraced the restoration of their local rivers, orchestrating stream habitat initiatives that included dam removal, streamside tree planting, and erosion control.¹⁹ From the early 2000s onward, they had started to collaborate with dairy farmers to keep cow manure out of waterways and with organic farmers work to reduce use of agricultural chemicals.

Like the Kitahama fishing professionals, participants across Hokkaido salmon fisheries rarely reject wildness or wild salmon conservation per se. “As it’s being said internationally, biodiversity [seibutsu no taiyōsei] and ecosystem conservation [seitaikei no iji] are the point of view from which we are going forward,” one former hatchery manager told me. In Japan, “those of us who are connected to salmon are thinking about them as wild animals [yasei dōbutsu]. We’re looking for hatchery production that approximates wild [yasei ni chikazukeru]. We can’t say that just because hatchery production has succeeded everything is fine.” Yet this manager and others with whom I spoke are slightly wary of North American wild-based management regimes—including those embodied in MSC policies—that might displace hatchery production and threaten Japanese enactments of salmon-as-food. “The Japanese are fish-eating people,” Yamada-san explains. “With our small land area, we can’t really rely on grazing, so we need to ranch the sea.” North American approaches to wild salmon management, which call for reductions in hatchery production to protect the genetic diversity of fish and reduce competition for food in ocean feeding grounds, worry them. While there are currently plenty of Chilean fish on store shelves, should Japan risk cutting back on its limited food resources? Although Japan has not suffered from famine for more than half a century, memories of postwar starvation remain alive, and food insecurity remains the stuff of everyday parlance, with frequent newspaper articles about low levels of domestic food production.

Yamada-san, the salmon education instructor we met in chapter 4, is among those who want to balance notions of salmon-as-wild-beings and salmon-as-food. In addition to his other activities, he organizes an annual Japanese-Canadian youth exchange program focused on fish. In odd years, Sapporo students travel to a town in British Columbia to learn about human and salmon worlds on the other side of the Pacific. In even years, the British Columbia students come to Sapporo, where in 2010, I tagged along with the visiting group of Canadian junior high students. In addition to general sightseeing, their schedule included a visit to a salmon hatchery, a trip to a salmon museum, a fish dissection, and several conversations about nature and fish. Yamada-san wants the Canadian students to get a sense of how Japanese salmon-human worlds are different from their own. “Salmon equal nature in Canada,” Yamada-san tells me. “They even cut down trees and leave them in rivers for salmon.” Yamada-san wants the students to see why such wild-based management practices are so difficult in Japan’s concrete rivers. He wants the Canadian kids to understand the predicament of Hokkaido salmon—that in the legacies of nineteenth-century modernization and ongoing limitations on food production, there are no quick fixes for Hokkaido’s damaged rivers and displaced fish. If they can understand Japan’s challenges, he says, perhaps the Canadian students will understand that the Japanese are not people who fail to understand the importance of nature conservation but instead are trying to do the best they can with their heavily modernized landscapes.

Japanese fisheries scientists are among those who feel marginalized by dogmatic approaches of many wild-centric North American fisheries experts. The scientists with whom I spoke are well respected in the trans-pacific fisheries science community, routinely attend conferences in North America, and publish their work in English-language journals. But they are irked at how North American salmon experts get to define what count as “best practices,” while Japanese salmon professionals are criticized for failing to conform to the wild-centric values of North America. To them, such attitudes are ironic, even hypocritical. “You gave us hatcheries,” one scientist reminded me. In the descriptions of several Hokkaido fisheries professionals with whom I spoke, the United States is not a “savior” of Japanese wild salmon but one of the chief causes of their decline. Nineteenth-century power relations forced Japan to emulate the West’s flawed approaches to natural resources. One scientist showed me a chart that indicated that nineteenth-century Japanese started to build hatcheries in Hokkaido before salmon populations started to decline. According to the scientist, Japan built hatcheries because they needed to appear kindaiteki (modern) rather than because they needed to supplement salmon numbers; the Meiji government desperately did not want to be “behind” (jidaiokure). In an attempt to enact modernity through natural resource management, the Japanese abandoned effective but “passive” (ukemi) resource management practices, like protecting spawning grounds, in favor of more “active” (sekkyokuteki) modes of management, including Western-style hatcheries, even though they may have hastened declines in Hokkaido salmon populations by removing spawning from still healthy nineteenth-century rivers and putting their gametes into then-unproductive hatcheries. Before the West started meddling, the first scientist emphasized, the Japanese had their own salmon management systems based around the protection of salmon spawning rivers. This tanegawa (seed river) system strictly enforced fishing bans in certain rivers to ensure adequate salmon reproduction. Thus, North America, this scientist asserted, is not the only place that can stake claims to a history of wild salmon protection. Japan, he stresses, has its own genealogy of conservation in which human cultivation is not a constitutive outside.

As the same fisheries biologist explained to me, the sentiment popular in places like the Columbia River that “because stream-spawning salmon are good, hatchery fish are bad, well, that argument just doesn’t make sense to us.” As another scientist put it, protecting some wild spawning creates an important genetic reserve “so if anything goes wrong with the hatchery fish” there is some place to turn. “You don’t need a lot [of naturally spawning fish] for that.” “It’s not that we don’t like wild salmon,” he continues, it’s that too much of a focus on the wild just is not practical. According to the best available estimates, at its peak, pre-hatchery Hokkaido salmon fisheries produced only about three million fish per year, while in the 2000s, hatchery-based fisheries produced about sixty million fish (Kobayashi 2009, 13). Within Hokkaido, this temporal comparison—of recent past of scarcity to substantial abundance—comes into conflict with the wild salmon comparisons that move between Japan and the United States.

As another Hokkaido salmon scientist pointed out to me, although the wild salmon policies promulgated in places like the Columbia River claim to be working toward sustainability, they are radically unsustainable in practice. “There’s an irony to it,” he said. “So all of you people in Oregon and Washington, the salmon you eat, it’s all coming from hatchery fish in Alaska. You only want to protect your own salmon as wild. To me this is really strange. You only care if your own place is wild. Other places it’s whatever goes.” While he overstates the proportion of hatchery salmon in Alaska, where around 30 percent of harvest fish are of hatchery origin, he nonetheless has a point; at the same time that fisheries professionals in Oregon, Washington, and California criticize Japanese fisheries managers for neglecting nature conservation in favor of production, the continental United States consumes a large volume of salmon from less than sustainable places, including Chile, where the United States has overtaken Japan as the largest destination for Chilean farmed fish.

Since around 2018, however, this confidence in Hokkaido hatchery salmon has been on the wane. While Hokkaido salmon returns ranged from about thirty-nine to forty-eight million fish between 2008 and 2011, those numbers had roughly halved by 2018–20, when only eighteen to twenty-three million returned, a level not seen since the early 1980s (Hokkaido Fisheries Research Institute 2020). These sharp declines have unsettled the fishing industry and tempered managers’ celebrations of hatchery success. While the reasons for these low numbers are not fully understood, fisheries scientists think that the warming water temperatures wrought by global climate change are likely the primary cause. As the optimal water temperatures for salmon shift farther north, Hokkaido fish seem to be suffering, while more northerly populations in Russia see improved survival rates and record high harvests. Some scientists also fear that hatchery production has made the situation worse for Hokkaido’s salmon, as the reduced diversity of hatchery fish gives the overall population fewer options for adapting to warmer oceans; a few have even posited that hatchery fish may be less physically fit than wild fish and thus less able to survive under the additional rigors produced by climate change.²⁰ Furthermore, data from one major Hokkaido river indicates that in years of low returns, hatchery fish tend to suffer proportionally more substantial declines than do wild fish, pointing to the likely ability of wild fish to cope with a wider range of conditions.²¹ With these mounting worries, Hokkaido fishermen’s cooperatives have ramped up their watershed conservation efforts, with their annual number of salmon-specific restoration initiatives leaping from thirty-three in 2008 to 122 in 2018 (Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 2020, 84). Yet larger policy shifts and governmental actions remain limited, especially when it comes to removing concrete from rivers. For example, despite the support of many Japanese fisheries biologists, it has taken nearly fifteen years to make substantial progress on the Rusha River, located within Hokkaido’s Shiretoko UNESCO World Heritage Site. By 2019, the river’s hatchery had been decommissioned, and two of three concrete dams on its Rusha River had been disassembled down to their river’s waterline, but the removal of their remaining structures are expected to take several more years (DeNies 2019; Rand 2020). Although concrete structures in the park’s other rivers have been notched to improve salmon migration, with subsequent increases in upriver fish spawning, they remain in place. The sluggishness of such projects points to a more general challenge: the structures of improved rivers and hatcheries are concretized in practices of governance, as well as in the concrete of the dams, dikes, and hatchery ponds themselves.

COMPARING WITH CONCRETE

Tensions manifest as Hokkaido’s salmon management efforts are pulled into implicit and explicit comparisons with those of North America, sets of comparisons in which the distinctions between wild and hatchery fish have reconfigured the terms on which they are made. These comparisons crop up in a variety of fisheries management contexts, not only in the previously discussed attempt to secure Marine Stewardship Council certification but also in transnational ocean fora, NGO initiatives, and United Nations heritage-site plans, where various international groups pressure Hokkaido managers and government officials to remove dams, improve fish spawning habitat, and reduce hatchery production. To a certain degree, such pressures are not bad; there are substantial numbers of people in Hokkaido, including members of the Asahikawa River nature society and numerous fisheries scientists, who would like to see the Japanese government invest more assertively in river restoration efforts. These tensions also appear in international ocean management contexts, where North American scientists charge Hokkaido hatchery chum with adversely affecting North American fish who feed in the same ocean areas. They assert that the extra competition for limited quantities of prey generated by the large numbers of hatchery fish is reducing the survival and body sizes of Alaskan fish, which include a substantial number of wild salmon (Cunningham, Westley, and Adkison 2018; Ruggerone, Agler, and Nielsen 2012; Ruggerone and Irvine 2018).²² Viewing these stocks as more valuable than their mass-produced Hokkaido counterparts, they call for reductions in Japanese hatchery production to improve conditions for wild fish. Again, such concerns also have their merits, as it does indeed appear that the total number of salmon is running up against the limits of the ocean to feed them all.

Yet in such contexts, Japanese salmon worlds are frequently depicted as behind the times, as needing to catch up to what North America–based fisheries professionals see as the proper approaches to wild salmon. Given the state of their rivers, their fishing industry built around hatchery fish, and the political and practical challenges of removing concrete, Hokkaido salmon scientists and managers are simply not able to enact the ostensibly more cutting-edge wild salmon initiatives prescribed by North American colleagues.²³ Japanese fisheries managers thus struggle to engage with structures of comparison in multiple senses: they must engage both with the comparative framings that since the nineteenth century have firmly positioned Japan as less modern or advanced than the so-called West and with the literal structures of channelized rivers and hatchery fish rearing ponds. Current comparisons from outside Japan, which criticize the state of Hokkaido’s rivers and the region’s focus on hatchery fish, do not recognize these structures as literally concretized histories of past comparisons—ones in which North American practices of agricultural and fisheries management played a key role.

In the subtle ways illustrated in this chapter, Japanese fisheries professionals often seek to make visible these histories by recounting the comparative origins of Hokkaido’s hatchery programs and its broader land/water transformations. In doing so, they enact a comparative practice that is distinct from those of North American fisheries managers, who, by simplistically framing Japanese salmon policy as inadequately attentive to wild fish, ignore how previous comparisons shape the material possibilities of the present. Insisting on such historicity—on how current comparisons unfold in land-water-scapes shaped by past ones—is to insist on imbrication. If North American fisheries managers were to pay attention to such concretized histories, it would indeed shift the grounds of comparison in an important way: rather than evaluating Japanese salmon management from an ostensibly outside position, it would require North American fisheries professionals to reenvision Hokkaido’s salmon dilemmas as ones in which their own management histories are also thoroughly entangled.