of the entrepreneurp is advantageous and desirables but looked at 

 from the broad standpoint of overall production, it would be hard 

 to say that it is always necessarily advantageous or desirabloc 

 The more efficient the fishing method becomes ^ the greater is the 

 danger of its effectiveness surpassing the reproductive potential 

 of the fishc In other words ^ there arises a danger of a decline 

 in the resource itself „ Such a tendency toward a decline in the 

 resource was already rather clearly apparent in the trawl fishery 

 before the war^ and measures to protect the resourcej such as 

 limitations on the number of vessels and the establishment of pro- 

 hibited areaSj, were being devised,, The marked decline in the 

 bottom fish resources of Japanese coastal waters since the war is 

 a good example of this phenomenono 



Table 5 



Comparison of Catches in the Trawl Fishery 

 (statistics from Ministry of Agric, and Forestry) 



* 1 kan equals 8o27 IbSo 



Notes The sudden decline from 1938 on was due to the 

 Si no "-Japanese waro 



As has been shown, the longline fishery is the main part of 

 the tuna fisheryo If we consider the catch by nets as a solid bodyj 

 the catch by longline is, by comparison, a line, or rather, a dotted 

 lineo In recent years the tuna longline fishery has come to be 

 prosecuted on a remarkably large scale, with large vessels in some 

 cases operating as much as 300 - 350 baskets of gear at a timeo 

 Since the length of the main line in one basket is about 300 meters, 

 the total length of the gear comes to about 90 kilometersc This is 

 done on the chance that some part of the line will encounter a school 

 of fish, but the gear itself remains, as before, a dotted lineo 

 P\irthermore, in this fishery the catch is limited to fish which have 

 already grown to quite a large sizeo Knowledge concerning the larval 



71 



