Japanese gastronomy | The eel, a coveted and threatened treasure

(Hamamatsu) After skewering the eel he has just sliced, Tsuyoshi Hachisuka places on his barbecue this essential fish of Japanese gastronomy today considered an endangered species, and whose scarcity is driving up prices and stirring up envy. traffickers.

This snake-like fish, disgusting to some, is caught and eaten all over the world. But it is particularly popular in Asia and especially in the Japanese archipelago, which has many specialized restaurants such as this establishment in Hamamatsu, in the department of Shizuoka.

Bones found in funerary monuments in Japan attest that the eel was already eaten there several thousand years ago. Since the 17th^e century, it is generally tasted there in kabayaki, grilled kebabs dipped in a soy sauce and mirin (rice alcohol).

Mr. Hachisuka, 66, has been using the same sauce base since he opened his restaurant over 40 years ago. “I arrange it as I go, it must be neither too sweet nor too salty,” he told AFP.

But the long-standing presence of the eel in Japanese culinary traditions, and the fact that it is unable to breed in captivity, has placed this natural resource in dire straits, with direct consequences for its price.

“A dish of unaju (eel on rice, editor’s note) is now almost three times more expensive than when I started,” says Hachisuka.

A complex life cycle

Catches of glass eels, the eel fry, fell to 10% of their 1960s level in the archipelago, and the Japanese eel was placed on the Union’s red list of threatened species in 2014. International for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

But its complex and still poorly understood life cycle makes its protection particularly difficult.

The mysteries of the very origin of eels have fascinated long-time researchers. The ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle, who studied them 2,300 years ago, imagined that they appeared spontaneously in the mud, never having found a trace of the larvae of the species.

“It is believed that the eel appeared around 60 million years ago near the island of Borneo,” explains Mari Kuroki, senior lecturer in the Department of Aquatic Biosciences at the University of Tokyo.

It then spread around the world, and its 19 species and subspecies today ripple in all the world’s oceans except Antarctica.

It was not until the beginning of the 20^e century that scientists discovered that European and American eels were born in the Sargasso Sea, near Cuba, their larvae (called leptocephali) being carried by the currents to the continents.

“As the continental drift caused the sea currents to change and the areas for life and spawning away from, the eel has adapted,” says M^me Kuroki. The locations of the breeding grounds of many of its species remain a mystery to this day.

Human activity involved

In 2009, a Japanese scientific expedition for the first time in the world formally identified a spawning site, establishing that the species called “Japanese eel” was breeding in the west of the Mariana Islands, 2000 to 3000 km from the coast of the country.

As it approaches the coast, its larvae evolve into glass eels, then reach estuaries and rivers in Japan, but also in Taiwan, China and South Korea, where eels develop and live on average 5 at 15 years old before swimming again to the sea to lay eggs, and die.

To explain the decline in eel populations, a global phenomenon, scientists highlight a combination of factors, all attributable to man: overfishing, but also oceanic phenomena linked to climate change such as El Niño, which are causing changes. currents and move the spawning grounds.

The deterioration of freshwater habitats, with the development of rivers and the concreteization of banks, also plays a major role, as does pollution. Dams also disrupt migration, and their turbines are a major cause of eel mortality.

In an attempt to better manage this common resource, scientists from the four countries where the Japanese eel mainly lives have been cooperating since 2012, and quotas were put in place in 2015.

But these restrictions, added to the European Union’s ban on the export of its glass eels, have led to the development of poaching and global trafficking, particularly from Europe and the United States. Over 99% of eels consumed in Japan come from aquaculture farming, which relies entirely on fishing or importing glass eels.

” White gold “

In 2020, reported fishing and legal imports of glass eels in Japan amounted to less than 14 tonnes in total, according to the Japan Fisheries Agency (AJP), while more than 20 tonnes were farmed, a large difference attributed to a lucrative parallel economy.

The situation would be even more serious, according to the environmental organization WWF Japan, which estimates that 40 to 60% of glass eels raised in the country come from illegal channels.

In Hamamatsu, the brackish waters of Lake Hamana, located by the sea, provide an ideal habitat for eels, and elvers fishing takes place there every year between December and April, in the greatest discretion.

“Eels are the most expensive fish in this lake,” says Kunihiko Kato, a 66-year-old fisherman, pulling up the long, conical-tipped net he uses to catch glass eels. “So we are careful,” so as not to whet the lusts, he slips.

The price of glass eels, sometimes nicknamed “white gold”, fluctuates sharply depending on the catch: the kilo traded on average 1.32 million yen ($ 15,000) in 2020 according to the AJP, and had reached a record from 2.99 million yen in 2018.

The annual consumption of eels in Japan has been cut by three since its peak of some 160,000 tonnes in 2000, according to official figures. Their increasingly high cost effectively reduces the opportunities to consume them, notes Senichiro Kamo, a seafood wholesaler based on Lake Hamana.

“At one time, all the grills and meals served in local hotels were made from eel,” recalls Kamo, whose fish represents 50% of sales. “They were also used in the packed lunches sold in stations, but as their price has tripled this is no longer possible”.

“Appreciate each eel”

In an attempt to preserve this natural resource, research on the artificial reproduction of the eel began in the 1960s in Japan.

In 2010, researchers succeeded for the first time in obtaining two successive generations of eels in the laboratory, a decisive breakthrough. But these “artificial” eels are still far from being able to be put on the market, recognizes Ryusuke Sudo, researcher in a specialized center of the AJP in the peninsula of Izu.

“The biggest obstacle now is that the cost of this method is too high”, in particular because of a low reproduction rate requiring human intervention for each individual, and a growth time of glass eels longer than for those. fished in the wild, says Sudo.

The Japanese government has set the objective that this device can be used on a large scale by 2050.

For Mari Kuroki, collective awareness would be the best way to save the species: “You have to appreciate every eel you eat,” she said, “keeping in mind that it is is a precious natural resource ”.