Are the Moonies and Japan headed for a new Clash of Civilizations?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:48 PM on November 4, 2006.

Let's put three stories about seafood -- two new and one old but not well known -- together and see what shakes out.

I'm a huge sushi fan (all left-gatekeepers drink latté and eat sushi) so I was troubled, to say the least, to learn that every time I bite into a deliciously slimy bit of uni I am, in all likelihood, throwing money at wacky cultist and right-wing propagandist Sun Myung Moon:

In a remarkable story that has gone largely untold, Moon and his followers created an enterprise that reaped millions of dollars by dominating one of America's trendiest indulgences: sushi.

Adhering to a plan Moon spelled out more than three decades ago in a series of sermons, members of his movement managed to integrate virtually every facet of the highly competitive seafood industry. The Moon followers' seafood operation is driven by a commercial powerhouse, known as True World Group. It builds fleets of boats, runs dozens of distribution centers and, each day, supplies most of the nation's estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants.

Although few seafood lovers may consider they're indirectly supporting Moon's religious movement, they do just that when they eat a buttery slice of tuna or munch on a morsel of eel in many restaurants. True World is so ubiquitous that 14 of 17 prominent Chicago sushi restaurants surveyed by the Tribune said they were supplied by the company.

So, yeah, that's how the Moonies can lose millions on the reactionary Washington Times and the rest of the Rev's media empire. Can't you just see the Reverend with Mini-Moon, pinkies to their lips, cackling madly at this modest bit of global domination?

Anyway, I thought about the Moonies' cornering the sushi market -- in addition to the fishing fleet and the distribution biz, Moonies own hundreds if not thousands of sushi joints -- when I read, in The Independent, that the Japanese are not all that happy about how their culinary heritage is being presented abroad, and they're fixing to do something about it:

'Sushi police' to protect Japan's culinary exports

Next time you pick up that succulent tuna roll or steaming bowl of miso soup, look behind you: the sushi police may be on the prowl.

Long irritated by the sometimes dire quality of Japanese food on offer outside its home country, Tokyo's culinary guardians may be about to launch a crackdown - and sushi is likely to be top of their hit-list.

Japan's Agriculture Ministry has set up a panel to discuss a certification system for Japanese restaurants abroad. Possible gastronomic crimes include slicing fish too thick, using too little or too much wasabi and overboiling rice. Japanese tourists have also been known to complain about greasy tempura, floppy, lifeless noodles and seaweed that is not crispy enough.[…]

I'm really with them when it comes to greasy tempura.

"Partly this move is for Japanese tourists but the government wants to export fish-eating culture and techniques to other parts of the world," said Yasuyuki Saito, a journalist with the Daily Fisheries News.

That all seems very Japanese to me. And if we can forgive them for inventing the repellent surimi, the principle ingredient in Krablegs* with a "k," then it is a rich culinary tradition indeed.

It'll be interesting to see whether Japan's certification system and the Rev's sushi empire end up butting heads. There may be millions of ripe suckers around the world who buy that Moon is some kind of Godly "spiritual leader" -- among his many claims, he says he's channeled the ghosts of Hitler and Mussolini and cured their "sickness" -- but at the end of the day, he's just another crazy right-wing corporatist billionaire with a decidedly anti-regulatory bent. (In the early stages of his sushi … er … plot, Moon married hundreds of Japanese fishermen to American wives so they could gain citizenship and fish legally within the U.S.'s 200-mile "exclusive economic zone.") I can't see him taking kindly to Japanese attempts to regulate -- even on a voluntary basis -- businesses outside of Japan.

And whether or not there's a clash in the offing, it doesn't appear that the world's oceans can withstand seafood being even more heavily promoted by the Moonies' global fishing operation (they're now expanding into Europe) and the Japanese Agriculture Ministry. While the Japanese have long been leaders in forestry management, they are, as any minke whale or finless shark can tell you, the sweaty, 240-pound serial rapists of the oceans.

And the world's fisheries aren't going to be around for much longer if we continue to indulge in our passion for seafood. At least that's what a group of researchers reported this week in the journal Science:

There will be no more commercial fishing in 40 years if the present levels of fishing continue around the world, leading marine scientists are warning …

A new analysis of world fisheries, which took four years to compile, concludes that by 2048 stocks of all of the species currently fished for food will collapse to less than 10 per cent of the maximum catches recorded.

That would make fishing impossible, and render stocks unlikely to recover.

The scientists - who report their work in Friday's edition of the journal Science - said that overfishing was accelerating, and stocks as a result were declining more rapidly.

Nicola Beaumont, co-author of the report and an ecological economist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, said: "We must take action now. If we leave this for 10 or 20 years we will reach the point of no recovery for fisheries. […]

The overfishing of one species of fish has knock-on effects on others, and reduces the resilience of the ocean eco-system and its ability to recover stocks.

This means the loss of a single overfished species, such as cod or tuna, could have wide-ranging effects on many other seemingly unrelated fish species.

"The oceans have all these moving parts and if you start removing parts, you get a breakdown," Ms Beaumont said.

However, the report found that in some areas where fishing was restricted in order to allow stocks to recover, fisheries could return to healthy levels within as little as three to five years. But in areas where overfishing had continued too long, no such recovery was possible.

We are a pretty dumb species, and don't tend to take the long view. I think I'll try to stick to farmed fish whenever I can.

*The Japanese have been eating processed surimi-based products, traditionally known as kamaboko, for hundreds of years, but the "krableg" was a post World War II invention. They take relatively cheap fish -- mostly pollock -- and grind it up into a greyish paste or gel, which is then bleached and combined with starch, eggwhites, flavoring and texturizing chemicals. Then the paste is formed by machine into sheets. The sheets are rolled up into strands, dyed and cut into Krab Legs. I've seen -- and smelled -- the process up close and personal and haven't eaten 'em since.

Tagged as: environment, moon, fish

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.