= Japan’s prized cat food trash fish bluefin tuna sushi craze! =

Japan’s prized cat food trash fish bluefin tuna sushi craze!

Reverse importing sushi from America to Japan can even be a research topic. The Japanese government went into reverse after the 2006 sushi police drive. Suddenly, strategically importing American abominations became a means to increase food ingredient consumption used in fusion sushi within Japan. Thus, Japanese businessmen and connected politicians take in the dough from what Korean-American sushi restaurant owners first popularized to stimulate sales.

When the minister who ate at the Korean-American sushi restaurant in Colorado went ape crazy to instigate the sushi police drive, was it really the insult felt that a non-Japanese was making sushi. Or was it actually jealously seeing swarms of customers flocking into the restaurant ordering up bulgogi to eat with the bland raw fish “gimbap”? Likely both.

There’s something fishy about that sushi: How Japan interprets the global sushi boom
March 2011
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio … sushi_boom

Since the 1990s sushi has become a global product with a transnational market.

Hybridised and localised sushi like California Rolls and Spider Rolls are now even being reverse-imported to Japan as ‘genuine American sushi’.

This article examines some attempts to re-nationalise global sushi, both from the Japanese state and from the vernacular media.

We argue that, while popular reporting on the ‘overseas sushi boom’ generates a sense of national pride over ‘them’ eating ‘our’ food, the state’s position is a more strategic one.

It operates with a clear motive of increasing sales of Japanese food products overseas, mobilising the image of authenticity for this specific purpose.

Both state and popular expressions of culinary nationalism claim Japanese ownership of culture not only in its ‘authentic’ forms but in its multiple, creative, hybrid and fusion forms.

By examining Japanese responses to foreigners consuming sushi, we hope to provide some insights into the relationship between food, national culture, authenticity and globalisation. A further objective is to understand Japan’s culinary nationalism within the larger context of the ‘soft power’ and ‘cultural diplomacy’ discourse.

But one thing Japan boasts more than anything is its overarching, unrivaled obsession for bluefin tuna sushi, especially the bloodiest, fattest belly “toro.”

Sushi diplomacy was pushed during Obama times. The bluefin cat food tuna craze of the Japanese was stripping the oceans. Bluefin became an endangered species that Obama relished eating when visiting Japan, perhaps a holdover from luncheons with Japanese businessmen in Hawaii for campaign contributions.

“Who cares if the world complains I am showing off by eating endangered bluefin tuna sushi at $400 a sushi plate!”

Barack Obama Just Ate The Best Sushi In The World
https://time.com/73570/barack-obama-jus … the-world/

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed President Barack Obama to Tokyo Wednesday by taking him to the greatest sushi restaurant in the world, the three Michelin star Sukiyabashi Jiro.

The unassuming restaurant is located in the basement of an office building off a subway station and seats just 10 people at a time at a long bar.

At current exchange rates, the quick meal puts a large dent in the wallet, costing nearly $300, though this is down from more than $400 when the dollar was weaker against the Yen.

Eating Endangered Species: An Obama Fetish?
Washington Free Beacon
April 23, 2014
https://freebeacon.com/blog/eating-enda … ma-fetish/

President Obama appears to have an interesting food fetish: eating endangered species.

Business Insider reports that the restaurant where President Obama dined with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday offers bluefin tuna as part of its “Chef’s Recommended Special Course.”

Bluefin tuna is an endangered species. TIME Magazine notes that the fish “is a favorite of sushi chefs around the world,” but its popularity “could mean its doom.”

Your Sushi Could Be Killing This Endangered Animal
https://www.thedodo.com/in-the-wild/blu … ered-sushi

Why Some Chefs Just Can’t Quit Serving Bluefin Tuna
NPR
Jan 7, 2015
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/20 … uefin-tuna

There’s one clear reason why it’s still on menus: “Bluefin tuna belly is one of the most delicious things in the world,” says Bruce Mattel, associate dean of food production at the Culinary Institute of America.

But, he says, the decision to serve bluefin is “largely driven by demographics and customer base” — in other words, chefs beholden to people spending hundreds of dollars on a meal.

Chefs at top restaurants can’t really play dumb about how few bluefin are left in the sea, Mattel says.

Just as the Chinese are now stripping all the fish out of the ocean, the precedent was set by the Japanese to drive species to extinction through arrogant consumption. The demand in Japan became insane, reflected in the prices. True to form, Mitsubishi aggravated the problem by catching and storing in deep freeze bluefin tuna, driving up prices even more as supply was locked up in secret cold storage. For what purpose?

Mitsubishi Profits as World’s Tuna Become ‘Critically Endangered’
April 6, 2016
https://www.projectcensored.org/mitsubi … ndangered/

Sushinomics: How Bluefin Tuna Became a Million-Dollar Fish
The Atlantic
Jan 5, 2014
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation … sh/282826/

Once used for cat food, the endangered fish is now one of the most prized delicacies in the world.

In the 1960s, no one wanted bluefin. In the United States, the fish sold for pennies per pound, and it was usually ground up for cat food. Japan fished for it, but few people there liked the bluefin’s bloody, fatty meat.

All of a sudden, bluefin was one of the most sought-after fish not only by Japanese fishermen but also by American and Canadian ones.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, between 1970 and 1990 fishing for bluefin in the Western Atlantic increased by more than 2,000 percent. The average price paid to Atlantic fishermen for bluefin exported to Japan rose by 10,000 percent. And it was mostly all being exported to Japan. Even today, a bluefin caught off the coast of New Hampshire will be shipped off to Tokyo before ending up on sushi plates somewhere else.

In the above graph, Japanese did not eat tuna until the 1980s.

The next article goes in depth about how much Japanese and Americans detested bloody bluefin tuna.

• The way Japanese diners regarded raw, ruddy fish flesh began changing. This marked a turning point in the history of sushi.

• “Really, it was a marketing scheme of the Japanese airline industry.”

• Many — probably thousands — of enormous bluefins caught last century by sport fishermen were killed, hoisted for photographs, then either thrown out entirely or sold to processors of cat and dog food.

• “Americans considered bluefin too bloody to eat and had no interest in bringing home their catch.”

• “It’s not even that good,” he says. “It’s got this distinct, not-so-subtle, tangy iron flavor, and it melts in your mouth.”

• This … “old-school sushi holdouts who are still loyal to the older version of sushi” … bluefin tuna is considered simplistic and unsophisticated… consider toro to be sort of for amateurs… traditional sushi connoisseurs enjoy the often crunchier, more subtly flavored muscle tissues of animals like squid, clams, various jacks, flounder and, perhaps most of all, sea bream, or Pagrus major.

• And though it was similarly wasteful to grind countless big tuna, from head to tail to toro, into cat food, it does seem that the bluefin might have been better off had we just gone on regarding it as trash.

From Cat Food to Sushi Counter: The Strange Rise of the Bluefin Tuna
Smithsonian Magazine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-cul … a-5980010/

The fish can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But just 45 years ago, big bluefin tuna were caught for fun, killed and ground into pet food

In January, a single bluefin tuna was purchased by a wealthy restaurateur in Tokyo for nearly $2 million — something of a publicity stunt yet indicative of just how much the modern sushi industry values this creature. Japanese chefs handle cuts of red bluefin flesh as reverently as Italians might a white truffle, or a French oenophile a bottle of a 1945 Bordeaux. And a single sliver of the fat, buttery belly meat, called toro, or sometimes o-toro, in Japanese, can pull $25 from one’s wallet. The bluefin, truly, is probably the most prized and valuable fish in the world.

The beef-red flesh, many say, is smelly and strong tasting, and, historically, the collective palate of Japan preferred milder species, like the various white-fleshed fishes and shellfish still popular among many sushi chefs. Other tuna species, too — including yellowfin and bigeye — were unpopular in Japan, and only in the 19th century did this begin to change. So says Trevor Corson, author of the 2007 book The Story of Sushi. Corson told Food and Think in an interview that an increase in tuna landings in the 1830s and early 1840s provided Tokyo street vendors with a surplus of cheap tuna. The meat was not a delicacy, by any means. Nor was it even known as a food product. In fact, tuna was commonly called neko-matagi, meaning “fish that even a cat would disdain.” But at least one sidewalk sushi chef tried something new, slicing the raw meat thin, dousing it in soy sauce and serving it as “nigiri sushi.”

The style caught on, though most of the chefs used yellowfin tuna. Occasionally, chefs made use of large bluefins, and one trick they learned to soften the rich flavor of the meat was to age it underground for several days. The way Japanese diners regarded raw, ruddy fish flesh began changing. This marked a turning point in the history of sushi, Corson says — but he points out that the bluefin tuna would remain essentially unwanted for decades more.

In the early 20th century, sport fishing began gaining popularity in the United States and Canada — and few fish were more exciting to hunt than the giant bluefins that migrated about the Atlantic and passed through near-shore waters in New England and southeast Canada. In Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, interest in catching giant bluefins proliferated among wealthy boat fishermen armed with enormous, crane-like rods and reels, and in 1937, local organizers held the first International Tuna Cup Match.

The event became a festive annual gala of wealthy boatmen vying for victory. Naturally, it was also a brutal bloodfest. The 1949 event saw 72 bluefin tuna landed — the highest number ever caught in the 28-year span the derby was held. The fish were giants, averaging 419 pounds. Such exact measurement depended on subduing and killing them, and almost certainly, most were later discarded. Author Paul Greenberg writes in his 2010 book Four Fish, which profiles the bluefin as among the world’s most important seafood species, that just like the Japanese at the time, “Americans considered bluefin too bloody to eat and had no interest in bringing home their catch.”

Many — probably thousands — of enormous bluefins caught last century by sport fishermen were killed, hoisted for photographs, then either thrown out entirely or sold to processors of cat and dog food.

The dramatic turnaround began in the early 1970s. Beef had become popular in Japan, and with a national palate now more appreciative of strong flavors and dark flesh, bluefin tuna became a desired item. It was also about this time that cargo planes delivering electronics from Japan to the United States and returning home empty began taking advantage of the opportunity to buy cheap tuna carcasses near New England fishing docks and sell them back in Japan for thousands of dollars.

“Bluefin tuna is an amazing example of something we have been made to think is an authentic Japanese tradition,” Corson says. “Really, it was a marketing scheme of the Japanese airline industry.”

Corson says that advancements in refrigeration technology at about this time facilitated what was growing quickly into a new and prosperous industry.

Now able to freeze and preserve all the tuna they could carry at sea, operators of huge fishing vessels were able to return home with lucrative hauls. By the time sport angler Ken Fraser caught a 13-foot-long Nova Scotia tuna in 1979 that weighed 1,496 pounds, things had changed for the bluefin. People were still killing them — but not wasting them.

Even sport fishermen often purchased commercial licenses, intending to sell what they caught to the Japanese sushi market. Giant bluefin would no longer be sent to pet food factories. The species had become a delicacy. The popularity spread back across the ocean, and soon Americans developed a taste for bluefin meat. By the 1990s, the bluefin tuna was wanted almost desperately worldwide.

The rest of the bluefin story has been told many times, but the worsening scenario mandates a quick recap: The Atlantic species has crashed from rapturous, water-thrashing abundance to scarcity. It has been estimated that a mere 9,000 adults still spawn each year in the Mediterranean. A British scientist named Callum Roberts estimated that for every 50 bluefins swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in 1940 there was just one in 2010. By most accounts, the population is down by more than 80 percent. The Pacific bluefin, smaller and genetically distinct from the Atlantic species, has fared better over the decades, but the relentless sushi industry seems to eventually catch up with all fatty, fast-swimming pelagics. Fishery scientists recently estimated the Pacific stocks to be just 4 percent of their virgin, pre-fishery biomass. Ironically, in the days when the bluefin’s value has never been higher, sport fishermen are increasingly releasingthe tuna they catch.

Corson, once a commercial fisherman himself, no longer eats bluefin.

“It’s not even that good,” he says. “It’s got this distinct, not-so-subtle, tangy iron flavor, and it melts in your mouth. This makes it very easy to like.” Too easy, that is. Corson says that “old-school sushi holdouts who are still loyal to the older version of sushi” share the same opinion. Among these diners and chefs, the melt-in-your-mouth sensation that has proved so marketable and so devastating to the bluefin tuna is considered simplistic and unsophisticated. “They consider toro to be sort of for amateurs,” Corson says. Instead, traditional sushi connoisseurs enjoy the often crunchier, more subtly flavored muscle tissues of animals like squid, clams, various jacks, flounder and, perhaps most of all, sea bream, or Pagrus major.

To help reveal to others the authentic history of sushi and just how gratifying it can be to eat lesser known species rather than the blubbery bluefin tuna, Corson leads regular tasting classes in New York City. “I’m trying in my own little way to show one person at a time how great traditional sushi can be,” he says. Bluefin is not on the menu at these events.

Whether the culinary world will embrace the true traditions of sushi and turn away from bluefin before the species goes commercially extinct is unclear.

Corson notes that he has never seen a species go from coveted delicacy to reviled junk fish. “It’s usually a process of expansion,” he says.

Indeed, restaurant owner Kiyoshi Kimura’s purchase of a 488-pound bluefin for $1.76 million at the Tsukiji fish market this January indicates that the bluefin is more valued than ever now. We might drop our jaws at this, thinking it obscenely wasteful. And though it was similarly wasteful to grind countless big tuna, from head to tail to toro, into cat food, it does seem that the bluefin might have been better off had we just gone on regarding it as trash.

It is the history of the Japanese relationship with the junk fish starting in Meiji Japan that is the most peculiar. What a contrast to their attitudes to tuna worship today!

The Surprising History of Tuna in Japan
Nov 20, 2009
https://www.trevorcorson.com/2009/11/20 … -in-japan/

Today, bluefin tuna is considered the pinnacle of fine sushi, especially bluefin toro–the fatty belly cuts of the fish. This is kind of funny, because just a few decades ago the Japanese considered toro such a disgusting part of the tuna that the only people who would eat it were impoverished manual laborers. And prior to about the 1920s, no self-respecting Japanese person would eat any kind of tuna at all if they could possibly avoid it. Tuna was so despised in Japan that all tuna species qualified for an official term of disparagement: gezakana, or “inferior fish.”

In the old days in Japan, if you had no choice but to eat tuna you’d do everything you could do get rid of the bloody metallic taste of the fresh red meat. One trick was to bury the tuna in the ground for four days so that the muscle would actually ferment, which led to tuna being called by the nickname shibi–literally, “four days.”

Not until the 1840s did an unintentional bumper crop of bluefin in Japan cause sushi makers to try to sell the fish at all, and these were rather pathetic street vendors catering to the lowest classes. They did their best to mask the inherent flavor of the flesh by smothering the red flesh in soy sauce and marinating it for as long as possible. Even today, purveyors that handle bluefin may soak it in ice water all night in an attempt to expunge the less desirable components of the fish’s smell.

The arrival of refrigeration technology made it possible to distribute tuna more widely, and as people gradually grew used to seeing the red meat of tuna on sushi, disdain for the fish decreased. But the fatty cuts of the fish were still considered garbage. There are reports that tuna belly was a common ingredient in Japanese cat food.

After World War II, with the American Occupation and the influx of Western culture into Japan, the Japanese began eating a more Westernized diet, including red meat and fattier cuts of it, which paved the way for the acceptance of tuna and toro in more recent decades in both Japan and the West.

But the current bluefin fad–Atlantic bluefin in particular–remains a historical anomaly, and one partly manufactured deliberately, for corporate profit. During the heyday of Japan’s export economy, Japanese airline cargo executives promoted Atlantic bluefin for sushi so they’d have something to fill their planes up with on the flight from East Coast US cities back to Tokyo. And as the recent documentary film The End of the Line has reported, Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the largest bluefin distributors in the world, now appears to be stockpiling massive amounts of bluefin in enormous high-tech deep freezers so it can make a killing dolling them at inflated prices out after the wild fish is all but gone.

Back in Japan you can still find a few old-school sushi aficionados who disdain bluefin toro. They’ll tell you that toro is child’s play. Anyone can enjoy that simplistic, melt-in-your-mouth succulence, they say. It takes the real skill of a connoisseur to appreciate the more subtle and complex tastes and textures of the traditional kings of the sushi bar–delicate whitefish like flounder and sea bream being some of the best, along with mackerels, jacks, clams, squid, and other types of shellfish that have been popular all along. Personally, I won’t eat bluefin anymore, and I don’t miss it at all. My sushi eating experiences have actually become more interesting as a result.

After the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese are eating off and stockpiling in deep freeze cold storage the very allies of nature helping to expunge radioactive contamination around Japan.

Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US
May 28, 2012
https://phys.org/news/2012-05-radioacti … cific.html

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. They spawn off the Japan coast and swim east at breakneck speed to school in waters off California and the tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Five months after the Fukushima disaster, Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York and a team decided to test Pacific bluefin that were caught off the coast of San Diego.

To their surprise, tissue samples from all 15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances — ceisum-134 and cesium-137 — that were higher than in previous catches.

All that bluefin could have otherwise wound up in America, transporting Fukushima radioactive material as bio-accumulated swimming sponges to California to be served as sushi for Americans.

Yum! Oishii!