TOKYO, Nov. 24, 2020—In a little over two decades, Japan’s squid catch in and around its territorial waters plummeted from 2.01 million tons in fiscal 1997, ended in March 2018, to 540,000 tons in fiscal 2019, ended in March 2020, the brutal impact of Chinese and North Korean illegal and environmentally-ruinous trawling.
If the Chinese continue their current pace of operations, experts warned that Japan’s squid resources would be annihilated in several years.
And yet, Japanese patrol boats are not taking overt action against Chinese fishing boats as they do not receive commands from their headquarters, a reflection of the absence of central government political and bureaucracy power for not angering Xi Jinping’s China.
The data was released recently by Japan’s national Fisheries Research Agency (FRA, http://www.fra.affrc.go.jp/shigen_hyoka/SCmeeting/2019-1/detail_surume_a_20201014.pdf).
Hiroshi Kubota, researcher of the FRA’s Niigata office on the Japan Sea coast told me Nov. 24 that his office’s research underscored aggressive Chinese trawling of ‘Surumeika (Japanese flying squid)’ in the Japan Sea as well as around Japanese waters, especially after 2015. ‘The Chinese began fishing for Surumeika in 2005 and they probably did not know how to catch large quantities,’ Kubota said.
Over the past 10 years, the Chinese have acquired the squid trawling technique, a special, one of the kind skill developed by Japanese fishermen over several decades. While Kubota stopped short of confirming, it was entirely possible that Chinese fishermen learned the skill from Chinese ‘vocational trainees’ who had worked on Japanese fishing boats to replenish young fishermen that were in short supply over the past two decades.
Kubota believes, however, that most Chinese squid fishing boats operate in duo in the Japan Sea, sandwiching squid between the two hulls with large fishing nets and hauled them onto the deck.
North Korean fishing boats also have been trawling the species but he speculated that their fishing activity was not of the magnitude that would endanger the squid resources, he said. Kubota said the Russians also have been catching Surumeika but the FRA’s research showed that the annual catch has been about 5,000 tons.
The FRA speculates that the Chinese government is purchasing fishing rights from North Korea to operate in the North’s exclusive economic zone (waters), which annexes Japan’s EEZ, and letting Chinese fishing ships to catch illegally near Japan’s Noto peninsula. Japan’s Fisheries Agency issued warnings to as many as 2,586 Chinese fishing boats during the nine months of 2020, a three-fold increase over the same period 2019, but the Chinese are giving deaf ears to the Japanese, according to the FRA.
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