A fascinating story from the August 15th edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review on the smuggling of seafood from Russia to Japan, controlled mainly by the Japanese yakuza and the Russian mafia. According to the Japan Fisheries Association, the illegal trade pulls in roughly $1.2 billion (USD) a year.
Because so much fish is being caught and sold within Japan, there are environmental concerns at stake:
[U]ncontrolled and unsupervised fishing is causing immense environmental damage in these fragile northern waters, threatening to wipe out whole species of fish. […] “We have to think about the amount of sushi being eaten,” says Isamu Abe, a senior official at the Japanese Fisheries Association in Tokyo, one of the most powerful players in the global seafood trade. “It can’t go on like this. It shouldn’t.”
In addition to organized crime, it should come as no surprise to anyone following this year’s myriad corporate scandals involving Japanese food companies (Snow Brand Foods and Nippon Ham are just two such examples) that large Japanese corporations are being implicated in the fish smuggling business as well:
Although foreign governments have long pushed Tokyo to crack down on this trade, a number of factors have prompted successive Japanese governments to drag their feet. To begin with, illegal imports suppress retail prices in Japan by almost a third–no small matter in the world’s costliest nation. Also, some of Japan’s biggest companies have profited from illegal fishing. In 1999, for instance, the giant trading firm Mitsubishi Corp.–which accounts for 30% of all Japanese tuna imports–publicly admitted handling illegally caught tuna.
The article also poignantly examines the effects any cleanup of the illegal fishing trade would have on Hokkaido.