News: Tuna Shortage Throws Japanese Into Turmoil

In this seafood-crazy country, tuna is the king of fish. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese.

So when global fishing bodies recently began restricting catches in the world's increasingly depleted tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.

Nightly news shows ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores.

At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi ideas like avocado rolls.

"It's like America running out of steak," said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan's national union of sushi chefs. "Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi."

The problem is the growing appetite for sushi and sashimi outside Japan, not only in the United States but also in newly wealthy nations like Russia, South Korea and China.

And the problem is not going to go away. Fishing experts say that the shortages and rising prices will only become more severe as the population of bluefin tuna - the big, slow-maturing type most favored in sushi - fails to keep up with worldwide demand.

Last year, Atlantic nations responded by agreeing for the first time to reduce annual tuna catches in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea by 20 percent.

The decision seemed to crystallize growing fears in Japan about tuna shortages, helping to push up prices of the three species of bluefin - northern, Pacific and southern - that are considered the best tuna to eat raw.

Since the start of last year, the average price of imported frozen northern and Pacific bluefin has risen more than a third, to 3,470 per kilogram, or $13 per pound, according to the Japanese Fisheries Agency.

Competition from foreign fishing fleets and buyers, wholesalers say, has made the top-quality tuna increasingly hard to come by here.

Tadashi Oono, who sells big red slabs of tuna from a stall in Tokyo's sprawling Tsukiji fish market, said that three years ago, he routinely sold two or three top-grade bluefin every day. This year, he said, he sometimes only finds two or three tuna of that quality to sell in a month.

Some culinary enthusiasts say the anguish over tuna shortages may also reflect deeper anxieties in Japan about its recent economic decline, especially when compared with neighboring China.

After World War II, tuna became a symbol of the economic might that allowed Japan to dominate the buying of tuna on world markets from Boston to Cape Town. Japan now consumes about 60,000 tons a year of the three bluefin species, or more than three-quarters of the annual catch globally, according to the Fisheries Agency.

But as more and more top-grade tuna ends up in other countries, there are concerns that Japan could one day lose its status as global tuna superpower.

"Fish that would have gone to Tokyo are now ending up in New York or Shanghai," said Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy (Gotham, 2007). "This has been devastating to Japan's national esteem."

The tuna shortage is also having a more concrete effect on menus at Japanese sushi bars. Fukuzushi, a midlevel restaurant in a residential neighborhood in Tokyo, is having a tougher time finding high-quality fish at reasonable prices.

The restaurant's owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, says the current situation reminds him of the last time he had no tuna to sell - in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it.

At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked venison and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.

"We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good," he recalled. "It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell."

If worse comes to worse, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembers was how customers objected to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar.

"One customer pointed and said: 'You have something four-legged in your fish case? That's eerie!' "

So far, the crisis has not reached top sushi restaurants like Kyubey in the swank Ginza boutique district of Tokyo. Yosuke Imada, owner and master chef at Kyubey, says he pays top yen to ensure a steady supply of tuna from domestic ports like Ouma in northern Japan.

Ouma's reputation for high quality - and high prices - make it the tuna world's equivalent of a brand like Armani.

Imada said he pays about $200 per pound for otoro, fatty flesh from the belly that is the filet mignon of tuna. He charges customers $14 for a single piece of otoro on rice.

"The prices of top-name tuna like Ouma are already as high as they can go," Imada, 62, said. "What will happen is that the prices of lower grades of tuna will rise to catch up."

That prospect worries Yamagata of the sushi chef's union.

Yamagata, 59, has been experimenting with more creative tuna alternatives at Miyakozushi, a restaurant catering to the business lunch crowd that has been in his family for four generations.

He says his most successful substitutes were ideas he 'reverse- imported' from the United States, like smoked duck with mayonnaise and crushed daikon with sea urchin. He says he now makes annual visits to sushi restaurants in New York and Washington to get new inspiration.

"We can learn from American sushi chefs," Yamagata said. "Sushi has to evolve to keep up with the times."

- International Herald Tribune