[LINK] On how damage to Tōhoku's fishing industry certainly isn't helping

[rfmcdonald]

As Tōhoku tries to recover, there are signs that in many areas recovery is not gooing to be possible in the short term; and, if not in the short term, there may not be any incentive for reconstruction at all. Bloomberg BusinessWeek had a couple of articles describing the blow taken by the fishing industry, which was substantially based on the northeastern shore of Honshu hit by the tsunami.

The wreckage of a 379-metric-ton tuna boat blocks the road to the deserted fish market in Kesennuma, once Japan's largest port for bonito and swordfish. More vessels litter the surrounding area, awaiting local cleanup efforts. Eventually the debris from last month's tsunami will be cleared away, but the industry may never recover. "Thirty years ago we used to think Japan was the No. 1 fishing country in the world, with the best catching and processing methods, but that's really no longer the case," says Ryosuke Sato, chairman of the Kesennuma Fisheries Cooperative Assn. "We've been in terminal decline."

Traffic at the port, 250 miles north of Tokyo, had dropped by 90 percent over the past 20 years as seafood imports rose, even before the country's northeastern coast was devastated on Mar. 11. Now the destruction of boats, harbors, and processing plants, coupled with concerns about radioactive contamination in marine life, threaten to hasten Japan's turn to imports for its most important food staple after rice.

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The earthquake and tsunami, which left almost 28,000 dead or missing, disproportionately affected Japan's northeastern fishing ports and towns. In Iwate prefecture, the tsunami caused about $1.3 billion in damage to the fishing industry, according to government data. That's about 10 times the combined total for the prefecture's agriculture and forestry industries. Fishermen in Kesennuma, which had a population of 73,000, expect it to take as long as five years to rebuild the port and market. Those are central to the fishing industry, which provides 85 percent of the town's jobs. The city government says 837 townspeople died, and 1,196 were listed as missing as of Apr. 22. A further 5,838 people, or 7.8 percent of the population, are in evacuation centers. In addition to the destruction of maintenance and refueling facilities, about 40 fishing vessels were lost in the port, one of Japan's 10 largest. "There's so much damage, this is a crisis for the town and the fishing industry," says Sato, whose Kanedai fish company had sales of $114.9 million in Japan and China, and 230 employees, in 2010.

South Kesennuma, where most of the fish processing plants were located, was the first area to be hit by the tsunami after it passed the island of Oshima that creates the entrance to Kesennuma's harbor about two kilometers offshore. In the harbor, trawlers and a refueling tank were slammed together, spewing fuel. Fire spread across the fuel-water mix. The 50-meter-long Myojin Maru No. 3 is one of at least 10 giant vessels dumped around the town. It towers over gutted two-story buildings owned by fishing companies, about 500 meters from the fish market. "Companies may have the money to rebuild, but people are saying they don't want to come back," Yaeko Komatsu says as she gazes at the rubble at her seafood company employer's facility. "They say it's dangerous."

While insignificant for the economy as a whole, it is quite locally significant, even if shipmasters do have to hire Southeast Asians to man the boats.

The importance of fishing and of towns such as Kesennuma in Japanese culture belie the industry's declining status in the economy. Fishing contributes about 0.2 percent of Japan's gross domestic product, and the number of fishermen has dropped to about 200,000 from some 1 million after World War II, according to the National Graduate Institute's Komatsu.

For fishermen such as Tokio Takatsuka, who returned to Shiogama Port earlier this month to sell yellowfin tuna from the Pacific, that means hiring more crew members from the Philippines and Indonesia to make up for the shortage of Japanese applicants. They've come as part of a government plan to ease labor shortages, and signs at the port, 80 kilometers south of Kesennuma, are now written in Bahasa as well as Japanese. "My generation never considered doing anything besides fishing," Takatsuka, 62, says. "It's different for young people now."

This has broader repercussions. Fears of radioactive contamination from Fukushima don't help.

Radiation from fish and lobsters near the U.K.’s biggest nuclear polluter suggest radioactive material dumped into the sea from Tepco’s Fukushima power plant isn’t a long-term health threat, according to Richard Wakeford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute.

The Sellafield nuclear-processing plant in northwest England has discharged at least 320,000 times more radioactive material into the Irish Sea since 1952 than what Tepco released from Fukushima this month, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data from both sites. Still, average radiation doses by seafood-consumers near Sellafield over 15 years have been half the recommended limit, studies show.

That hasn’t stopped China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong from banning fish imports from parts of Japan. The countries accounted for about 70 percent of Japan’s fish exports in 2009, according to Japan External Trade Organization figures.

“Radiation is a grim reaper, you can’t see it and you can’t smell it,” said Ken Banwell who has worked as a fish importer in Tokyo for 22 years. “I would say it would have a profound effect on sales from those areas.”

Still, overall sales at Tsukiji recovered to pre-quake levels last week, indicating Japanese consumers are returning to fish. Prime Minister Naoto Kan proposed a 4-trillion yen ($49 billion) extra budget that is likely to be the first of several packages to rebuild areas devastated by last month’s record earthquake and tsunami, which will include assistance for the industry, the government said in an April 22 statement.

“It’ll take three years, at most five years to rebuild the fish market,” said Sato, in his ninth year as head of the Kesennuma Fisheries Association. “In the meantime we need to know how we can continue to live here today, tomorrow, without jobs at plants which don’t exist anymore.”