KASAHARA: JAPANESE DISTANT-WATER FISHERIES 



pan. Cuba operates a small fleet in the Atlantic; 

 the Soviet Union has a mothership tuna fishery 

 of relatively minor importance. Most of the at- 

 tempts by other nations to develop a tuna long- 

 line fishery have failed. (Venezuela has a fleet 

 of small longliners. The fishery is protected by 

 regulations prohibiting the import of tuna and 

 tuna products.) 



Tuna longlining is conducted in a variety of 

 ways. The bulk of Japanese vessels still operate 

 from Japan, but a large number also use foreign 

 bases. In the South Pacific, catches are delivered 

 to American Samoa, Espiritu Santo (New Heb- 

 rides), and Fiji. Penang and Port Louis (Mau- 

 ritius) have been the main bases in the Indian 

 Ocean. Mombasa is a base established recently. 

 Vessels operating in the Atlantic have delivered 

 their catches to such ports as Las Palmas, Abid- 

 jan, Cape Verde Islands (Portuguese posses- 

 sion) , Tema, Cape Town, Port of Spain, etc. St. 

 Martin Island in the Caribbean has been an im- 

 portant base in recent years. (See Broadhead, 

 1971, for a description of international tuna 

 trade.) Many of these foreign transshipping 

 bases now receive more fish from Taiwanese and 

 Korean vessels than from the Japanese boats. 

 Mothership-type tuna longlining has also been 

 conducted both with self-navigating catchers and 

 with deck-loaded boats, but the former type has 

 ceased to exist. The mothership fishery with 

 deck-loaded catchers has developed largely in 

 the last 15 years although some experiments 

 were conducted even before World War II. Each 

 mothership, which also does fishing in most 

 cases, carries 1 to 8 fishing skiffs. The catches 

 of the different types of tuna fisheries are com- 

 pared in Table 4. 



It has been demonstrated that the catch per 

 unit of eflfort in any region quickly decreases as 



the amount of longline fishing increases. It is 

 also apparent that the total longline catches of 

 yellowfin, albacore, bigeye, and bluefin tunas 

 from the world ocean will not show substantial 

 increases as fishing is further intensified al- 

 though the proportions taken by the diflferent 

 longline fishing nations will change further. 



The pole-and-line skipjack fishery operates 

 relatively close to Japan, but a large number of 

 vessels now fish in waters around the Trust Ter- 

 ritory of the Pacific Islands (from bases in 

 Japan). The fishery also takes a substantial 

 amount of albacore; some vessels still conduct 

 both pole-and-line skipjack fishing and tuna long- 

 lining. 



Some tunas and skipjack are caught by purse 

 seiners in waters close to Japan. A few tuna 

 seiners have been operating in West Africa. The 

 Japanese have also been trying to establish a 

 purse-seine fishery in the eastern tropical Pa- 

 cific, so far without success. 



OTHER FISHERIES 



Some of the other fisheries, principally those 

 conducted around the Japanese islands, have had 

 or are likely to have some international impli- 

 cations. These include, among others, the purse- 

 seine fisheries for coastal pelagic fish, the saury 

 fishery, and the squid fishery. The kelp fishery 

 around the southernmost islands of the Kurile 

 chain is also an international issue. 



Most of these fisheries depend on the resources 

 of coastal pelagic species in waters around Ja- 

 pan. The combined catch of main coastal pe- 

 lagic species in temperate waters, including 

 anchovy {Engraulis) , sardines (Sardinops and 

 Etrumerts) , jack mackerels (mainly Trachurus 

 and Decapterus) , mackerels (two species of 

 Scomber), saury (Cololabis) , yellowtail (Seri- 



1 Bluefin, southern bluefin, albacore, bigeye, yellowfin, and some small tunas. 



^ Other than Atlantic. 



s With deck-loaded catchers. 



* Mainly albacore. 



Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Japan) (1971). 



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