by James Prosek
She laughed, then continued talking about a particular trip to the Sargasso with Steve Brandt, a hydroacoustics expert. “We saw one big aggregation on sonar that we thought might have been the eels. We had five or six nets and never saw one.”
Gail spoke of the adult eels returning to the place where they were born, spawning and dying, and then the newly hatched larvae drifting toward the coast from the spawning area. “The currents are so strong, the larvae have no control. They get stuck in the Gulf Stream.” Gail offered no explanation as to how the multitudes of larvae dispense themselves to occupy freshwater habitat throughout the extensive range. How did some know to swim up the Mississippi and others the Delaware, the Hudson, or the St. Lawrence? I asked if it was possible for young eels to return to the same rivers, or at least the same general area, that their parents had migrated from.* With no uncertainty at all in her voice Gail said, “No. Young eels don’t home to particular rivers. The adults home to where they were born, just like salmon do. Except with eels it happens that their birthplace is an almost featureless place in the open ocean.”**
Gail said that if she and Jim went back to try to catch adult eels in the Sargasso Sea, they’d bring commercial fishing gear. “We always thought the navy knew where they went,” she added. “It’s really deep near the Puerto Rican trench. They must test their subs down there. Who has all the latest and greatest toys but the navy?”
Gail and Jim agree that it is just a matter of time before the mystery of the eels’ spawning place is unraveled. McCleave writes in Eel Biology: “At some time, smaller telemetering devices will allow direct determination of locations and times of spawning of European and American eels migrating from different parts of their continental ranges.”
If I live to read that headline in the news, it will be a bittersweet day.
* For instance, when the North American and European continents were closer (and the ocean between them narrower), the eels would not have had to travel so far. But as the plates moved apart and the distance widened, the eels would have had to travel further and further to get to the same general area where optimal spawning conditions exist.
* K. Aida, K. Tsukamoko, and K. Yamauchi, Eel Biology (Tokyo: SpringerVerlag, 2003).
* The panmixia hypothesis-that all eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea and randomly mate with each other-was challenged in a paper published in the journal Nature in February 2001, “Genetic Evidence Against Panmixia in the European Eel.” The authors, Thierry Wirth and Louis Bernatchez, posited that the northern (Baltic Sea) and southern (Mediterranean Sea) populations of European eels are two genetically distinct and therefore reproductively isolated groups. Which meant that when the southern population migrated to the ocean to spawn, they did not mix with the northern population, and that the offspring of each group returned to the same general areas from which their parents migrated. This theory has since been proven wrong. It does in fact appear that the entire European population spawns together and that the offspring are randomly dispersed to freshwater rivers throughout the range.
** The eels’ reproductive strategy is very different from other migratory fish that move between freshwater and saltwater. Salmon, because they spawn in rivers and migrate home to the rivers where they were born, have been repro- ductively isolated in separate river drainages for thousands of years and have evolved into slightly different varieties. Though not significant enough genetically to be considered separate species, each river has a unique population. (In terms of conservation of the species this must be considered. You can’t, for instance, introduce Atlantic Salmon from Canada to replace the extinct popula- tion from the Connecticut River in southern New England and expect them to thrive.) Eels, on the other hand, mix their entire adult population every year reproducing together in the Atlantic Ocean, so the species as a whole is more homogeneous.
chapter seven
WHERE EELS
Go to Die
Japanese Eel Day poster
Tsukiji, which literally means “landfill,” is built on a former wetland in the delta of the Sumida River. It is the largest seafood market in the world. Inside is a wonder of the fish trade; outside is a series of restaurants and markets selling everything from sushi knives to T-shirts. The bustle begins outside of Tsukiji well before 4:30 A.M., when we arrived—the planes full of fish are landing at Narita Airport from the farthest corners of the world, trucks coming in and backing out, the auctioning of tuna, the opening of Styrofoam containers gleaming with fresh seafood, dead as well as live, in all imaginable sizes, shapes, and colors.
Both of my travel companions, Kunio Kadowaki (native Japanese fixer/translator) and David Doubilet (photographer), had spent a great deal of time at Tsukiji on various assignments for National Geographic. I was looking forward to walking through it for the first time.
The first story that Kunio and David had worked on together was bluefin tuna in 1978. Things had changed in our oceans in thirty years. For one thing, the number and size of our large pelagic fishes, the tuna, swordfish, and marlin, had decreased drastically. Populations of bluefin tuna, an indicator of ocean health, were crashing toward extinction. The major cause of the decline seemed to be overfishing, an increased demand for fish, and a finite supply. Eel populations were not faring much better.
Standing in the muggy morning air thick with the smell of fresh fish, we entered Tsukiji through same door that many a jet-lagged tourist had before. The door leads to a damp, dark hallway that opens onto room upon room of frozen bluefin tuna. Collectively, the tuna, their tails lopped off, white with frost and lined up neatly in rows, make a steaming sea of bodies. Some of them may have come from as far as Australia, the Mediterranean, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod Bay.
“The king of the market is still tuna,” David said, lifting his Leica to take a photo.
At around 5:00 A.M. the tuna auctions begin—men shouting, some holding coring devices used to sample the flesh, bidding, making notes, and dragging them away one by one. In 2001 a single tuna weighing 444 pounds was auctioned off at Tsukiji for $173,000.
Beyond the auction rooms are acres of stalls and alleys with the scent of the sea, where the purchased frozen tuna are halved and quartered with saws and long sharp knives. As the segments of tuna thaw, beautiful pumpkin orange and mango red colors emerge from the flesh, ribbed and clean-lined and still draped in silver skin.
“How can the oceans support all of this?” I asked David, in awe of the abundance.
“They can’t,” he said.
In the cavernous room where we now stood, narrow aisles led between tanks and crates of fish live and dead. It was like being in the collection rooms of a natural history museum, but without the labels telling you the common and scientific names. Baskets and bundles and boxes of things I could roughly identify as octopuses, clams, mussels, shrimp, salmon, seahorses, lamprey, urchin, squid, cod, eels, snapper, grouper, skate, flounder, swordfish, mackerel, crab, and lobster bulged from all corners. There were of course Japanese characters on signs, posters, and cardboard placards that I imagined described what the creatures were. This world had its own vocabulary, even its own language of commerce.
We came to a counter where three men were cleaning live eels. David’s shooting increased in intensity.
We had come to document the road’s end for the eel. In midsummer, an especially large volume of eels passes through Tsukiji. Eel is the sixth-largest import to Tsukiji overall annually, but now, at high season, it is the third-largest, surpassed in live weight only by tuna and shrimp. More than 130,000 tons of eel are consumed in Japan per year, mostly in the form of a grilled eel dish called kabayaki unagi. The Japanese eat more eel in midsummer than any other season because they believe the flesh gives them stamina in the relentless heat—relief from what they call natsubate, or summer fatigue.
Eel consumption peaks at the end of July on doyo unagi, Eel Day. On that particular day bold, colorful signs, flags, and posters commemorate the event, and eel is sold in every
supermarket and roadside convenience store. This year Eel Day fell on the twenty-eighth of July, toward the end of our trip, and the city was appropriately hot.
The custom of eating eel in summer began as a marketing ploy. Actually, the proper name for the day when people eat eel is not Eel Day but doyo no ushi no hi, the Day of the Ox. This story is well told in Theodore Bestor’s book Tsukiji: “An eighteenth-century Edo unagi (eel) restaurateur had the bright idea of commissioning a famous calligrapher to make a simple sign proclaiming, ‘Today is the day of the Ox.’ The fame of the calligrapher ensured that passersby would notice the sign and the eel shop, and make the desired assumption that there was something special about the day and its relationship to unagi. Once made, the connection stuck.”
Kunio said that such clever marketing was a tradition in Japan. He followed with a contemporary example. “Thirty years ago, they never ate chocolate in Japan. Then some savvy marketing guy started a trend where women buy men chocolate on Valentine’s Day. Now chocolate sales are huge in February.” He added, “It is like you eat turkey on Thanksgiving.”*
Eating eel in midsummer may have been popularized by savvy marketing, but there could be some substance to the belief that eel beats summer fatigue. Eel meat has well-known health-giving properties.* It is high in vitamins A and E, containing four times more vitamin A than cheese and eight times more than egg, six times more vitamin E than cheese and three times more than egg. Vitamin A is good for human skin. Vitamin E helps prevent aging. Eel is also rich in fish oils that contain antioxidants to aid the immune system and fight sickness. Because of its high concentration of omega-3 fatty acids, eel has been found to help prevent type 2 diabetes. A native of Kyoto told me, “They have a saying in Kyoto—that the girls have beautiful skin because they eat eel.”
Eel is not commonly prepared at home, but is customarily eaten in eel-only restaurants. Part of the reason is the difficulty of pacifying and preparing the unruly fish.* Also, while cleaning an eel you must be careful not to get eel blood in an open wound or your eyes, as the blood contains a neurotoxin, less than one cubic centimeter of which injected into a rabbit causes instant convulsions and death.** For this reason, eel is never served raw as sashimi but cooked or hot-smoked, a process by which the toxin is neutralized. (It is rumored that the Borgia family of Renaissance Italy had a secret poison that they kept hidden in hollow rings and dripped into enemies’ drinks during meals, and that the main ingredient of this poison was eel blood.)
In the half-light of Tsukiji I put down my camera and took in the colorful buzz of the place. As I watched the pails and tubs of live eels, their metabolism slowed by crushed ice, I couldn’t help wondering if they might have come from a farm in China supplied by Jonathan Yang with glass eels caught in Pat Bryant’s nets in the Pemaquid River in Maine. The probability that these eels had been born in the Sargasso and caught as glass eels in Maine was roughly 40 percent. The rest had mostly come from the Basque region of France and Spain and also had been born in the Sargasso Sea.
At sixty-three, Kunio was grandfatherly and friendly. He wore a photographer’s vest made of black mesh with pouches in which he kept a small notebook, an address book, a camera, and a pen. “I am your guide dog,” Kunio liked to say, repositioning his wire-rimmed glasses. “Without me you are blind in Japan.”
For the remainder of the day we followed our guide dog around Tokyo, dipping in and out of seemingly hidden districts of the city, behind a wall here, along a river there, through a small park with trees. The city was a dizziness of cars and bicycles and lights and signs that all seemed to melt together in the ferocious heat. Somewhere beyond Akihabara, the hyperkinetic electronics district (picture Times Square multiplied by Las Vegas), we turned a corner onto a quiet narrow street where the shadows of potted Japanese maples and bamboo gave the illusion of relief from the heavy air and frenzied city. A small nondescript door led to a cozy restaurant, Kubota, with six tables.
The owner and purveyor of the 120-year-old eel restaurant, Shoichiro Kubota (his father was eel handler to Emperor Hirohito), met us at the door. The restaurant serves only eel and specializes in kabayaki, or grilled eel. Kunio said, “When we talk about a dish of eel in Japan, ninety-nine percent of the time we mean kabayaki.”
Kunio facilitated our entry into the normally closed kitchen. Each restaurant has its own closely guarded recipe for the sweet sauce put on grilled eel, the base of which is mirin (a sweet rice wine) and soy sauce.
“Until forty years ago,” Kubota said, “we served exclusively Japanese eels, many wild caught from the nearby Edo River—but they became too scarce. Now almost all of the eels we serve are farmed.” Kubota did not like to admit that 80 percent of the eels eaten in Japan are raised from European or American glass eels.
“American eels are not as tasty,” he said. “Even the French eels are not as good—like American cherries. We like our native things.”*
Japanese will pay more than ten times as much for Japanese eel as they will for American or European; the same is true for beef, peaches, and melons. In Mitsukoshi, a 380-year-old department store, individual Japanese-grown melons can sell for over $250. Cows born in Australia are raised the last half year of their life in Japan so they can be called Japanese wagyu beef. Recently, Kunio said, there was a story in the paper about how short-necked clams from North Korea had been fraudulently sold for a premium as native Japanese clams. The government exacted fines. “Most Americans would rather have quantity than quality,” Kunio said. “Most Japanese want good product.”
Later in the day, at the Kobayashi Company in another part of Tokyo, I watched eleven men and women at three separate tables cleaning eels, at an average of two and a half per minute. The foreman came around every so often with energy drinks for his workers. At the eel slaughterhouse the pace never lagged. One after the other the eels were taken live out of a tub, pinned by their heads with a steel spike into a hole in a wooden cutting board, and opened; the spine was taken out, and the flesh laid flat into two symmetrical fillets still connected by skin. John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” played through a weak signal on the radio. Eel spines, flesh with skin, heads, and guts were all placed into separate buckets, the eel heads still moving after being severed from the bodies. In another room three men were easing several bamboo skewers into each fillet and putting them on a conveyor belt, where they were grilled and dipped in kabayaki sauce by a machine. The foreman told me they could clean, skewer, and grill an average of four thousand eels a day.
Leaving the eel slaughterhouse, I headed across town to the Ocean Research Institute (ORI) at the University of Tokyo to meet Professor Katsumi Tsukamoto, the man who discovered the spawning place of the Japanese eel. His laboratory is the only one in the world that is actively doing ocean research on eels.
“We are able to do our research because eels are culturally important in Japan,” Mike Miller, who works with Katsumi in the Department of Marine Bioscience, had told me by phone. “The food supports the science. If they didn’t eat eel in Japan, I wouldn’t be here.”
I was fortunate to have caught Mike and Katsumi on land, as ordinarily at this time of year they would be on a summer cruise, sampling the ocean for the larvae of newly hatched eels. Their latest cruise, from December through March, had followed a track from Tokyo around New Zealand to Antarctica and back.
Almost every year the team at ORI makes cruises in the Indo-Pacific region, searching for clues that will tell them more about the life history of catadromous eels. The high costs of operating research vessels (at least $10,000 a day) are assumed by the Japanese government. As Miller said, the research is motivated by Japan’s hunger for eel. The thought is that if they knew where and under what conditions eels reproduced, then they might have a better chance of hatching and raising eels in captivity in a cost-effective way. The ability to do so would alleviate pressure on the wild fishery, make eel meat more affordable, and preserve an important part of Japanese cultural heritage.
On entering ORI I passed a young woman in the hall and asked where I might find Mike Miller. Soon enough I was shaking hands with a tall, broad man with a short-cropped beard wearing a plaid shirt; he looked like a lumberjack. Mike brought me into his office and we sat down at his desk. Next to his computer was a framed photo of his expedition team from the previous cruise. He stood beside his much smaller Japanese colleagues, sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb.
Originally from Oklahoma, Mike got involved in eel research through his professor at the University of Maine at Orono, James McCleave. Mike had accompanied Jim on a 1989 cruise to the Sargasso Sea, and though the expedition was not successful in its objective—to catch adult eels on the spawning grounds—he got his first taste of what it was like to be out in the middle of an ocean.
“It’s a form of pure nature that most people don’t even know exists,” he said.
McCleave introduced Miller to Katsumi Tsukamoto at the Ocean Research Institute in Tokyo, and he was invited to join a 1991 cruise in the Pacific on the R/V Hakuho Maru. Miller enthusiastically accepted. Tsukamoto was trying to locate the then-unknown spawning area of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, by cruising the ocean with fine-mesh nets in search of eel larvae.
It would be the fifth trip for Katsumi and the Hakuho Maru in search of Anguilla japonica. Only a hundred or so larvae of Japanese eels had ever been captured, and never in high enough concentration or small enough size to indicate the location of spawning. But on that trip in 1991, one evening near the end of the cruise, Tsukamoto, Miller, and the rest of the crew captured for the first time very small larvae of the Japanese eel in the region to the west of the island of Guam and the other Mariana Islands. It was an evening the team came to call the “longest night,” as they collected and processed more than nine hundred small eel larvae, a quarter inch long or less, before sunrise.