TSSS 10th Special Feature:Looking Back on the Past Ten years and Looking Ahead to the Future with Key Persons in Japan’s Seafood Industry(Part 1)

Since its founding in 2015, Seafood Legacy has hosted the TSSS (Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Summit) every year in collaboration with Nikkei ESG. For the 10th anniversary of TSSS, we brought together past speakers at TSSS to talk about how we arrived at where we are today and to look ahead to what the next years until 2030 will bring.

The guests are Ms. Fujita Kaori from TSSS’s co-organizer Nikkei ESG; Mr. Kakizoe Naoya, current President of the Marine Eco-Label Japan Council and former president of Nippon Suisan (Nissui); Ms. Iue Minako, Board Chairman of the marine environmental NGO Sailors for the Sea’s Japan Office; Mr. Usui Sotaro, President and Chief Executive Officer of USUFUKU HONTEN, which obtained the world’s first MSC certification for Atlantic bluefin tuna​; and Mr. Hasegawa Takuya, Executive Director of Fisherman Japan and collaborator for the creation of Seafood Legacy Times. The round table is facilitated by Mr. Hanaoka Wakao, President and Chief Executive Officer of Seafood Legacy.

The shared path taken in the ten years since the launch of TSSS in 2015

Hanaoka:
In November 2015, Seafood Legacy launched the first TSSS (Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Symposium, now Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Summit), and this year sees the 10th Summit. I would like to take this opportunity to look back on the past ten years, and talk with you about the changes that happened around sustainable seafood in Japan, Asia, and the rest of the world, and what we can do to further promote this movement in the future. All of our guests today have been speakers at TSSS in the past and I would like to start by asking you about your most memorable experience from TSSS.

The 1st TSSS in 2015

Fujita:
I launch the TSSS with Mr. Hanaoka and have been a speaker every year as one of the co-hosts. The starting point was in April 2015, when Mr. Hanaoka came to visit me in my office at Nikkei Ecology (now Nikkei ESG) all by himself and said “I want to organize a Sustainable Seafood Symposium.” This was still before Mr. Hanaoka had founded Seafood Legacy, and Nikkei at the time was not proactively involved in the topic of nature. But despite all this, I was infected by Mr. Hanaoka’s passion and so we decided to bring his idea to life.

In the beginning, most speakers were from NGOs or retail businesses, but from 2018, we started having more speakers from the financial sector and a growing number of finance-related sessions. In 2020, the symposium was held online because of the COVID-19 pandemic and we had more speakers from international institutions such as the United Nations, and I saw with my own eyes how the activities of TSSS extended to all over the world. Since then, we have had speakers from KDDI, IHI Jet Service, NTT Docomo, and NEC, and an increasing number of IoT-related sessions, a huge change from where we started.

Ms. Fujita Kaori

Usui:
I was a speaker at the TSSS in 2019, 2021, and 2022. During my first year as speaker in 2019, an attendee from outside of Japan made a suggestion about how we could establish traceability measures, and I remember thinking that in Japan, work on this very topic had already been ongoing for over 10 years in the deep-sea tuna industry. But despite those efforts, tuna fisheries were waning, and I started thinking about why this was happening.

After that, there was an acceleration in global trends and especially Norway and other countries implemented strict resource management rules. Those fishing companies that ensure resource management are becoming a world-recognized and sustainable industry. Now it feels like Japan’s fishing industry is lagging far behind this global movement.

Kakizoe:
I have spoken at the TSSS in 2017, 2020, and 2022. When I participated in 2017, I had just been appointed as the president of the MEL (Marin Eco-Label Japan Council), which had been established in December 2016, and I felt that other people were still very distant.

However, after MEL V2 obtained GSSI approval in 2019, Herman Wisse, the Executive Director at GSSI at the time, participated as speaker at the TSSS in 2020, and the level of attention we received changed noticeably. Then in 2022, both Nissui, which I was president of, and Maruha Nichiro, became speakers as well as sponsors at the TSSS. I could watch how sustainability became an important topic in society through the activities of the TSSS.

A session at TSSS 2022. From the left: Ms. Ishii Naoko from Tokyo University Global Commons, Mr. Yabuki Toshiya from Nippon Suisan (now Nissui), and Mr. Akiyama Kunio from Kyokuyo. On the bottom right is Mr. Sato Hiroyuki from Maruha Nichiro, and furthest on the right is Ms. Yamauchi Aiko from Seafood Legacy.

Iue:
I met Mr. Hanaoka for the first time in 2013 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the USA. At that time, he was still talking about the dreams he had, and now it’s already been ten years since Mr. Hanaoka actually brought the TSSS to life. That’s really amazing. I attended it as a speaker in 2018, 2020, and 2023, and in my first session, I felt like the topics were still rather vague. The platform to create a movement in Japan itself was still rather undefined at that time.

At the session in 2020, the Revised Fisheries Act was implemented and the Act Ensuring the Proper Domestic Distribution and Importation of Specified Aquatic Animals and Plants had been established, making that year an important turning point. The session featured IUU (illegal, unreported, and unregulated) fishing as a topic, including talks by representatives of Japan’s Fisheries Agency, and I think this had a meaningful impact. At the TSSS in 2023, there was a session in which I participated as facilitator with representatives from NGOs from the USA, UK, and South Korea and Mr. Sunami Atsushi from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan. I believe that the TSSS today is the only platform in the world that brings together and shares the newest information from all over the world.

Hasegawa:
Fisherman Japan was established after the Great Tohoku earthquake and also celebrates its 10th anniversary this July, and I think of it having grown during the past ten years together with the TSSS. I’ve always been watching the TSSS from afar and admiring how it was doing things that no one else in Japan was doing yet. When I participated in the TSSS as a speaker for the first time in 2017, I was very happy to see how it put a spotlight on rural areas and the on-the-ground conditions in the fishing industry and for fishermen, and how it was trying to engage all stakeholders involved in the sustainability movement.

When I was a speaker in 2020, Marukin, whose Executive Director Mr. Suzuki Shingo was also the director of Fisherman Japan, had just obtained ASC certification. He talked about our latest growth efforts and I was grateful to receive an opportunity to make some comments. The TSSS is also a great place to make new connections. I still remember in particular one fisherman from Hokkaido who had come to the TSSS and is now active as the head of the local fishermen’s association.

Mr. Hasegawa Takuya

Hanaoka:
For the first TSSS we held in 2015, we approached many Japanese companies about speaking at the event, but only a single company, AEON, accepted our offer. All other speakers were from NGOs or from outside Japan. Now, ten years later, we continuously have more than half of our speakers coming from Japan. Many impactful initiatives have been developed in Japan, and things have changed considerably since then.

“Sustainability” was an unrecognized word in the Japanese fishing industry ten years ago. Now, things are different.

Hanaoka:
Let’s move to the next question. How has Japan’s fishing industry changed over the last ten years?

Fujita:
The first large change is that “sustainable seafood” has become a well-known expression. Even in convenience stores, you can see sustainable seafood rice balls on sale, and consumers have become familiar with the concept. In addition, laws have changed with the Revised Fisheries Act and the Act Ensuring the Proper Domestic Distribution and Importation of Specified Aquatic Animals and Plants. Thanks to the activities and proposals from people such as everyone around this table, there have finally been changes to these Laws which had been untouched for decades.

In addition, finance has entered the sustainable seafood field. In the beginning, ESG investment and lending was focused on climate change, but recently nature and ecosystems as well as oceans are also included as areas of interest. Ten years ago, I would not have thought that these fields would become this important.

Usui:
From my point of view, I actually feel that the situation in the fishing industry has seen less change the further you go to the players most downstream in the production chain. Even if upstream players such as financial institutions and large companies think about sustainability, the reality is that downstream, the trend goes to favoring low costs and profits over sustainability. This is why even when fishing companies such as ours obtain MEL or MSC certification, we are not getting any orders from within Japan.

From my position, I feel that the degree of decline in fisheries is much larger than any changes we have seen in the past ten years. Unless we work to fill the gap between global trends and our domestic situation, fishing communities will only become smaller and exhaust themselves. I believe that we need to convey the movement that is happening now to the downstream industry players and consumers.

Kakizoe:
This is already more than ten years ago, but when I was still president as Nissui in 2001, we made an investment in a fishing company in New Zealand. The local Maori tribe who we invested in contacted us saying that they would be receiving MSC certification for the blue grenadier fish they were catching and asked us to evaluate their stock price more highly for this reason. I think this might have been the first time ever that it was discussed how to convert the value of an MSC certification into money.

After that, at a fiscal year policy information session at our company in 2007, I proposed to use “Traceability and Sustainability as Keywords in Anticipation of the Future” as direction statement, but I was met with large resistance from people saying that such an approach would leave us with nothing to sell. However, Nissui later became a member of SeaBOS and a sponsor of the TSSS in 2019. I feel that at least in my circle there has been a large change in mindset.

Mr. Kakizoe Naoya

Iue:
In 2013, I started my work on launching the “Blue Seafood Guide※.” At that time, the word “sustainability” was not well-known yet, and while I heard words of thanks for providing this kind of information from some people, others were telling me that sustainability was not related to the seafood business and to not be a nuisance. Someone even said, “I don’t want restrictions on how much tuna can be caught. I will be retiring in ten years, so I don’t care about overfishing.”

Now, the number of companies who endorse our position as “Blue Seafood Partners” has grown to over 80, and we have various supporters ranging from large companies to schools who are not directly related to fishing at all. I am very thankful when thinking about how the times have changed.

※ “Blue Seafood Guide”: A list of seafood assessed as being sustainable based on a strict scientific review of the following principles verifying sustainability: 1) Status of target stocks, 2) Ecosystem impacts, and 3) Management.

Hasegawa:
I am also working for LY Corporation, and over the past ten years more and more of my colleagues have been very positive about my activities promoting sustainability. The understanding among fishery cooperatives and fishermen has also grown, and I feel like people who are actively working towards sustainability are receiving special attention and have become something like “heroes.” I founded Fisherman Japan in Sanriku together with only ten friends and today, we have designers, former traders or former magazine editors among our members and we have launched platforms for fishermen (defined in the broadest sense as fishery workers) in all areas of Japan.

I also think another big change is that together with the growing familiarity of SDGs, sustainability has also been integrated into education. A picture book made by Fisherman Japan has become rather popular, and we have been asked for permission to use it as educational material. Recently, young children know more about the current state of the ocean than adults, and I am sure that the Japanese fisheries will have changed even more in ten or twenty years, when those children have grown up.

Hanaoka:
In my opinion, the growing reach of Mr. Hasegawa’s Fisherman Japan or Ms. Iue’s Sailors for the Sea Japan and the establishment of many new organizations in Japan such as the ASC Japan office, GSA Japan office, or Chefs for the Blue is one of the highlights of the past ten years.

Looking at the industry overall, the concept of sustainability has become so ingrained that it has become more difficult to find any large company related to the fishing industry not mentioning sustainability in its management or supply policies. While there may still be room for growth in on-the-ground operations, this strong movement in Japan is currently attracting interest from other Asian countries that supply large amounts of marine products to the Japanese market and the participation of Asian countries at the TSSS is noticeably increasing.

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Our guests reflect that back in 2015, the fisheries industry was not yet familiar with sustainability and obtaining understanding from stakeholders was very difficult. Ten years later, the concept has been visibly integrated into fisheries. On the other hand, Mr. Usui also remarked that the fisheries on the ground are actually in decline. In the second part of this special feature, we talk about what issues the Japanese fishing industry needs to tackle by 2030, and what expectations our guests have for the future of the TSSS.

Original Japanese text: Shino Kawasaki