Wakayama, Spring 2007--When the memory of the sea is rewritten

Wakayama, Spring 2007--When the memory of the sea is rewritten

In the spring of 2007, something unusual was happening in the sea of Kinan, Wakayama Prefecture. In the early spring, fishermen's nets used to be filled with dancing, fatty chub mackerel. In recent years, however, the nets have been filled only with sesame mackerel, a tropical species that grows in the Kuroshio Current. The fishermen nodded in agreement at the unfamiliar speckled pattern. The sea has changed," they said.

In the mid-1990s, seawater temperatures along the Kii Peninsula began to rise slowly. The temperature at a depth of 100 meters, which used to be in the 15°C range, reached 17°C in 2002. These two degrees of rise caused a quiet and dramatic change in the marine ecosystem. By 2005, 80% of the mackerel caught were sesame mackerel, a fish with a different taste and price.

This change is not a simple replacement of fish. Fishermen's incomes have been reduced, and distribution and processing have been affected. The lives of people who have lived with the sea for generations are slowly being shaken from the ground up.

At the time, Japan was talking about global warming as an "international problem" as the Kyoto Protocol was about to be implemented. In Wakayama, however, global warming had already become an "issue of daily life. The sea was not just a resource, but a culture, an accumulation of time. The memory of the sea was being rewritten, quietly and surely.