Farming, fishing, livestock and forestry in Japan.
Japanese researchers have read the genome of the potted cyclamen's wild ancestor: 1.48 billion base pairs, 83% of them repeats. Breeding scent back into the flower once took Saitama 21 years.
Extinct in Japan's wild in 1971, the Oriental stork now numbers 728, and only 49 were released. Most hatched in the wild, fed by low-pesticide paddies that cost farmers work and yield. Now they nest on power poles.
Japan's gene-edited GABA tomato opened its field. It wasn't the first gene-edited food sold (US soybean oil, 2019), but the first CRISPR food shoppers could buy. How Japan's rules compare with the EU's.
A Japanese team tracked 563 metabolites and 107 tasters to show how hen housing changes egg flavour, in a country where 96.6 percent of laying hens are still caged and cage-free eggs cost about twice as much.
A Shizuoka lab has closed the breeding loop on the douman crab. Individual boxes are standard practice in Southeast Asia; what took eight years was larval die-offs and timing the female's molt.
Rausu, Rishiri, hosome, ma-kombu: four kelps sold under four names and four price tiers. A Hokkaido University team read the DNA of 475 plants and found no genetic line between them.
Warming seas pushed a pufferfish north across the Tsugaru Strait, and the hybrids do not fit Japan's 1983 table of edible species and parts. How the rulebook caught up, and why the Mediterranean has the same gap.
Murakami's salmon run fell from 55,000 fish to 1,400 in a decade. Now the town is spending about $32,000 to attempt what Norway and Chile have not: closing the life cycle of chum salmon entirely on land.
A kawakawa hybrid made bluefin tuna sperm at eight months, and rainbow trout now spawn Chinook salmon yearly. Inside Japan's 20-year surrogate broodstock effort and Kindai's 32-year tuna project.
Pacific fishing nations agreed on August 18, 2026 to raise the quota for bluefin tuna over 30 kilograms by 25 percent, to 14,836 tons in the western Pacific, and to cut the quota for juveniles by 6 percent.
Japan's 2025 seafood output fell to 3,577,400 tonnes, the lowest since 1956, while FAO puts world production at 235 million tonnes. Comparing quota rules with Norway and the US shows why fewer fishermen isn't the answer.