Japan’s International Fisheries Policy: Law, Diplomacy and Policy Governing Resource Security by Roger D. Smith (review)

Japan’s International Fisheries Policy: Law, Diplomacy and Policy Governing Resource Security. By Roger D. Smith. Routledge, London, 2015. xviii, 216 pages. $145.00.

This book reviews Japan’s international fisheries policy, with an emphasis on the negotiation of international fisheries agreements, both bilateral and multilateral. It focuses primarily on the period between the end of World War II and the mid-1990s. It does, though, also contextualize this core content in a broader discussion of Japanese fisheries and food policy, and includes a chapter on prewar Japanese fisheries policy and occasional mention of developments in the twenty-first century.

The primary lens through which the book looks at its topic is food security. Roger Smith argues that Japan’s resource scarcity, its history of food self-reliance, and food shortages in the immediate aftermath of World War II have left it with a deep concern for insuring food security, understood as reliable access to both sufficient calories and culturally appropriate foods. Since seafood is more important to the Japanese diet on both counts than it is to most other national diets, it makes sense that a key concern of Japan’s food security policy should be with maintaining the supply of fish. Japan’s international fisheries policy can, the author argues, be understood as a consistent effort to maintain control over its supply of fish.

This effort, Smith suggests, has relied on two key policy directions: a push for open oceans and an emphasis on scientific management of international fisheries. What I refer to here as open oceans is the idea, commonly accepted in international law since the seventeenth century, that resources in the high seas are open to access by anyone, on a first-come, first-served basis. Until World War II, the high seas were understood to include everything outside territorial waters, which extended three miles from shore. Beginning after World War II, continuing through the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, and culminating in both the coming into force of that document in 1994 and the related Straddling Fish Stocks Agreement in 1996, the high seas have shrunk and rights of open access have been diminished. Countries now have the right to claim regulatory authority over fisheries up to 200 miles from shore, and even in what remains of the high seas, states are expected to participate in multilateral fisheries management rather than fishing freely.

Japan’s international fisheries policy has, through this process of change, been fighting a rearguard action to keep access as open as possible and to make the case for the rights of fleets that traditionally fished for a stock (as opposed to the right of coastal states to monopolize stocks within their 200-mile exclusive economic zones). It has at the same time been engaged in bilateral negotiations with neighboring countries to clarify international boundaries at sea and to buy access for its fleets to other countries’ waters. Smith argues that these efforts all make sense in the context of, and are in fact all ultimately driven by, a concern for food security; policy, in other words, is driven by the goal of maximizing the amount of protein that Japan’s fleets bring in.

Scientific management, meanwhile, is the idea that fish stocks should be managed to maximize resource productivity. This idea seems straightforward at first glance, but other priorities can interfere with it. In particular, Smith describes Japanese policymakers as concerned about environmentalist priorities in this context. The tension between these concerns and scientific management is drawn most starkly in the chapter on Japan’s whaling policy, in which U.S. and European concerns with the well-being of whales as individuals are seen as inimical to the use of whales as a natural resource. But it is also seen in conflicts between Japan and other developed states about ideas like the precautionary principle, which states that when the science is not clear, environmental management should err on the side of not doing environmental harm. Smith ascribes...