CHAPTER THREE Of Dreams and Comparisons
Making Japanese Salmon Abroad
THE practices of comparison that remade Hokkaido’s lands and waters did not remain on the island or in the surrounding region. While Hokkaido was made into a site to experiment with bits and pieces of models borrowed from elsewhere, it also emerged as a ground for comparisons that moved outward from it to imagine how other places might be transformed in ways akin to the projects underway there. Hokkaido became a linchpin in several Japanese government and industrial initiatives across a wide swath of the twentieth century within prewar and wartime imperialism and postwar economic growth.
As we glimpsed in the Sapporo Agricultural College graduates’ use of Hokkaido as a model for their later work in colonial administration and imperial governance, the island itself has served as a source from which to make comparisons that reach out and remake other natural and social landscapes. As it trained many key colonial bureaucrats, SAC served as a proving ground for logics and practices of Japanese expansionism that were applied within Japan’s other imperial projects. At SAC, young Japanese men developed the comparative languages of civilization and backwardness along with the concrete skills in agriculture and scientific management that they deployed in Japanese colonial campaigns, and such know-how quickly became one of the island’s most important exports, alongside goods such as canned fish.
Consider the example of Nitobe Inazō, an early SAC graduate mentioned in chapter 2, who became a key figure in the development of the colonial logics used to justify the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and Korea (Dudden 2005). During his time as a personal assistant to Gotô Shinpei, the colonial governor-general of Taiwan, Nitobe transferred specific practices of agricultural management from Hokkaido to Taiwan. As historian Alex Dudden documents, one of Nitobe’s projects in Taiwan was to introduce “large-scale sugar-planting techniques—a staple of global empire—that he had first learned during his courses with William Smith Clark, in Sapporo” (14). Nitobe was only one of many students who thought practices of empire through Hokkaido. In 1907, SAC became the site of Japan’s first Department of the Study of Colonization and Agricultural Administration, and scores of the program’s graduates went on to lead agricultural development projects in Japan’s Asian colonies, with Hokkaido as a key point of comparative reference.1 As Japanese expansion proceeded, Hokkaido’s comparative importance continued. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Japanese officials working in Manchuria’s Reclamation Bureau turned to Hokkaido for inspiration for farming methods suitable to conditions on the continent, including cold weather and a shortage of labor. They soon invited experienced Hokkaido farmers to serve as advisors to immigrant settler communities and established still more experimental farms. In 1941–42, more than 250 Japanese immigrants to Manchuria were sent to farms in Hokkaido to serve six-month traineeships in the modern farming methods prior to dispatch (Tama 2012, 36).
While agricultural production took center stage, Hokkaido’s salmon management practices were also drawn into Japanese imperial efforts. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese government constructed Hokkaido-style hatcheries across the Kurils and Sakhalin in an effort to mark and legitimate their claims to these islands and their fish.2 The government also supported Japanese companies, such as Nichiro Gyogyō, in establishing salmon canneries in these new northern territories, inspired by the earlier success of Hokkaido’s salmon industry. While these salmon projects ended abruptly when Russia reclaimed Sakhalin and the Kurils at the end of World War II (along with Japanese agricultural colonization projects in China, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia), Hokkaido-linked development imaginaries did not.
In the decades after World War II, Hokkaido gradually became central to a new set of comparisons. Reconfiguring imperialist patterns, this new wave of comparisons reenvisioned Hokkaido as a site from which to build practices of international cooperation, development aid, and fisheries supply chains, forms of global power that remained feasible after the war and the subsequent American occupation. One of these new-generation projects was an effort to transplant chum salmon and modern salmon hatchery techniques from Hokkaido to southern Chile. From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, Hokkaido fish biologists, working under the auspices of what is now the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), toiled to establish fish runs in Chile, a nation with no native salmon populations.3 Despite the temporal gap, this project was linked to earlier imperial projects; its goal was to replace the salmon stocks that Japan had lost to Russia at the end of the war by creating new fish populations, specifically for Japanese consumption, in an overseas locale. The comparisons that this project’s Japanese participants made between Hokkaido’s and Chile’s river hydrologies, infrastructures, and work rhythms also point toward the continued imperative they likely felt to perform their nation’s modernity in the postwar period. When they brought Japan and Chile into the same frame, the fisheries biologists made comparisons that foregrounded the similarities of their landscapes (and thus the possibility of transplanting fish) while also emphasizing alleged differences in the countries’ levels of technological and economic development (and thus the justification for Japanese involvement). After the end of Japanese empire but still working within dreams of Japan as a modern power, Japanese actors described themselves as creating a form of Chilean salmon production that would feed the economic growth of their more developed nation, while fiscally uplifting the Chileans in the process. The transfer of salmon stocks to Chile was to serve as a foundation for commodity-chain connections that would both funnel cheap fish to Japanese markets and help rural Chileans toward a higher stage of economic development. Within the legacies of earlier colonial comparisons, Hokkaido became a concrete site from which to jointly imagine how salmon populations might be established in new ecosystems and how postwar Japan might situate itself in the world.
The JICA-Chile salmon project, however, reveals comparative practices that are as idiosyncratic as they are structural. The comparative legacies of nation-state building certainly exert substantial force within the project, but they do so only within and through the complex braids of comparative practices that emerge within individual lives. In contrast to institutional logics of comparison, the comparative practices of an individual person reveal how particular practices of comparison emerge within biographies, as well as within state-making projects. The history of Japanese efforts to cultivate salmon abroad are evident in the unique comparisons of Aliaky Nagasawa, the fish biologist who headed the efforts to establish salmon populations in Chile that would mirror those of northern Japan. Nagasawa-san was indeed an agent of the Japanese state, and he undoubtedly took on many official sensibilities as his own. Yet he guided the salmon project by relying on his own eccentric and charismatic practices of comparisons, a heady and seemingly incongruous mix that combined Japanese nationalism with evangelical Christianity. The very unorthodoxy of Nagasawa-san’s comparisons appear to have been integral to their world-making force as his intense passion for the JICA-Chile salmon project, which emerged at the unexpected intersections of his multiple comparisons, ultimately contributed a major spark to the Chilean aquaculture industry.4
When I first met Nagasawa-san in early 2010, about a year and a half before his death, it was clear that he had long accepted—even embraced—a spaciotemporal geometry in which the West equaled modernity and progress. Although he was in his early eighties, had a stiff leg, and carried a cane, Nagasawa-san had a distinctive walk that he attributed to a training program he had attended in Tokyo before the Japanese government sent him to Chile. The training program taught Japanese men how to walk more like Euro-Americans—upright, shoulders back, and with a bit of swagger to project confidence. At the training program, he also learned that it was more Western to wear one’s hat slightly tilted to one side rather than squared stiffly front and center, and every time I met him, he wore his military-style felt cap cocked slightly to the left. Unlike most Japanese men, he also wore a mustache, a habit he picked up when he lived in South America. When Nagasawa-san spoke, his voice was rough from a lifetime of smoking, but his manner was gentle, and he gave conversations a cosmopolitan flair by peppering his mostly Japanese sentences with words of English and Spanish, languages that he had spoken nearly fluently in his younger days.
Nagasawa-san clearly relished fashioning himself as a sophisticated modern. After our interviews, we would often go out for dinner, and my suggestions of Japanese establishments were always rebuffed. At Nagasawa-san’s insistence, we would invariably dine at an Italian or American restaurant, then spend the late evening listening to French chanson music at a European-styled café. As I drank red wine, Nagasawa-san chain-smoked long, slender, vanilla-flavored mini-cigars and discussed his passion for accordion music. After his wife had passed away, he had taken up the instrument and started music lessons, becoming such an aficionado that he made a pilgrimage to France a year before he died so that he could soak up bal-musette in its native environment. Nagasawa-san was also a Christian, something that he felt connected him to Western modes of being in the world. He had converted after he married his wife, a devout Protestant whom he adored. But Nagasawa-san’s turn to Christianity was clearly not a token gesture to appease his wife. The process of conversion had transformed him; he described how he had accepted the Lord into his heart and come to experience the world through the lens of the Holy Bible, seeing nature—including salmon—as the work of God’s hand.
In the 1960s, when Nagasawa-san was a young fisheries biologist at a Hokkaido fish hatchery, a group of Japanese fish processors had begun to worry about their increasingly limited access to North Pacific salmon. For nearly a century, Japanese fishing vessels harvested huge quantities of salmon in the North Pacific Ocean near Russia and Alaska. Between 1906 and 1945, under the terms of surrender negotiated at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese salmon fishermen ruled the Okhotsk Sea, filling their holds with fish intercepted on their return journeys to spawn in Russian rivers. But at the end of World War II, Japan lost control not only over Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands but also over its access to Russian-bound salmon. Although American occupation forces initially restricted Japanese fishermen to the areas around the nation’s main islands, they soon relented, as part of policies aimed at alleviating food shortages in postwar Japan. With US general Douglas MacArthur’s blessing, several fishing companies rapidly developed large salmon factory ships, which traveled across the North Pacific harvesting and processing salmon. But these ships soon raised the ire of American and Canadian salmon fishermen, who objected to the presence of huge Japanese vessels near their coasts, stealing what the North American fishermen saw as “their” salmon.
Drawing both international scorn and legislation, Japanese factory ship salmon harvests did not last long. Beginning with the Tri-partite Fisheries Treaty in 1952, continuing with the formal adoption of two hundred nautical mile exclusive economic zones in 1982, and ending with the Convention for the Conservation of Anadromous Stocks in the North Pacific Ocean in 1993, Japan’s access to high-seas salmon fishing gradually disappeared as a new resource nationalism emerged. As fish tagging and tracking methods improved, salmon swimming in the open ocean ceased to be an undifferentiated mass of stateless creatures, a form of “nature’s bounty” that was simply there for the taking. Instead, salmon became individuals who originated and belonged to a specific country, a country with specific rights to the salmon because the government had invested in their existence either by making them in hatcheries or by working to conserve salmon spawning rivers. Nations began to feel that they retained rights to “their” salmon even when the fish swam into extraterritorial waters. Under such logic, a US-born salmon swimming in Canadian waters was, at least conceptually, property of the United States. As a result of these ideological shifts, new international legal frameworks limited salmon fishing to coastal waters so that countries were more or less catching their “own” salmon as they returned to their rivers to spawn.
The Japanese government soon sought alternative sources of salmon. Japan’s own salmon stocks—the majority of which were located in Hokkaido—remained depressed from decades of severe habitat degradation and overharvesting. Developing Hokkaido had meant transforming its forests into farm fields and its rivers into irrigation and drainage ditches. By the 1960s, the situation was even worse: postwar make-work initiatives had included a number of river management and flood control projects in Hokkaido, further channelizing its waterways and lining their banks with concrete. In that same decade, the Japanese central government began to invest heavily in intensive and improved hatchery salmon production in Hokkaido, including through the funding of extensive research on juvenile salmon nutrition, management of diseases, and optimal hatchery release timings. But Japan’s fish processors and distributors remained uneasy. For decades, Hokkaido’s hatcheries had failed to bolster salmon numbers. Would this new generation of facilities be able to ramp up production and compensate for the loss of North Pacific fisheries? Or would it be better to expand outward once more? With Hokkaido’s ability to produce large numbers of salmon as of yet unproved, industry members did not want to put all of their eggs (quite literally) into Hokkaido’s hatchery baskets.
In the mid- to late 1960s, the Dai Nippon Suisan Kai, a trade industry group representing Japan’s major fish processors, began to explore the possibility of creating a new source of salmon beyond the borders of Japan. They had a wild idea: Why not create thriving salmon populations abroad that could be funneled to Japan through carefully crafted supply chains? As they imagined such a process, they began to compare Hokkaido’s aquatic worlds to those of others around the world. Was there somewhere to which they might transplant Hokkaido salmon? Their first thought was New Zealand, a place where a handful of non-native salmon had already taken root. In the early twentieth century, New Zealand, which had no native salmon populations, received crates of fertilized salmon eggs by steamship from California. Despite the odds, many of the eggs hatched, and their offspring were released into South Island rivers, where they established small, self-reproducing populations.
Based on such success, the Japanese fish processors thought investment in fish hatcheries in New Zealand could likely produce bumper crops of salmon that Japanese companies could then purchase. They contacted the New Zealand government to test the waters, but their offers of eggs and equipment were rebuffed. New Zealand did not need any more salmon, the government allegedly said. “They just had no interest in serious commercial fishing or salmon cultivation,” a former JICA project member told me about the New Zealanders. “They had lots of sheep, so they didn’t need salmon, and they just weren’t that poor.” With strong inheritances from the British sports-angler traditions, the New Zealand government saw the relationship between people and salmon as one of gentlemanly pleasure rather than commercial production. They were apparently not interested in a new paradigm, a potentially messy development project with significant risk in terms of environmental consequences and fisheries sovereignty.
After the New Zealand rejection, the Japanese fish processors needed a plan B. They had seen an American report that detailed some early efforts to transplant salmon to Chile. Although these efforts had not created self-reproducing populations of salmon as they had in New Zealand, they had had some modest success. A few juvenile salmon released into Chilean rivers had returned as adult salmon before funding, interest in the project, and the salmon runs themselves ultimately petered out. Based on such favorable information about the possibilities of salmon culture in Chile, the fish processor’s group sent an exploratory party, which they referred to as a “mission,” to Santiago, where their idea of creating a salmon industry was warmly received by the Chilean government. Chilean officials courted the Japanese processors and took them on a study tour of Patagonia, exploring possible sites for a Japan-sponsored salmon hatchery. After the mission, the Japanese processors reportedly prodded the Japanese government to create an official development aid project to establish salmon populations in Chile and coached Chilean officials about how to appeal to the Japanese government for such funds. The Chilean government soon submitted an application for aid, and the Japanese government responded enthusiastically.
JAPANESE DESIRES
The Japanese government likely embraced the idea because the salmon project meshed with its own dreams. Since the Meiji Restoration, resource scarcity has been a central concern for Japanese officials yearning to transform an island nation into an industrialized global power. Inspired by Great Britain, the Japanese government dreamed of an empire supported by resource-rich colonies. Fears of scarcity and dreams of imperial authority proved a toxic mix, driving Hokkaido colonization alongside twentieth-century Japanese military aggression and territorial expansion in Asia. They also led the Japanese government and Japanese businesses to consider a range of possibilities for accessing and extracting natural resources from Latin America. As early as 1889, a Japanese company established a joint venture mining business in Peru (Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004, 15). Yet in contrast to mineral resources, which could be immediately put to use in Japan, many of Latin America’s other products were not ready-made for Japanese extraction. When it came to agricultural products, there was a mismatch between existing Latin American goods and Japanese desires. As political scientist Toake Endoh explains, “The ‘banana republics’ served and had developed according to the interests of European colonial and U.S. capitalist interests. Latin America’s traditional export goods—coffee, sugar, beef, and wheat—were not what Japan wanted. The Japanese preferred rice to bread, green tea to coffee, and seafood to beef” (Endoh 2009, 171). The Japanese government’s solution to this problem was to send emigrants to Latin America to introduce and produce the goods that Japanese trading firms desired. They sought to create a Japanese diaspora that would produce commodities for the homeland.
Prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, about 246,000 Japanese people migrated to Latin America (Manzenreiter 2017). Many emigrants were sent to Brazil and Peru as kokusaku imin, “immigrants under a strategic national policy” (Endoh 2009, 2).5 With Japanese state funding, the immigrants were placed together in settlement colonies located in “undeveloped” frontier regions where the Japanese government urged them to undertake cultivation of the agricultural products most needed in Japan. Japan viewed these settlements “as an integral part of its colonization enterprise” and directly linked to expansionist policies in Southeast Asia (175). The Japanese Colonial Ministry coordinated activities among Japanese state-owned farms, farms owned by private Japanese companies, and independent Japanese farms that had been organized into agricultural cooperatives, and in the space of a few years, Japanese farms in Peru and Brazil began producing impressive amounts of cotton, pepper, and other agricultural commodities for export to Japan (175).
Although the end of World War II caused marked changes to Japanese practices of overseas resource extraction, there were some surprising continuities. New dreams of economic domination quickly took forms that echoed earlier dreams of territorial expansion. After World War II, Japanese concerns about inadequate resources only intensified as formal imperialism ended. In the immediate postwar moment, resource demand—of food, oil, and minerals—greatly outstripped domestic supplies, and the Japanese government turned from explicit colonialism to supply chains to move raw materials from extraterritorial hinterlands to the Japanese homeland. Initially, much activity centered on Southeast Asia, often in relation to timber extraction, with Japanese companies partnering with local elites (Dauvergne 1997).
In Latin America, Japanese efforts to maintain a resource diaspora also continued in the second half of the twentieth century, with an additional 93,405 Japanese citizens migrating to Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and other South American countries between 1945 and 1989, often under bilaterally negotiated national contracts (Manzenreiter 2017). While languages of colonialism gave way to languages of “economic development,” Japanese overseas initiatives in Latin America remained focused on bolstering Japanese agricultural and economic security. Even after state-sponsored Japanese emigration waned around 1970, the Japanese government persisted in its attempts to keep some of the continent’s farm fields producing for its needs. The example of soy production in Brazil illustrates these new resource relations. After the United States issued a two-month ban on soy exports in 1973, Japan, a country heavily dependent on soy protein and unable to meet demands domestically, sought to increase soy production in Brazil, a country with little history of either soy production or consumption (Endoh 2009, 178). Through a combination of promotion by farmers of Japanese descent, direct investment by Japanese companies in soy plantations, and support from JICA, which provided funding and technical assistance for research on high-quality soybean varieties and management practices best adapted to Brazil, soybean production spread across the Latin American nation (Endoh 2009, 178, 232n23). Almost nonexistent in 1972, soy quickly became one of Brazil’s top export crops (177). Japanese involvement in the development of the industry—especially through aid projects aimed at technology transfer and infrastructural development—networked the local producers of this new project with Japanese traders and markets. Extending far beyond soy, this coupling of international aid and supply-chain capitalism is emblematic of Japanese resource extraction.
As in earlier periods, the Japanese state continues to help secure the availability of such resources for Japanese traders, but such support now comes in the form of “development aid” rather than imperial decree. Japanese development projects have indeed emerged directly from the rubble of its imperial ones. In the years after World War II, “confronted by its own need for recovery and development, Japan invented a distinctive pattern of economic cooperation with the developing world that at its core is intended to contribute to Japan’s own developmental plans” (Arase 2005, 5).
Japanese supply-chain capitalism and the cheap foreign resources that it helped acquire certainly aided the mercurial rise in Japanese economic power from the 1960s through the early 1990s. But the foreign-aid practices that were entangled with the production of such commodity chains were both a symbol of Japanese economic power and a method for building it. From the 1960s onward, foreign development aid became an important way to enhance Japanese prestige. After two decades as a major recipient of postwar foreign aid (especially from the United States and the World Bank), Japan began to transition from receiving development aid to giving it (Takagi 1995). Such a shift was intended to be symbolic of a phoenix-like return of Japanese strength (Endoh 2009, 195). As Endoh (2009) highlights, in the case of Brazil, the Japanese received far more than a stable soybean supply from its investments:
Another gain was in international clout. Japan’s contribution to Brazil’s economic development in the form of the formation of soy and related industries earned it credit in the international community. This was compatible with the values of postwar, peace-loving Japan in converting its economic power into international status and respect and becoming a superpower in development aid. (179)
Until the Japanese economy collapsed in the mid-1990s, Japanese government policies and transnational business ventures sketched a vision of an economically integrated Pacific that had many parallels with those found within earlier imperial imaginaries of a “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” Since the mid-1990s, however, the Japanese government’s ability to conjure its nation as a global economic powerhouse has dramatically declined. New mappings of Asia in which Japan’s power is overshadowed by China have become dominant. In everyday conversations in Japan, people almost never cite imperial Britain or the postwar United States when they talk about their dreams for Japan’s future; instead, they often express more modest dreams, such as the idea that Japan might emulate Finland or one of the other Nordic welfare states. But while Japanese dreams of geopolitical power appear to have waned, the supply chains that developed from them have not. The Japanese economy remains dependent on imports from abroad; to offer one example, Japanese domestic food production accounts for only about 37 percent of the nation’s caloric needs (Statistics Japan 2020, 62). In an important way, ongoing trade in agricultural and natural resources between Latin America and Japan is not wholly different from the imperial practices that began with the colonization of Hokkaido, with its focus on raw materials for Japan’s economic growth. The Japanese government’s interest in salmon in Chile must be understood within the context of these unrelenting desires.
CHILEAN DESIRES
It would be a mistake, however, to focus only on Japanese desires. The particular comparative practices of the Japan-Chile salmon project arose not through the sui generis imaginings of Japanese participants but through the articulation of Japanese dreams with Chilean ones. Chilean government officials (both socialist and dictatorially inclined) yearned for stronger trade connections with Asia and a new export product that would help spur Chilean national development. Regional officials in Patagonia dreamed of a new industry that would make their area something more than an economic backwater. Wealthy Chilean sportsmen dreamed of home-grown trophy salmon that rivaled those of Europe.
Like Meiji era Japan, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chileans also found themselves caught up in comparisons with Europe. Living in a former Spanish colony that had gained independence in 1844, elite Chileans of European descent often yearned for forms of nationhood, symbols of “civilization,” and levels of development that would make them comparable to such powers as England, France, and Spain. Although such desires took many shapes, the oblong silvery bodies of fish were one of them. In northern Europe, salmon had long been considered the “fish of kings,” seen as so valuable that their ownership was specifically mentioned in the Magna Carta (Montgomery 2003, 62). For hundreds of years, catching and eating salmon had been a pastime of the wealthy, and Europeans who moved to Chile sought to bring some of the high-collar civilization that salmon connoted to the New World. In 1865, coal baron Louis Cousiño stated that he wanted to transplant salmon and trout to Chile to create an angling paradise, but he died before he could act on such desires. Posthumously, his wife, Isidora Goyenechea de Cousiño, kept his dream alive; in the 1880s, she hired a Scottish fish expert, established Chile’s first fish farm, and strove to introduce trout and salmon to Chile.6 Successful rainbow, brown, and brook trout introductions soon followed, with both government officials and private citizens going to great lengths to transport these new species to Chile. For example, in 1905, the Chilean government ordered four hundred thousand Atlantic salmon and trout eggs to be purchased from a hatchery in Germany, shipped by boat to Buenos Aires in wooden boxes, sent by train to Mendoza, then carried over the Andes by mule to a Chilean hatchery on the Blanco River (Urrutia 2007, 457). Although many eggs died in transit, Chileans did not give up on their efforts to make landscapes that resembled those of Europe; by the mid-twentieth century, their perseverance had partially paid off. Although salmon had failed to take root, multiple species of trout could be found in most of Chile’s lakes and rivers.
Yet at the same time that elite Chileans looked toward Europe, they also wanted to establish their own identity alongside economic independence. Part of this process entailed looking East. Despite its colonial connections to Europe—or perhaps, more properly, because of them—Chile, perched on the Pacific, has long been interested in fostering connections with Asia. In the late nineteenth century, the Chilean government made an important gesture of diplomatic friendship to Japan by giving the newly “open” country a warship, which Japan later used in the Russo-Japanese War.7 By 1890, Chile had established a consulate in Tokyo, and in 1899, Chile opened its first Asia-Pacific embassy in Japan. From the start, the Chilean government hoped that transpacific trade would boost their nation’s fortunes. Although exports to East Asia (metal and nitrates) were initially small, the Chilean government remained interested in such markets. During Japan’s postwar economic boom—and after Pinochet’s rise to power—Chile began aggressively marketing its exports across Asia. ProChile, the Chilean government’s trade promotion arm, quickly established branches in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. Such courting worked well in Japan; Chilean minerals and chemicals quickly became a part of its expanding economy, and with the addition of a growing trade in forestry, agricultural, and fisheries products in the 1980s, Japan became Chile’s largest trading partner in the 1990s (Saavedra-Rivano 1993, 192–95).
These late twentieth-century desires to court Japan were part of broader Chilean governmental and industrial sector dreams of export-led development. Although actual development policies have changed along with Chilean governments, desires for “development” have remained constant. Although not an obvious candidate, since the 1960s, salmon have proved flexible enough to fit with nearly every Chilean administration’s political aspirations and developmental dreams. During the administration of Eduardo Frei (1964–70) and the Christian Democratic party, salmon introduction initiatives were seen as an alluring possibility for assuaging the demands of fishermen who were protesting declines in harvests. Next, the salmon project fit with the goals of the socialist movement of Salvador Allende (1970–73), which focused on rural development and anticipated that salmon projects would create populations of high-value fish that could be harvested by local people in rural Patagonia (Winn and Kay 1974). For entirely different reasons, Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1974–90) was equally excited about salmon. Drawing on the expertise of the “Chicago Boys”—a group of Chilean economists who trained at the University of Chicago—the dictatorship implemented neoliberal policies that positioned privatization as the answer to struggles for modernization. The dictatorship saw salmon as a potential model for key neoliberal goals, such as the expansion of nontraditional exports and the introduction of external capital for development of private industry. Within this frame, salmon promised to be an exemplary tool for Chilean integration into international markets of goods, services, and capital (Urrutia 2007, 464). In its early years of rule in 1973–74, the military dictatorship enacted changes in Chilean law that were designed to help the kinds of industries that it imagined salmon might one day become, especially changes in export laws and tax laws that allowed for better competition in international markets. The idea of salmon production fit especially well with the military dictatorship’s focus on the liberalization and privatization of Chile’s natural resources. During the late 1970s and 1980s, while other Latin American nations moved toward resource nationalism and sought to limit the extraction of trees and minerals by international firms, “Chile went against the grain in Latin America by allowing foreign exploitation of its natural resources with few restrictions” (Saavedra-Rivano 1993, 202).
Salmon also meshed with elite Chileans’ long-standing interests in species introductions in the name of economic development—and their deafness to such practices’ ecological risks. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Chilean businessmen, sometimes with government support, imported animal and tree species that they thought might bring a profit. With hopes of creating a fur industry in Patagonia, South Americans imported Canadian beavers to Argentina in 1946 and American mink to Chile from 1930 to 1970 (Jaksic et al. 2002; Ogden 2021). However, the animals either escaped from their farms or were released into forests; feral beavers now destroy Chilean and Argentinian forests as mink munch on native species of rodents, terrestrial and aquatic birds, crustaceans, and insects (Choi 2008; Jaksic et al. 2002). When it comes to the plant kingdom, dreams of a lucrative forest-products industry inspired Chileans to introduce radiata pine (Pinus radiata) beginning in the 1950s. A scrubby tree in its native California, radiata pine grow rapidly when transplanted to other locales. With straight trunks and small, widely spaced branches, radiata pine seemed a perfect species for Chile’s timber industry, easy to grow and easy to process. The radiata pine produced higher-value timber much more quickly than did native forests. After the Pinochet dictatorship initiated subsidized planting programs in 1974, these trees (along with eucalyptus) became the backbone of the private timber plantation system that blossomed in Chile. In south-central Chile, timber plantations increased from 29,213 hectares (5.5 percent of the landscape) in 1975 to 224,716 hectares (42.4 percent of the landscape) in 2007 (Nahuelhual et al. 2012). Despite winning the praise of regional economists, these privately held monocrop forests have reduced species diversity and fragmented Chile’s temperate forest habitats (Klubock 2014).
In this same spirit, elite Chileans, both in and outside of government, dreamed of salmon. Perhaps salmon could be Chile’s Pinus radiata of the sea, a species designed to augment or even replace those of lower commercial value—in this case, the coastal shellfish harvested by poor and Indigenous communities. Yet salmon populations had already proven to be more difficult to establish than beavers, mink, or pine trees. Between 1870 and 1875, two Chileans, an entrepreneur and a scientist, partnered in the first attempt to bring Chinook salmon to their country, but their efforts ended in failure. In 1885, the Chilean government requested that a French veterinarian oversee another series of attempts to transplant salmon to South America, but the difficulties of transporting the fragile eggs across long distances again thwarted the project. Even after shipping improved, salmon introductions remained largely unsuccessful due to the complexities of their life cycle. Salmon typically migrate to the ocean then back to the river of their birth, but after transplantation projects released their precious progeny, the salmon tended to disappear into the ocean, never to be seen again. Such was the fate of the salmon who hatched from the 200,000 Chinook eggs, 114,000 sockeye eggs, and 225,000 coho eggs brought to Chile in the 1920s and 1930s from Alaska and the continental United States (Bluth 2003, 20). In the 1960s, the Chileans also formed cooperative salmon introduction programs with the US government, as well as with a private American company with ties to Union Carbide and Campbell’s Soup (Borie 1981; Mendez 1982).
In short, by the time the Japanese mission showed up on Chilean shores in 1967 with their offer to transplant Hokkaido salmon, there was a lot already going on. Making salmon in Chile was a messy, multinational, multi-continent, multispecies affair in which Chilean agencies and business groups continually courted many parties, and investments in the early Chilean salmon industry were not limited to JICA.8 These initiatives included the work of Fundación Chile, a nonprofit created through a partnership between the Chilean government and the US-based ITT Corporation, a manufacturing and communications multinational, which used its own funds to spur salmon industry development in parallel to (but in conversation with) the Japan-Chile project. Thus, a JICA project publication claimed that “the Chileans have long dreamed of salmon of their own”; it was not merely a platitude or justification for their own quasi-colonial desires to construct a salmon industry in Chile. Instead, the Japanese comment reflects how the JICA project intersected and developed within the flux of non-identical but overlapping dreams.
MAKING SALMON IN A WORLD OF DREAMS
Aliaky Nagasawa was working as a fish biologist in one of Hokkaido’s salmon hatcheries in 1970 when a government official in Tokyo called him with a question: Would he be willing to try to create Hokkaido-style salmon runs in Chile? The moment that he said yes, Nagasawa-san found himself entangled in the complex web of Japanese and Chilean desires detailed above. But he was no newcomer to practices of imperialism and economic development, nor to their sometimes unexpected modes of comparison. Nagasawa-san was a child of the colonies himself. Although he had been born in Hokkaido in 1931, he was taken to Manchuria as an infant, not to return to Japan proper until the end of World War II, by which time he was already a first-year high school student. According to Nagasawa-san, the experience of growing up along one margin of Japan was what led him to work along another. For all its hardships, life in Manchuria was oddly cosmopolitan when compared to the intense wartime nationalism of mainland Japan. Although English language study was banned in Japan, Manchurian children were required to learn foreign languages (choosing among Chinese, Russian, or English). When he entered middle school, Nagasawa-san decided to focus on English, until the intensification of the war and its immediate aftermath upended his studies. Like many Manchurian families who survived the war and subsequent repatriation, the Nagasawa family decided to resettle near kin, specifically a sibling of Nagasawa-san’s father who lived in the Hokkaido coal-mining town of Yubari. When Nagasawa-san reenrolled in high school, he found himself with a surprising educational advantage that would ultimately pull him into the salmon project. Under the US occupation, Japanese high schools were just beginning to require English language study, and although the tongue was entirely new to his peers, Nagasawa-san already had three years of instruction under his belt. With this head start, Nagasawa-san earned top honors in English throughout high school.
When it came time to apply for college, Nagasawa-san found the university entrance exams to be manageable, and he earned a seat in the Hokkaido University fisheries department. Fisheries science was a seemingly odd vocational choice for a man who had spent his life in inland China and a mountain coal town. But during Nagasawa-san’s final year of high school, he had heard a lecture given by an older Yubari student who was attending a fisheries university in Tokyo. The student passionately claimed that someday, the coal in Yubari’s mountains was going to run out, and he implored the students to turn their eyes to the renewable bounty of the ocean. Nagasawa-san, who already sensed that there was no future in the coal mines, was so moved by the speech that he decided to become a fisheries scientist. But coming from a working-class family, Nagasawa-san found it difficult to pay the bills for his studies. Fortunately, Nagasawa-san found that he was able to parley his relatively advanced English language skills into a part-time job at a nearby American military base. “It was pretty dirty English, all slang,” he said of his time working on the base. “But it was English nonetheless. I got used to native pronunciation.”9 Those language skills would become unexpectedly critical to his future.
After college graduation, Nagasawa-san found work as a fish hatchery technician and researcher for the National Fisheries Service, and in his first few years of employment, he was stationed at several different Hokkaido hatcheries. Yet even when his rank in the fisheries agency was relatively low, he played an important role because he spoke the best English of any fisheries personnel. From his first year on the job, he was consistently selected to be the guide and translator for international guests to Hokkaido’s hatcheries. When, as part of the initial phase of the Japan-Chile salmon project, the Japanese government extended an offer to provide technical training in salmon hatchery production to a Chilean in the late 1960s, they immediately contacted Nagasawa-san. At the time, there were no Chilean fish biologists who spoke Japanese and no Japanese fish biologists who spoke Spanish. But Rafael Aros, a young Chilean fisheries technician who had guided the Japanese mission from the Japan Fisheries Association during their visit to southern Chile in 1969–70, was eager to learn Japanese fish cultivation methods—and he spoke some English.10 He was paired with Nagasawa-san, the fisheries person best able to communicate with him in that language.
When Nagasawa-san, by then the director of a small hatchery in rural northeast Hokkaido, was told that he was going to be assigned a Chilean trainee to mentor, he was surprised, but not shocked, to hear of a plan to introduce salmon to Chile. Several years before, in the mid-1960s, he had served as an official monitor and observer on a large North Pacific mother ship salmon vessel, ensuring that the private company that owned the vessel observed fishing treaties and regulations. In the evenings, he often dined and conversed with the boat’s captain and other high-ranking staff, who were concerned that the increasing regulations, which Nagasawa-san was there to enforce, were likely going to put them out of business in the region. “The people there knew I was in hatchery work,” Nagasawa-san explained, “and they asked if it would be possible to make salmon somewhere else in the world. It was like a dream. But I said that it wasn’t impossible, if you release fish somewhere in the South Pacific, there are lots of krill there, so if you let salmon go, the same kind of resources might develop there as what you have in the North Pacific.11 It was talk about dreams [yume no hanashi].”
But these were serious dreams for people in the fishing industry, which is why, only a few years later, Nagasawa-san found himself tasked with teaching hatchery techniques to an earnest young Chilean. Aros, the Chilean, was even more surprised by the turn of events. Despite the historical interest in salmonids, when the Japanese mission arrived in Chile, “no one was thinking about salmon at all,” Aros said. He had worked on freshwater fish culture to stock lakes for recreational fishing, but no one had thought about commercial production until the Japanese started searching for hatchery sites. Rather suddenly, Aros found himself entangled with the project and on a plane to Tokyo to spend half a year studying Japanese fish culture techniques. He was twenty-five years old, and although he had been over the border to Argentina and Bolivia, his experiences of international travel were limited. On his arrival, Japanese officials wanted to send him to study at a prestigious fisheries research institute in Osaka, but Aros knew that there were no salmon that far south in Japan. He insisted that he wanted to go north to Hokkaido, the heartland of Japan’s salmon hatcheries. “But they said no, Hokkaido is too cold, you are from South America,” Aros recalls. Fortunately, he had some photos of Patagonia with him. “When I showed them to the Japanese, they said, ‘Oh, you have snow!’ So then I was sent to Hokkaido.”
After a stop in Sapporo to learn about the general structure of the Hokkaido hatchery system, Aros was assigned to study at a cluster of five rural hatcheries for which Nagasawa-san was the regional manager. “I was sent into his hands,” Aros recalls. Despite their mutually imperfect English, the men worked together well. Aros learned about the differences among chum, pink, and sockeye salmon—how the chum preferred the locations in the river where springwater bubbled up through the gravel beds, how pink salmon populations fluctuate dramatically between even and odd years, and how sockeye salmon made long-distance migrations. He learned the procedures necessary for running a salmon hatchery—taking eggs, fertilizing them, hatching them, managing disease problems, feeding fry, and timing fish releases into rivers. Perhaps most importantly, Aros also learned things about work practices and scale that would serve him long after his formal participation in the JICA project ended. He was impressed by how the Japanese fisheries staff focused on efficient care of fish, not on human comfort. “Americans wanted to heat hatcheries, but the Japanese did not heat buildings,” Aros observed. “Who is the heat for? It is for the people not the fish.” The scale of Japanese facilities also left a lasting impression on Aros. It made him realize the possibilities of large-scale fish cultivation. In the 1970s, most global fish production facilities were small-scale experiments with a few thousand fish, but in Japan, fish hatchery technicians had already pioneered processes for rearing millions of young salmon at a single site. In Hokkaido, Aros was able to learn techniques for fish production on a large scale, particularly how to rear high densities of salmon in small amounts of water by carefully managing the hydrodynamics so as to deliver oxygen to growing fish in the right moment in the right way. All these ideas would later become critical to the Chilean salmon industry.
When Aros finished his first round of studies in Japan in 1971, the Japanese government saw Nagasawa-san as a natural choice to send to Chile for the next phase of the project. Together, Aros, Japanese fisheries experts, and local Chilean workers were to construct a hatchery, rear chum salmon eggs shipped to Chile from Japan, and release the first chum salmon into Patagonian waters. According to Nagasawa-san, this is where the real story begins, what he considered the true adventures of salmon in Chile. “It’s like a novel [roman mitai],” Nagasawa-san said of the salmon project’s early phases. “Like tales of dreams [yume monogatari].” As passionate as he was about salmon, I think Nagasawa-san loved the stories of Chilean salmon just as much as the fish themselves. “It’s really a dramatic story,” he emphasized. “You know, there actually was a movement to make a TV drama about it at one point—a drama with real actors, not with me.” Salmon, with their flashy silver sides, large leaps, and reliable returns to their natal streams, seem to court storytelling. For Nagasawa-san, the fish naturally hook people with their unique lives, reel them in with their stunning beauty, and refuse to let them go. “Salmon have a connection to the human heart,” he told me. “They are fish that inspire feeling—the dream of these little fish going out and coming back big.”
From Nagasawa-san’s perspective, the ways these classic fish stories intersected with heavenly signs and human drama was what made Chilean salmon stories so epic. The project was about the unknown. At the time, the business of international aid seemed as much like terra incognita as rural southern Chile. The salmon project began not only before there was a JICA office in Chile but also before JICA even formally existed. The salmon project was not the product of a preexisting Japanese aid agency with agendas and plans but was instead one of the sites where the Japanese government experimented with what a formal international aid program might be. Nagasawa-san said he felt like “007, James Bond. I was handed a slip of paper with a mission on it and that was it.” In 1972, the Japanese government gave him three months’ pay in cash and sent him off. Beyond the flight number and departure time of the airplane, he received virtually no instructions, no sense of how to proceed, and no inkling about conditions along the way. Perhaps he would receive such information once he arrived in Chile, he thought. When he disembarked from his plane, he was met by officials from the Japanese Embassy in Chile, who immediately took him to a Chilean government fisheries official. The Japanese Embassy man presented Nagasawa-san to the Chilean and said, “Here is the expert you requested,” and “that was it.”
The Chileans gave Nagasawa-san no more direction than did the Japanese. “I thought they would have requests or plans, but there was nothing,” Nagasawa-san said. He thought he was coming to play a part in a grand Chilean plan, but the Chileans were expecting him to generate it. The day after Nagasawa-san arrived in Chile, a group of government officials convened a conference at which they began to grill Nagasawa-san about his plans for the joint project. He was caught completely off guard. “It seemed really rude to ask questions like ‘What are you going to do for us? Why are you here?’ to someone whom you’d requested.” But the Chileans said that they couldn’t make any plans because they didn’t have the salmon fisheries experts to do so. The whole situation shocked Nagasawa-san: “In Japan, everything is always so top-down. People always give you a plan to follow, but here there was nothing. In Japan, the only people who make plans are the upper-level people in Tokyo and maybe the Hokkaido prefecture officials, but the concept of asking a technician like me to make a plan in Japan, it is just totally unthinkable.”
Despite his status as a mere technician, he was the entire Japanese aid program in Chile, and he had to do something. Beginning in July 1972, he and Aros hastily drafted a plan with the knowledge they had, arranging for the construction of a fish hatchery and scheduling deliveries of equipment and salmon eggs from Japan for October through December. Because some Americans had already established a small experimental hatchery in the Los Lagos region, the Chilean government had asked the original Japanese mission to select a site farther south. Based on their ideas about what made for a good salmon river in Japan—cool, clean, well-oxygenated waters—they selected a location on the Claro River, near Coyhaique, a small town in the Aysen region.
Nagasawa-san described the area as “Hokkaido a hundred years ago.” There were a few buildings with unreliable electricity, some radios, and a handful of cars, but otherwise not much. “Flying from Santiago to Coyhaique was like a time slip,” he said. If he needed to send a message to Japan, he had to go Coyhaique’s central phone office where it would take at least thirty minutes to get a connection to Japan. Because of long lines at the phone office, transmitting a short message to Tokyo could take all day. Although he was working with Aros, whom he knew from Japan, living and working in rural Chile was exhausting and lonely for a man who initially spoke no Spanish and who was worried about how to manage a major overseas project. “I didn’t know any Spanish at all then, only que será será!” Nagasawa-san explained. Local residents seemed to have friendly feelings toward him, and people would stop him on the street to ask him to write their names in kanji, the Japanese script.
By November 1972, the future was beginning to look brighter for Nagasawa-san and the project. The hatchery was mostly built, the egg shipments from Hokkaido were in transit, and Yoshikazu Shiraishi, another Japanese fisheries biologist, had come to join the project. But then, just as it seemed the project was on track, tragedy struck. On the same day that the first Japanese salmon hatched in Chile, Shiraishi-san’s heart began to beat irregularly. Although they called in a plane to transport him to a hospital in Santiago, he died of a heart attack on the way. Nagasawa-san tried to express both his grief about Shiraishi-san’s death and his optimism about the salmon eggs in the short and simple telegraph he sent to Japan: “One side gone, other side born.”
In the midst of the shock and grief, Nagasawa-san formed closer relationships with Aros and the other Chileans at the hatchery and lost himself in the technical dramas of making salmon. In their Coyhaique hatchery, Nagasawa-san and Aros began the difficult work of turning desires and dreams into fish flesh. The analogic comparisons between the climates, rivers, and oceans of Hokkaido and Chile did not offer tidy answers to everyday challenges; differences in hatchery rearing problems and post-release juvenile fish behavior seemed to trump similarities. Everything was trial and error, and Nagasawa-san said he felt more like an engineer than a teacher or expert. He had to invent ad hoc solutions without any advance knowledge or guiding theories. Nagasawa-san was not applying well-formed knowledge to a new locale, because at the time, people in Hokkaido and in the United States were still experimenting with salmon feeding practices and disease control methods themselves. And the applicability of the existing information was questionable. “It was all knowledge from the northern hemisphere,” Nagasawa-san said. “Really, all of it was useless.”
First, they had to deal with the difficulties of transporting salmon eggs from one out-of-the-way place (rural Hokkaido) to another (rural Chile). Logistically, purchasing Chinook or coho eggs from the United States would have been easier and cheaper than transporting chum eggs from Japan, but the use of American eggs was never seriously considered. “Politically, especially then, we had to use Japanese technology and materials,” Nagasawa-san explained. “It was about nationalism in those days.” The choice of chum eggs, however, was not only about nationalist dreams of creating Japanese salmon abroad; it was also about the specific migration pattern they hoped the transplanted salmon would take. In contrast to Chinook and coho, which stay relatively close to shore, chum make long-distance migrations in the open ocean, which Japanese boosters hoped might allow them to access more abundant food sources off Antarctica, ultimately supporting more robust populations.
However, transporting chum salmon to Japan was a monumental logistical task; because adult fish require large tanks and oxygenation systems, it was only feasible to move large numbers of fish when they were still eggs. To maximize survival, eggs were shipped as close to their hatching time as possible, when they were slightly less fragile, but with enough leeway that the eggs would not accidentally hatch during transport. Ideally, the eggs would spend three days in transit and hatch two to three days after they arrived. In general, sending the eggs from Japan to Santiago via Vancouver on Canadian Pacific Airlines worked acceptably. Once the eggs landed in Santiago, the Chilean Air force would speed the eggs to Coyhaique. Once, however, the Japanese government decided to ship some eggs via Frankfurt on Lufthansa; about half the eggs died when they got stuck on the tarmac during a second transfer in San Paulo, Brazil. Even under the best of conditions, things often went awry. On one occasion, Nagasawa-san opened a box of eggs only to find a sticky mess. Some of the eggs had hatched in transit, so there were live, dead, and dying eggs and alevins all jumbled together in what Nagasawa-san described as a grotesque “jam.”
Tinkering with transportation schedules was only the beginning of their trials and tribulations. One of their major problems was the seasons—winter in Japan was summer in Chile. Salmon are only in egg form during the Japanese winter, which meant that shipments of salmon invariably arrived during the Chilean summer. Already stressed from their transoceanic and trans-equatorial journey, the young salmon—cold-water-loving fish adapted to short wintery days—were thrust into a world of long photoperiods and warm summer waters that they could barely tolerate. Normally, salmon would hatch in the winter and migrate to the ocean during the late spring, when creeks would fill with runoff from snowmelt. But a few months after their birth, the Chilean salmon faced a dry fall instead of spring floods. Nagasawa-san and Aros did not know what to expect. They released the juvenile fish that they had reared in the austral fall, but the fish just stayed in the river. As the fish grew larger and larger in the river, salmon project staff vacillated between hope and despair. They were relieved that the salmon were finding adequate food in the foreign river, but they worried that the fish might completely fail to migrate to the ocean. At last, in the austral spring—six months later than their counterparts in Japan—the large, well-fed young salmon swam to the sea.
But the salmon, a species known for their homing ability, were not following plans. “With such big fingerlings, we thought that we would have a high return percentage,” Nagasawa hypothesized. “But we waited four years and no fish came back.” At first, the salmon project staff thought that if they just raised the fish to a larger size before releasing them that they would be more likely to return, as larger, older fish tend to make shorter migrations. But although they kept releasing larger and larger fish, the salmon still did not return. Then, salmon project staff realized that brown trout, a species introduced from Europe, were eating many of the salmon as they tried to migrate down the rivers. When they examined the stomach contents of brown trout, they were filled with their carefully raised juvenile salmon. “We wanted to cry,” Nagasawa-san said. “We wondered what we were doing. It felt like we were just releasing food for the brown trout.” To address that problem, they began releasing juvenile salmon directly into the ocean, where they would not have to swim through a gauntlet of hungry brown trout in the lower reaches of the river.
But adult salmon still failed to return to the river. They tried different species of Pacific salmon, different diets, and different rearing strategies without results. Soon, they began to worry about the future of their project because of their dependence on imported eggs. At the time, salmon eggs were in rather short supply in Hokkaido, where salmon stocks had dwindled and hatcheries had little surplus; shipments of eggs to Chile were thus likely to be heavily curtailed, if not entirely terminated. So the Chile salmon project staff decided that they had to make their own salmon brood stock in Aysen to ensure that their program had a stable supply of eggs. “It’s kind of odd for a Japanese to say this, but I could hardly wait to be independent from Japan,” Nagasawa-san said. He also wanted his fish to be more “Chilean” than “Japanese.” He felt that they had been doing it all wrong, trying to transplant highly developed eggs. Drawing on conceptions of citizenship based in natal location rather than blood, he felt that fish fully “born” in Chile would be better suited to that place than those that began their lives in Japan. He wanted to make juvenile salmon that were of Chile. He thought that they would do better in the new land if they had not known the scent of any other waters. Eggs fertilized in Chile would also be on the right seasonal cycle for the Southern Hemisphere, a significant advantage.
Nagasawa-san, however, had no expert advice to offer about raising adult brood stock. It was not done in Hokkaido hatcheries, as it was unnecessary. Each year, hatchery workers obtained brood stock from among the many fish that returned to the island’s rivers. Without a tradition of adult salmon rearing in Hokkaido, JICA officials thought that penned salmon brood stock was a bad idea. “Why are you trying to teach things that aren’t done in Japan?” they questioned. It seemed that the comparative logics that were to undergird the project had been stretched to their breaking point. But after Nagasawa-san insisted, JICA relented and went along with the proposal. Although the Coyhaique hatchery would continue to release most of its fish to migrate to the ocean, it would keep some in captivity and raise them to maturity so that the hatchery would have a supply of eggs that could not swim away. Because adult salmon crave saltwater, they installed a pen for the adults in a nearby fjord. Every aspect of the pen culture was novel for the team, but they somehow made it work.12
Yet even a steady supply of local eggs did not solve the hatchery team’s problems. Chilean-born salmon still disappeared into the ocean, not to be seen again. The team considered still more explanations for their problems. Perhaps the salmon were surviving to spawn, but they were spawning in other rivers rather than returning to their home stream. Maybe the timing of the currents was not right and the salmon did not have time to get all the way back north to lay eggs. “Or maybe we just didn’t have enough eggs, and we just didn’t release enough fish,” Nagasawa-san thought. “In that environment, if you get a 1 percent return, you’d be lucky.” Finding a handful of surviving fish along the vast Chilean coast might be like searching for a needle in a haystack. As technological fixes failed, Nagasawa-san increasingly turned to his faith in God to make sense of the salmon. “If you think about it, it’s really hard on the eggs and fry to transport them all the way to the tip of southern Chile. All you can do is leave it to the fish, to release them in this place and pray to God that they come back somewhere, anywhere. It just isn’t about technological issues after that point. Just prayers for divine intervention [kamidanomi].”
Although the JICA project team was frustrated by the lack of returning adult salmon, they never doubted their goals. They firmly believed that salmon were good for both the economy and the soul. Nagasawa-san saw salmon as a fish of the global north, a literal embodiment of civilization (bunmei). Furthermore, as a Christian, multiplying the fishes to help the poor fit perfectly with his cosmologies, even if those fishes were ultimately destined to be exported to Japan. No one involved in the salmon project worried about the possible ecological consequences of introducing new species. “The idea that this was a non-native species that might damage the environment, nobody ever said anything about that,” Nagasawa-san recalled. “Rather, everyone was interested in how the economy might become more active.… If you look at geological time, species have always been moving around.” He felt he was creating a new ecology, a new salmon constellation, but he saw this as exciting rather than problematic. “In Hokkaido, it’s bears and salmon, right? In Chile, it was flamingos and salmon.” For his own part, Nagasawa-san also firmly believed that the southern hemisphere was at a lower stage of development, environmentally and culturally, and that this not only justified salmon introductions but made them a virtual necessity. He perceived extra room in the allegedly incomplete ecosystems of the Southern Hemisphere, and he believed that such space would allow new species to coexist, rather than displace, older species. Bringing salmon to Chile was part of finishing God’s work: “Why did God not put salmon in the southern hemisphere? I guess he left that for humans to do.”
While Nagasawa-san was committed to scientific methods, he also believed that the final phase of the salmon project could best be understood through languages of faith. As salmon failed to return to Coyhaique year after year, the project came under criticism from the Japanese government as a pie-in-the-sky project—a waste of money and time (despite its rather modest budget). But Nagasawa-san refused to abandon his faith. He believed, despite the lack of confirmed returns, that salmon were indeed swimming in the South Pacific. Like new Christians, the salmon needed time to grow in their faith, he said—in their case, faithfulness to a single river. They needed to go through a process of evolution and adaption. At other times, Nagasawa-san compared the salmon to the Israelites; they were living in diaspora and struggling to make their way in a new land. Overall, Nagasawa-san believed that God was testing his faith, much as God did to Job. In the context of that comparison, to give up on the salmon would be to give up on God.
During the eleventh hour of the salmon project, after the Japanese government had already decided to cancel it the following fiscal year, God finally spoke to Nagasawa-san through the salmon. In 1986, seven adult chum salmon were found in a river near Punta Arenas, far south of the project area (Shimura, Cardenas, and Nagasawa 1986, 17). The fish were healthy, mature, and robust, equivalent in size to the largest chum salmon in Hokkaido. For Nagasawa-san, the signs were unmistakable. Seven is the divine number of the Bible, he told me. Seven is the number of perfection and completion: the seven days of creation, the seven churches in Revelations, and the seven angels in the Gospel of Luke. Nagasawa-san saw the name of the river to which the fish returned as yet another mark of God’s hand on the salmon project. The river was called Rio Ultima Esperanza—last hope river (saigo no kibō)—and the salmon’s appearance there both brought a final sense of hope to the salmon project and reminded Nagasawa-san of the ultimate hope provided by God through the story of Jesus.
Even in 2011, the final year of his life, as Nagasawa-san faced seemingly endless suffering, including hospitalization for gastrointestinal problems, the death of a son, and a cancer diagnosis, he continued to believe in God and salmon, or perhaps God through salmon. He believed that the project would have been a huge success with bigger numbers of fish. “I really think it was possible. If we tried it again, I do think it would work. I would have liked to have tried it again, but the Japanese government was tired of it, and then the [Japanese economic] bubble burst and all.” He fervently believed that the project had not been a failure, and that in some remote small river in southern Chile, there was an as-of-yet undiscovered population of chum salmon. For Nagasawa-san, the story was not over; the final chapter of the novel had yet to be written. There were still fish out there. One just had to believe.13
Nagasawa-san built webs of dreams through knots of comparison. His imaginative projects pulled him into comparisons, while his comparisons inspired his imagination. As a Christian, a fisheries scientist, and a man struggling to make a meaningful life, Nagasawa-san inhabited multiple sets of comparative practices. Indeed, it was his very mixing of modes of comparison—of talking about salmon as Israelites while relentlessly checking Chilean hatchery water temperatures against those in Hokkaido—that compelled him to fight to keep the Chilean salmon project alive and generated his charismatic rapport with the Chilean scientists he trained.
Overall, the JICA-Chile salmon project seemed worthwhile not only to Nagasawa-san but also, for many years, to large numbers of Japanese and Chilean officials, who saw practices of comparison that stressed similarities in biophysical parameters yet differences in stages in societal and economic development as commonsensical. When enacted in creative ways by various people within the national contexts of Chile and Japan, such comparative sensibilities generated nonidentical—but equivalently strong—desires for Chilean salmon. It is important to focus on individuals like Nagasawa-san because he was neither wholly idiosyncratic—dreaming up his comparisons alone—nor a comparative automaton, simply enacting established government logics. Instead, as he turned fuzzy project plans into actions on the ground, Nagasawa-san wove together—and ultimately reworked—the comparisons circulating around him, linking Hokkaido and Coyhaique as well as the registers of Japanese technology transfer and evangelical Christianity together in novel and surprising ways. While these comparisons may or may not have produced self-sustaining chum salmon runs in Chile, they have still had substantial world-making effects.