Tsuyoshi Hachisuka gently places skewered eel on a grill, preparing a much-loved Japanese delicacy that is now so endangered it commands eyewatering prices and the attention of international traffickers.
Consumed worldwide, eel is particularly popular in Asia, and perhaps nowhere more so than Japan, where remains found in tombs show it has been eaten on the archipelago for thousands of years.
Despite its enduring popularity, much about the eel remains a mystery. Precisely how it reproduces is unclear, and coaxing it to do so in captivity without intervention has proved unsuccessful so far.
Photo: AFP
Pressures on wild stocks ranging from pollution to overfishing mean supplies have dwindled dramatically in recent decades.
While the writhing snake-like creature is repellent to some, it is a mainstay of Japanese cuisine, and since the 17th century has most often been prepared kabayaki-style: skewered, grilled and basted in a mixture of soy sauce and mirin rice wine.
In central Japan’s Shizuoka, 66-year-old Hachisuka’s restaurant in Hamamatsu City has used the same basting sauce base for four decades.
Photo: AFP
“I adjust it as I go. It mustn’t be too sweet or too salty,” he said.
But while his recipe has stayed the same, his product has not. The annual catch in Japan of young known as glass eels has fallen to 10 percent of 1960 levels.
That has driven prices sky-high, even in a country that has battled for years to achieve inflation.
Photo: AFP
“A dish of unaju [eel on rice] is today nearly three times more expensive than when I started,” Hachisuka said.
There are 19 species and subspecies of eel, many of them now threatened.
In 2014, the Japanese eel was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which cited factors including habitat loss, overfishing, pollution and migration barriers.
Photo: AFP
ENDURING MYSTERIES
Protecting the animal is complicated by their complex life cycle, which unfolds over a vast area, and the many unknowns about how they reproduce.
The mystery of eel reproduction has fascinated scientists for thousands of years, with even ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle puzzling over it.
He theorized eels must simply emerge spontaneously in mud because he could find no traces of their larvae.
“We think that the eel emerged approximately 60 million years ago, near the island of Borneo,” explains Mari Kuroki, assistant professor at Tokyo University’s aquatic biosciences department.
“As continental drift affected marine currents and the distance grew between the areas where eels lived and laid eggs, the creature has adapted,” she said.
It is now present in every ocean except the Antarctic.
Yet despite their ubiquity, it was not until the early 20th century that European scientists discovered that European and American eels are born somewhere in the Sargasso Sea near Cuba, with their larvae then carried by currents to different regions.
The precise location of eel spawning sites remained an enigma until 2009, when a scientific mission pinpointed the breeding grounds of the Japanese eel, west of the Mariana Islands, about 2,000km to 3,000km from Japan’s coasts.
Evidence suggests the species mates and lays its eggs at the spot, but the process has still never been observed. Once they hatch into larvae, the creatures drift toward coastlines, growing on the way into glass eels. They swim into estuaries and rivers in Taiwan, Japan, China and South Korea, and live in freshwater habitats for between five and 15 years before swimming back out to sea to spawn, and then die.
WHITE GOLD
Eels are vulnerable to a wide range of catastrophic human behaviors, and climate change-linked phenomenon such as El Nino have affected the ocean currents that carry them, as well as their spawning sites.
The deterioration of their freshwater habitats, including by river development, also plays a significant role, along with pollution.
Dams can block migratory routes and eels are sometimes caught in hydroelectric turbines, a leading cause of death for the species.
Since 2012, scientists in the four territories where the Japanese eel is most commonly found have worked together on conservation, setting aquaculture quotas in 2015.
But restrictions, including an EU ban on exports in 2010, have created a flourishing black market, with poaching and international trafficking.
More than 99 percent of the supply in Japan consists of caught or imported glass eels raised to maturity on farms.
Last year, declared catches and legal imports of glass eels for farms in Japan amounted to 14 tonnes, according to Japan’s Fisheries Agency (JFA), but the country’s farms reported buying more than 20 tonnes of glass eels, a gap indicating the role of illicit trade.
Environmental group WWF Japan believes the true scale of the problem is even larger, estimating between 40 to 60 percent of eels raised in Japan come from illegal sources.
In Hamamatsu, the brackish waters of Lake Hamana near the sea are an ideal habitat for eels, and the hunt for the creatures takes place there each year between December and April, under a cloak of secrecy.
“The eel is the most valuable fish in this lake,” says Kunihiko Kako, a 66-year-old fisherman, holding a long net with a conical end that he uses for his catch. “So we have to be careful.”
The creature is so precious it is sometimes dubbed “white gold,” with prices fluctuating wildly depending on the catch size.
Farms paid an average of ￥1.32 million (US$11,627 at the current exchange rate) last year for 1kg of glass eel, according to the JFA, after a record of ￥2.99 million in 2018.
‘APPRECIATE EACH EEL’
With stocks falling and prices rising, eel consumption in Japan has changed, and the dish is now seen as a treat rather than a regular meal.
A record 160,000 tonnes was consumed across the country in 2000, but that figure has fallen by two-thirds. “In the past, all the meals sold at grill places and local hotel restaurants had eel in them,” says Senichiro Kamo, a seafood wholesaler on Lake Hamana.
“It was also in the bento boxes sold at stations, but since the price has tripled, that’s no longer possible,” adds Kamo, half of whose sales are of eel.
Eels of all types are notoriously resistant to breeding in captivity, and since the 1960s, Japanese researchers have worked to coax them into the mood, but without success.
In 2010, experts bred two consecutive generations of Japanese eels in a lab for the first time, a major advance.
But these “artificial” eels aren’t likely to hit the market any time soon, says Ryusuke Sudo of the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency in the Izu region, southwest of Tokyo.
“The biggest problem now is that the method is very expensive,” he said.
Each eel requires individual human intervention, the reproduction rate is low and creatures produced in captivity also grow slower than their wild counterparts, he said.
Researcher Kuroki believes the best way to protect the species is to make consumers more mindful.
“We need to appreciate each eel we eat, keeping in mind that this is a precious natural resource,” she said.
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
RSS