🐟 In 1984, Japanese boats and farms landed 12.81 million tonnes of seafood. Last year they landed 3.58 million: the smallest haul since the government began counting in 1956, and the fifth annual decline in a row. Over the same period, world production climbed to an all-time high. That divergence is not an accident of nature, and the explanations usually offered in Japan don't cover it.

The world set a record. Japan set a different one.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries released Japan's 2025 figures at the end of May 2026. Total production across capture fisheries, marine aquaculture and inland waters came to 3,577,400 tonnes, down 1.6 percent. Marine capture fell 3.1 percent to 2,700,500 tonnes. The one bright spot was marine aquaculture, up 3.6 percent to 831,900 tonnes on strong nori and wakame harvests. Sardine and mackerel landings rose; scallops and skipjack dragged the total down.

Stretch it over five years and the slope is unmistakable. Total production ran 4.158 million tonnes in 2021, then 3.917, 3.830, 3.636 and 3.577 million. Capture alone slid from 3.179 million to 2.701 million tonnes, down 15 percent in four years. Today's total is roughly 28 percent of the 1984 peak.

The global picture runs the other way. The FAO's State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2026, launched in Mombasa in June, put 2024 world production at 235 million tonnes, an all-time high, with aquatic animals accounting for 195 million of that. Farmed aquatic animal output crossed 100 million tonnes for the first time, reaching 103 million, and now supplies 53 percent of everything harvested.

Wild capture worldwide isn't growing either. It has oscillated between roughly 86 and 94 million tonnes since the late 1980s, while the share of assessed stocks fished within biologically sustainable levels slipped to 62.4 percent from 64.5 percent in the previous report. FAO notes that part of that drop reflects methodological updates and newly included stocks, and that measured by volume landed rather than by stock count, 72.6 percent of 2023 landings came from sustainable stocks. The global boom is farming, not fishing.

What makes Japan unusual is that it is shrinking on both sides at once. Capture has fallen for years, and aquaculture dropped from 927,000 tonnes in 2021 to 832,000 in 2025, during exactly the stretch when everyone else's aquaculture went vertical.

Fewer fishermen, less fish-eating, and why neither closes the gap

The two explanations you hear most in Japan are demographic. Both are true. Neither is sufficient.

Crews are shrinking and greying. New entrants run at roughly 1,700 a year, about seven in ten of them career-changers from other industries. Domestic appetite collapsed in parallel: per-capita seafood consumption peaked at 40.2 kilograms in fiscal 2001 and stood at 21.3 kilograms in fiscal 2024, barely half.

The ocean changed too, sharply. Sea-surface temperatures around Japan averaged 1.44°C above the 1991-2020 baseline in 2024, the highest since records began in 1908 and well clear of the 1.10°C set in 2023. The Japan Meteorological Agency puts the long-run trend through 2025 at 1.36°C per century for Japanese waters against 0.63°C for the global ocean, more than double the pace. From August 2017 to April 2025, the Kuroshio Current sat locked in a "large meander" that swung it far off the south coast for seven years and nine months, the longest such episode since reliable records began in 1965. Foreign fleets working the East China Sea add real pressure on top of all that.

All of that is true. But Norway, Iceland, the United States and New Zealand all fish a warming ocean and all face labour and market pressure. None of them is steady, either: U.S. commercial landings slipped from 9.7 billion pounds in 2015 to 8.4 billion in 2023. What none of them has done is post five consecutive years of decline into its lowest total on record.

The Japanese government says as much itself. Discussing the long decline, the Fisheries Agency's own white paper states that while many factors are involved, there are also many stocks whose decline could have been prevented or eased had resource management been handled more appropriately. That is the regulator conceding, in an official document, that the rules were part of the problem.

Japan rewrote the rulebook in 2020. It still isn't finished.

Japan's Fisheries Act dated from 1949. It was overhauled in 2018 and took effect in December 2020, the first fundamental revision in roughly seventy years. The new law made maximum sustainable yield (MSY) the legal target, meaning limits set at the level that keeps a stock producing the largest long-term catch, and made the total allowable catch (TAC) the primary tool.

Elsewhere this has been routine for decades. In the United States, the Magnuson-Stevens Act requires annual catch limits across federally managed fisheries, with measures that trigger when a limit is approached, and the results are audited publicly every year. At the end of 2023 NOAA managed 506 stocks and stock complexes; among those whose status is known, 94 percent were not subject to overfishing and 82 percent were not overfished. Fifty stocks had been rebuilt since 2000.

Japan is still assembling the same machinery. Scientific assessment coverage went from 50 species in fiscal 2018 to 192 in fiscal 2021, and MSY-based assessments reached 22 species and 40 stocks by fiscal 2025. The roadmap originally called for 80 percent of the catch to sit under TAC management by fiscal 2023; that slipped to fiscal 2025. As of April 2026, the figure was 77 percent.

Seventy-seven percent, six years in, is real progress. It is also not the same thing as a working quota system, because how you divide a quota turns out to matter more than whether you have one.

Why Japanese mackerel is so small

A catch ceiling that isn't split among individual boats creates a race to fish. Everyone works as hard as possible before the collective limit is hit, because a fish left in the water is a fish someone else will land. Fish then get taken young and small, when they are worth least and when their reproductive value is highest.

Ayumu Katano is a specialist professor at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology who has bought seafood in Northern Europe since 1990. Writing in Wedge in December 2023, he set out the official forecast for chub mackerel in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Through March 2024, catches would be led by zero-year fish of 25 to 26 centimetres and one-year fish of 28 to 32 centimetres, with fish above 32 centimetres also expected in the Sea of Japan. In Northern Europe, he writes, quotas are set strictly per vessel, so skippers avoid low-value juveniles on their own and mackerel under three years old go untaken.

By Toyo Keizai's calculation using January 2026 trade data, Japan imports Norwegian mackerel at roughly three times the unit price at which it exports its own. The country sells small cheap fish abroad and buys big expensive fish back. Domestic mackerel, long the cheapest thing on the fish counter, went from ¥154 to ¥169 per 100 grams between March 2025 and March 2026, about $0.97 to $1.06, a 10 percent jump in a year on a tally of the internal affairs ministry's retail price survey across 79 cities.

The fix isn't exotic. Give each vessel its own share and the incentive inverts: your quota is yours whether you land it in June or November, so you wait until the fish are big and the market is good. That, in Katano's account, is what per-vessel quotas already do in Norway. Japan has begun introducing individual quotas, but mostly in minister-licensed offshore fisheries, such as bluefin and southern bluefin tuna, mackerel and sardine for the large purse-seine fleet, squid jigging and Pacific saury. The coastal fleet, most of the boats and most of the towns, largely sits outside.

The blame is easy to misplace. Fishermen catch fish; that is the job. If the rules permit taking juveniles and a competitor will take them anyway, taking them is rational. The design is the problem.

Bluefin tuna is the counter-evidence

If management were beside the point, Pacific bluefin should have kept falling. It didn't.

The stock sat near historic lows in the mid-2010s. Under the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Japan and its neighbours cut catches of juveniles under 30 kilograms to half the 2002-2004 baseline and held adult catches flat. It hurt, and it worked. Spawning biomass recovered, and at the 2024 WCPFC annual meeting members agreed to raise the small-fish limit by 10 percent and the large-fish limit by 50 percent.

A quota can also be hollowed out. In 2023, a Japanese fisherman and a local dealer were convicted over falsified bluefin catch reports. From April 2026, amended legislation requires individual-fish tracking for bluefin of 30 kilograms and up, and blocks unreported fish from entering distribution.

The tightening extends to other species. For 2025 the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC) cut the high-seas Pacific saury quota by 10 percent to 121,500 tonnes and the high-seas chub mackerel ceiling from 100,000 to 71,000 tonnes.

The promise of 4.44 million tonnes

Norway is the comparison Japan keeps reaching for. In 2025 Norway cut quotas hard on cod and other headline species because the science said to. Wild-caught export volume fell 12.5 percent. Export value from those same wild fisheries rose 7 percent anyway. Total Norwegian seafood exports hit a record NOK 181.5 billion, about $17.2 billion, on 2.8 million tonnes.

Japan set a record too. Seafood exports reached ¥423.1 billion, about $2.7 billion, up 17.2 percent, on 640,000 tonnes, led by scallops, yellowtail and pearls. That is good news. It is also about a sixth of Norway's export value, from a country with more than twenty times Norway's population. And Japan imported ¥2.145 trillion, roughly $13.5 billion, of seafood the same year: five times what it sold.

The official target is to rebuild the catch to 4.44 million tonnes by fiscal 2030. From 3.577 million, that is a 24 percent increase in five years.

The 1984 peak is not a fair benchmark, since a large slice of it came from distant-water fleets that shrank permanently once 200-mile exclusive economic zones spread worldwide. And a warming ocean moves the target itself, because MSY is calculated against prevailing conditions and those are not holding still. Norway's own cod quotas have been cut sharply. Good management is not a machine that yields more fish forever.

But that argues for better rules, not against them. A stock managed badly in a stable ocean recovers slowly. A stock managed badly in a warming one may not recover at all.

Japan gave the world shun, the idea that every fish has a season when it is at its best and that eating it then is the entire point. For decades its quota system rewarded the opposite. What does your country's system reward, and does anyone there argue about it?

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