The Japan News by The Yomiuri Shimbun
Heatwaves may be to blame for poor saury haul
The saury industry has been reeling from a spate of poor catches in recent years, and marine heatwaves might be the problem, a joint research team from Hokkaido University and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has announced.
Saury, commonly known as sanma in Japanese, is a species of fish that prefers to dwell in relatively cold sea water. However, when the team analyzed ocean temperature data for the ocean area off the southern coast of Hokkaido, they found that marine heatwaves occurred each summer from 2010 to 2016.
Similar to heatwaves on land, marine heatwaves are sustained periods of abnormally warm seawater temperatures. Specifically, the phenomenon is defined as high-temperature events, greater than the 90th percentile for the area, that continue for at least five consecutive days.
Over the past 100 years, marine heatwaves have been occurring with dramatically increasing frequency, prompting concern over the phenomenon’s ramifications for the marine ecosystem.
As elevated sea temperatures have again been recorded off Hokkaido since 2019, the researchers said they feared the condition may become permanent.
The team analyzed observation data from satellites to determine the mean sea surface temperature for the region.
Over the summer months from July to September between 2010 and 2016, the average temperature was about 1.5 C higher than in the same three-month period from 1993 to 2009, a margin that constituted a heatwave.
The heatwave was precipitated by a warm eddy that spread to obstruct the Oyashio current, which typically brings cold water from the northeast of Hokkaido to the south. The team assumes that the eddy itself was formed when part of the warm Kuroshio current, which usually follows the southern shores of the Japanese archipelago and flows toward the east, flowed into the sea area instead.
Prof. Shoshiro Minobe of Hokkaido University, a climatology expert who participated in the project, said: “Perennial marine heatwaves are unprecedented. It is possible that oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns have changed as a result of global warming.”
Saury are migratory fish and can
be found across a large swath of the northern Pacific Ocean. Around Japan, schools of the fish gradually move to the south, from the sea off Hokkaido to the waters off Chiba Prefecture, from August to around December.
According to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry and other sources, the saury catch has been poor since the start of the 2010s.
In 2019, the nationwide saury catch dropped to 45,778 tons, down approximately 60% from the previous year. By prefecture, Hokkaido’s catch was the largest at 19,085 tons, followed by Iwate Prefecture’s 6,033 tons and Miyagi Prefecture’s 5,973 tons.
Meanwhile, Hokkaido’s catch of Japanese amberjack, a species that resides in warm sea currents, has been rising rapidly. A total of 10,873 tons of amberjack were caught in the prefecture in 2019, nearly 16 times more than in 2004.
The situation underscores how the tides of change have been swirling around northern Japan’s fisheries in recent years.
Shusaku Sugimoto, an associate professor of physical oceanography at Tohoku University, said: “Marine heatwaves are an important phenomenon, not only in terms of marine resources, but also from the perspective of natural disasters. Elucidating how they work is an urgent, pressing task.” (Feb. 19)
Group travel, with participants gathering for photos at scenic or historic spots in the daytime before dining together at night, has appealed to Japanese for many years. However, this type of travel is now in trouble due to the pandemic. Demand has sharply dropped over fears of crowded situations in which infections could spread. Amid these circumstances, some businesses have begun searching for and trying out new styles of travel.
‘DEMAND HAS DRIED UP’
“Plans for about 2,300 reservations have disappeared,” said an employee of Tokyo-based Nippon Travel Agency Co., speaking in December at a branch in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Most of the 2,300 reservations, which the branch had arranged mainly for groups, were canceled after a scheduled book-related event was changed to being held online.
“Demand has dried up,” the employee said. “We hadn’t anticipated this. I don’t know when it will recover.”
Last year, Nippon Travel Agency’s interim results from January to June showed a 70.1% drop in the transaction values of domestic group travel compared with the same period in the previous year, with a 67.5% drop in November.
JTB Corp., another major travel agency, saw a 91% drop from April to September.
In recent years, some studies have shown that group sightseeing in Japan has declined to account for less than 10% of the travel market. However, the importance of group tours has not dimmed because sales per group are big.
“Hotels and tourist spots are eager to receive tourist groups,” said a Nippon
Travel Agency employee in charge. “We want to get through this situation however we can.”
FIRMS, SCHOOLS A DRIVING FORCE
In Japan, group travel had been the driving force of the travel industry for many years.
The forerunner was pilgrimage trips organized by Japan’s first travel agency, Nihon Ryoko-kai (now Nippon Travel Agency), founded by Shinsuke Minami in 1905. Based on his experience of selling bento meals at Kusatsu Station in Shiga Prefecture and being involved in operating a dining car, he planned a trip to visit the sacred Koyasan area and Ise Grand Shrines by train. About 100 people participated in each of the first trips. He also began services such as providing booklets of travel information and famous local sweets. Similar services are still in practice in the travel industry.
Group travel gradually spread to the general public. During the rapid economic growth after the end of World War II, group travel became part of the corporate
culture in the form of company trips to support the well-being of employees and to strengthen unity among workers.
School excursions, which started in the Meiji era (1868-1912), also took root in the postwar period and became a stable source of income for the travel industry. Mainly due to an increase in personal income over the decades, demand for group travel was overtaken by demand for individual travel.
“The appeal of group travel has never faded,” said Masami Morishita, a professor of Toyo University’s Faculty of International Tourism Management and a specialist in tourism marketing. “Participants still have a good time together and deepen their camaraderie. There is a great potential need for this type of travel as people are reevaluating their relationships with others amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
NEW APPROACHES
The travel industry is trying to find ways out of its economic woes by making better use of information and communication technology and placing emphasis on a category of business travel known as MICE — an acronym for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions.
A record 527 international conferences were held in 2019 in Japan, with spending by foreign visitors at those and other events reaching ¥211.7 billion in 2018, according to the Japan Tourism Agency. These figures suggest that growth related to MICE can also be expected in the post-pandemic world.
The Tokyo metropolitan government, which is working to attract MICE events, has drawn up operational guidelines in view of infection control measures, under the assumption that the pandemic will last long, including the use of online chats for question-and-answer sessions at event venues and digitizing explanatory materials.
A metropolitan government official in charge said the government “will seek ways to hold [such events] that meet the new environment.”
Some company travel plans are drawing attention with their approach of “team building,” in which employees are given a problem they need to work together to solve.
Package plans offered by Prince Hotels Inc. include ones in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, that feature orienteering and curling on a rink. The hotel says it receives “requests for strengthening ties among employees, which may be a reaction to the pandemic. We will continue to view this as a primary source of revenue in the future.”
Online group tours organized by Tokyo-based travel agency Autabi are also enjoying popularity. Some local governments and other entities are cooperating in organizing these tours, while hoping their efforts will attract in-person group travel after the pandemic. (Feb. 23)
Shimadzu Corp. has developed a reagent kit for PCR tests to detect the presence of the novel coronavirus on doorknobs and other surfaces and has started selling the product to testing facilities and medical institutions, the company announced earlier this month.
The product is expected to help prevent contagion via objects commonly touched by many people.
The kit can detect the virus in about two hours after using a cotton swab to wipe the surface of such objects as a faucet, tablet or remote control.
Detecting the virus has been difficult thus far because only a small amount of it adheres to objects. However, Shimadzu’s kit concentrates the virus and identifies it with a high degree of accuracy.
One set with enough reagent for 100 tests costs ¥275,000 plus tax.
Shimadzu aims to sell 1,000 sets within
one year.
“We want to prevent mass infections by thoroughly examining both people and objects,” a company official said. (Feb. 23)