Japan's tuna shortage spawns sushi panic

2007-06-25 04:00:00 PDT Tokyo -- Sushi made with deer meat, anyone? How about a slice of raw horse on that rice?

These are some of the most extreme alternatives being considered by chefs as shortages of tuna threaten to remove it from Japan's sushi menus -- something as unthinkable as baseball without hot dogs in the United States.

In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world's rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.

News shows ran reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, U.S. sushi variations like avocado rolls.

"It's like America running out of steak," said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan's national union of sushi chefs. "Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi."

The problem is the growing appetite for sushi and sashimi outside Japan, not only in the United States but also in newly wealthy countries like Russia, South Korea and China. And the problem will not go away. Fishing experts say the shortages and rising prices will only become more severe as the population of bluefin tuna -- the big, slow-maturing type most favored in sushi -- fails to keep up with demand.

Last year, dozens of nations responded by agreeing to reduce annual tuna catches in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea by 20 percent to stabilize populations. But the decision only seemed to crystallize fears in Japan about tuna shortages, helping to push up prices of the three species of bluefin that are the best tuna to eat raw.

Since the start of last year, the average price of imported frozen northern and Pacific bluefin has risen more than a third, to $13 a pound, according to Japan's Fisheries Agency.

Wholesalers say that competition from foreign fishing fleets and buyers has made the top-quality tuna increasingly hard to come by.

Tadashi Oono, who sells big red slabs of tuna from a Tokyo fish market, said that three years ago, he routinely sold two or three top-grade bluefin every day. This year, he said, he sometimes finds only two or three tuna of that quality to sell in a month.

The tuna shortage is also having a more concrete effect on menus at Japanese sushi bars. Fukuzushi in Tokyo is having a tougher time finding high-quality fish at reasonable prices.

The restaurant's owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminds him of the last time he had no tuna to sell -- in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.

"We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good," he recalled. "It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell."