of his own I These boats fish the warm seas 

 of the whole world — the Indian Ocean, the 

 Galapagos area, the Arabian Sea, the 

 Atlantic. Their fishermen can walk with a 

 swagger through the streets of tuna ports 

 like Misaki, on the rare occasions when 

 they get to spend a day in a home port, 

 and they can compare notes on the girls of 

 Venice and Recife, Haifa and Cristobal. 

 There has been no worldwide fishery like 

 this one, I think, since the American 

 sperm whale fishery of the last century. 

 I wonder if that fishery too was not built 

 and sustained not only by economics but by 

 pride and guts. The Coffins and the 

 Starbucks built their mansions in Nantucket; 

 the new nabobs of the longline fleet are 

 building theirs, I am told, on the bluff 

 above Misaki. I should like to invite you 

 to put aside your fear of these people for 

 a moment and admire the audacity and ini- 

 tiative that has taken these fishermen 

 around the Earth. 



It seems to me that fishing, to con- 

 tinue, has got to be more than a matter 

 of dollars and cents alone, it must be a 

 way of life. The American fisheries were 

 carried along for years, to a considerable 

 extent, by fishermen who immigrated from 

 fishing villages in the Old Country. When 

 they are gone, who is left to carry on? 

 Would it be too unkind to say a pack of 

 potential factory hands, temporarily lured 

 to sea by the promise of extraordinary pay? 



In Japan there are still genuine 

 fisherfolk. There are still many boys 

 reared in narrow coves backed by cliffs, 

 with hardly a square yard of land to till. 

 Compared with scratching out a bare living 

 in the inshore fisheries, a berth on a find 

 modern longliner, a chance to see foreign 

 lands, the prospect of earning 70 or 80, 

 even 100 dollars a month while enjoying 

 four square meals a day of rice and high- 

 grade tuna is a glamorous and attractive 

 picture of success. 



You have heard of falling catch rates 

 and rising costs. It is true that in gen- 

 eral the catch per day' s absence for the 

 large longliners dropped in 1956 and 1957. 

 For example, a sample of 500-gross-ton 

 boats averaged 8k days per trip in 1955> 

 9h days in 1956, and 113 days in 1957. 

 Meanwhile the average catch per day of 

 fishing fell from 8? tons to less than 

 6 tons. This trend is blamed largely on 



the slump in Indian Ocean catch rates of 

 which you have heard, but in any case 6 

 tons per day is not bad longlining, and the 

 Indian Ocean fishing, they say, is picking 

 up again. 



Some persons, encouraged by such re- 

 ports, have thought that American fishermen, 

 with their vaunted efficiency, can run the 

 Japanese out of business. I would not be 

 too optimistic on this score. If Americans 

 are willing to pull in their belts and be 

 fishermen do or die, eat tuna and rice if 

 need be, it may be that they can do it. It 

 may be that they will not see any use in 

 trying. 



In Japan they have resigned themselves 

 to the fact that apparently the spectacular 

 catch rates on virgin fishing grounds do 

 not last long. There are few virgin grounds 

 left anyway, except in the far eastern 

 Pacific. But they are stubbornly convinced 

 that the longlines of the present fleet, 

 working over such great expanses of the 

 world's oceans, cannot fish the tuna popu- 

 lations down below an economic level. What 

 happened when the Indian Ocean temporarily 

 went bad? The boats moved back into the 

 tropical Pacific, where catch rates, though 

 not spectacularly high, are remarkably de- 

 pendable. They believe that catch rates on 

 the newer grounds will settle down to a 

 liveable level and that by rotating grounds 

 they can continue to make satisfactory 

 catches indefinitely. 



There is a minor tuna boat-building 

 boom in Japan now, they say. That, I sup- 

 pose, we may take as an indication of con- 

 fidence in the future. Although the 

 Government has discouraged expansion of the 

 fleet since 1955> in theory granting no new 

 licenses and requiring the scrapping of 

 equivalent tonnage as a condition of au- 

 thorizing new construction, there has been 

 an increase year by year in the total ton- 

 nage of the fleet and the average tonnage 

 of the boats. Last year 9h new tuna boats 

 were launched. To May of this year con- 

 struction permits were granted for 35 new 

 bait boats and 28 new longliners. One yard 

 in Shimizu is said to have 10 boats of over 

 250 tons gross scheduled for launching by 

 October. 



This year the Japanese Fisheries 

 Agency, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries 

 of Japan, announced a tuna mothership 



44 



