CRIME

The Death Of Sushi?

Japan's passion for sushi is fuelling a huge trade in illegally caught seafood that's endangering fish stocks and enriching organized crime

By Velisarios Kattoulas/WAKKANAI and SAPPORO, HOKKAIDO, and VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIAN FAR EAST

IN THE EARLY HOURS of May 21 this year, a flaming torch and three plastic canisters filled with petrol crashed through the window of an apartment on the Russian island of Sakhalin, north of Japan. Inside, Vitaly Gamov, his wife, Larissa, and their 14-year-old son, Ivan, woke to the sound of the breaking glass.

As Vitaly Gamov struggled to put out the flames, his son opened a door to escape. A gust of air swept into the room, causing the burning petrol to explode. Ivan managed to escape with only minor burns, but his parents were less fortunate. From Sakhalin, Ivan's 38-year-old mother was eventually flown to a hospital in Tokyo. There, she underwent months of treatment for burns covering her entire body.

Ivan's father only made it as far as Sapporo, on the neighbouring Japanese island of Hokkaido. "Vitaly never passed out, though the skin on him was flaking," a neighbour told Reuters. "I led him to the ambulance. His skin was grey and tough like wood. It was an awful sight." A week later, Gamov died.

Gamov, 39, was a general in Russia's Border Guards. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scores of his colleagues have been collared for taking bribes from gangs smuggling Russia's natural resources overseas--everything from lumber to diamonds. Not Gamov. He was determined to do his job. And that's what killed him. Shortly before the attack, the general had scored a major victory in his long-running battle against a highly lucrative illegal trade in Russia's lawless Far East--seafood smuggling. That success turned him into an instant target.

Estimates vary, but it's believed that each year at least $1 billion worth of illegally caught seafood--crab, salmon roe, sea urchin and other delicacies--is brought from Russian waters into Japan. There, the catch finds a ready market in a nation obsessed with eating only the freshest sushi and sashimi.

There's a high price to be paid for satisfying this appetite: Much of the illegal fishing is overseen or controlled outright by Japanese and Russian organized-crime gangs--the yakuza and the mafia--which show no reluctance to wipe out anyone who gets in their way. Just as worrying, uncontrolled and unsupervised fishing is causing immense environmental damage in these fragile northern waters, threatening to wipe out whole species of fish. In the Ohkotsk Sea, separating Japan and Russia, six-kilogram king crabs were once common; these days, an animal two-thirds that size is considered a giant. "We have to think about the amount of sushi being eaten," says Isamu Abe, a senior official at the Japanese Fisheries Association in Tokyo, one of the most powerful players in the global seafood trade. "It can't go on like this. It shouldn't."

Japan's yakuza first got involved in illegal fishing in the 1960s. Today, the circumstances sound almost comical, but back then, with the Cold War at its height and World War II still a raw memory, they were anything but.

A still-unresolved row between Tokyo and Moscow over islands seized by the Soviets at the end of the war led the Japanese to bar their own fishing fleets from entering Russian waters. But following advice from the intelligence services in Tokyo, Japanese law-enforcement officials looked the other way as up to 100 Japanese fishing boats with links to or controlled outright by yakuza gangs routinely entered Russian waters. The involvement of the yakuza was no accident. To fish safely in Soviet waters, skippers had to be prepared to flout all sorts of laws: "Japanese fishing boats were setting sail packed with electrical appliances and prostitutes, to bribe Russian officials," says Hiromi Teratani, of Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, who is a leading authority on Japanese-Russian relations. "The boats would dock, the Russians would board, and eventually the fishing boats would return to Japan bulging with seafood."

In exchange, the fishing boats provided Japanese officials with what they wanted most: information. The seamen acted as spies in the disputed Southern Kuril islands (known in Japan as the Northern Territories). As a result, the Japanese boats became known as rupo-sen, literally, report boats. "It was hardly ideal," says Teratani: "But for a long time the rupo-sen were the best source of information the Japanese government had about the Northern Territories."

Rather then making things better, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 only made them worse. The demise of the Soviet state-run economy put much of the Russian Far East fishing fleet in private hands. Eyeing the trade dominated by the rupo-sen, many Russian skippers set their sights on the lucrative Japanese market. Partly because Russian boats had neither the fishing permits nor the licences to export their catch, the new trade immediately caught the attention of the Russian mafia. But what really sparked their interest was the realization that a boatload of seafood could fetch up to $1 million on a Japanese wharf. Today, yakuza gangs leave the illegal fishing to the Russian mafia, while they concentrate on processing and distribution in Japan.

How much is the business worth? Discrepancies in the way trade statistics are compiled, along with the role of organized crime, make it difficult to gauge. But Russian and Japanese government data give some flavour of what's at stake. According to Japanese figures, seafood imports from Russia reached $686 million in 2000. Russian figures for the same period indicate seafood exports to Japan were a paltry $3 million. The Japan Fisheries Association, meanwhile, estimates the illegal seafood trade between Japan and Russia alone is worth $1.2 billion a year, in line with the most plausible Russian estimates. In addition, the association says that of the around 270,000 tons of tuna consumed in Japan each year, some 50,000 are caught illegally. For its part, the World Wide Fund for Nature estimates poaching in the Bering Sea separating the Russian Far East, Japan and the United States nets organized criminal gangs $4 billion a year.

Although foreign governments have long pushed Tokyo to crack down on this trade, a number of factors have prompted successive Japanese governments to drag their feet. To begin with, illegal imports suppress retail prices in Japan by almost a third--no small matter in the world's costliest nation. Also, some of Japan's biggest companies have profited from illegal fishing. In 1999, for instance, the giant trading firm Mitsubishi Corp.--which accounts for 30% of all Japanese tuna imports--publicly admitted handling illegally caught tuna. It subsequently vowed to clean up its act.

Nevertheless, industry insiders believe Japanese big business still plays a role. A trip to Wakkanai, Japan's most northerly fishing port, shows why: All year round, its wharves are busy with buyers awaiting the arrival of Russian fishing boats laden with seafood, most of which is caught illegally. Many of the Japanese buyers work for small local companies. However, the biggest guns come from out of town. Whereas locals buy just single boatloads, the out-of-towners buy three, spending up to ¥300 million ($2.5 million) in a morning. "Who apart from the trading companies could spend ¥300 million at a time?" asks the president of a major fisheries company in Wakkanai.

And there's still one more reason why Tokyo has turned a blind eye: the social costs. "For the Japanese government it's a dilemma," says Nobuo Arai, an assistant professor at Sapporo International University, who has tracked the illicit seafood trade for a decade. "On the one hand it wants to crack down on the illegal fishing. On the other it realizes whole communities have come to depend on it for survival."

Nowhere is this truer than in Hokkaido, Japan's most northerly prefecture. While the rest of Japan speaks of a lost decade since the collapse of the bubble economy, Hokkaido talks of a cataclysm. In recent years its biggest bank, the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank, has collapsed, dragging down hundreds of local companies. Also, one of the area's biggest employers, the food-processor Snow Brand, has shed thousands of jobs after a flurry of food-safety scandals. Hokkaido has also been hit by a sharp fall in public-works spending. Against that background, fishing towns such as Wakkanai welcome jobs of any description, even if they involve organized crime. A quarter of a century ago, largely legitimate fisheries and fishing accounted for 90% of the port's economy. These days, in a shrunken economy, it's down to barely a fifth.

Yet, even at such low levels, fisheries is still a vital source of local revenues. According to the Wakkanai Shinkin credit union, the town's biggest financial institution, fisheries last year accounted for some ¥20 billion of income--big money for a town that has seen its population shrink from almost 70,000 in the 1970s to less than 40,000 today. Says a senior executive at the credit union: "If the flow of illegally caught seafood entering Wakkanai dries up, my guess is practically every fisheries company in town will collapse."

Despite its reservations, in March Tokyo finally cracked down hard on at least one facet of the illegal seafood trade. The reasons for the change of heart included a deal allowing Japanese boats to resume fishing in Russian waters off northern Japan. But a rise in violence accompanying the smuggling also played a role. Across the Russian Far East, deaths related to the illegal-seafood trade are not unusual. In June last year, though, the mayhem spread to Japan. Alexander Mihalenko, a 37-year-old Russian mobster involved in seafood smuggling, became Wakkanai's first murder victim in half a century when he was gunned down by what police believe was a professional assassin.

Japan's belated crackdown started well. First, Japanese port officials got tough on forged Russian export documents. Then, in April--thanks to the efforts of Gen. Vitaly Gamov--came news of an even more important initiative on the Russian side. For years, Gamov had fought for permission to order Russian fishing boats to fit electronic tracking devices. He believed that if he and his men could follow the Russian fishing fleet by satellite, they could virtually halt the trade in illegally caught seafood. Finally, Gamov's superiors and their political masters in Moscow bowed to his logic, and on May 1 banned Russian fishing boats from leaving port without "black boxes" aboard. As a result, according to Japanese newspaper reports, illegal imports of crab and other seafood from Russian waters fell by between two-thirds and three-quarters practically overnight.

But then, just three weeks later, came the arson attack. Gamov's death sent shockwaves through both Russia and Japan: In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin interrupted a meeting to express his horror. At the Japanese Fisheries Association in Tokyo, Gamov's death was greeted with dismay. Abe, the senior official there, points out that Gamov was a key figure in the fight against the poachers.

It remains to be seen if Gamov's early success can be sustained. Abe is not hopeful: He says smugglers are now importing their catch into Japan using new routes. "It'll take time for the smugglers to resume shipping the volumes they were used to," says Abe. "But already they've started taking their catch into South Korean waters, switching it to South Korean boats, and sneaking it into Japan that way." Put another way, Abe fears foreign governments and environmentalists could be right: Unless Japan radically curtails its consumption of prize seafood its seemingly insatiable appetite for sushi could one day mean the death of it.

This article first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, August 15, 2002