People in Japan are eating a lot less fish now than they used to, but why?

Japan’s per-person fish consumption has dropped by almost 50 percent in just a generation.

Japan is, in many ways, a piscivore’s paradise. As a compact island nation, when you’re in Japan you’re never very far away from the sea, and in addition to the country’s representative cuisine of sushi, Japanese culinary traditions include an abundance of grilled and simmered fish dishes.

And yet, these days Japan is eating a lot less fish than it used to. The obvious explanation might be to say “Well, Japan’s population is shrinking, so obviously the country is going to be eating less fish,” except that Japan’s per-person fish consumption has fallen, and by quite a lot. According to statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Japan’s per-person fish consumption peaked in 2001, with an average of 40.2 kilograms (88.6 pounds) of fish eaten per person in Japan. Fast forward to 2022, the latest year for which the ministry has posted its food supply and demand tables on its publicly viewable website, and that amount has dropped to 22 kilograms of fish eaten per person per year, a decline of over 45 percent from the peak and the lowest amount on record since the ministry began collecting such statistics in 1960.

Meanwhile, Japan’s per-person consumption of meat (i.e. land-based animals) has been increasing. Per-person meat consumption passed fish consumption in 2011, and in 2022 reached 33.5 kilograms per person annually, showing that Japan, collectively, is eating around one and a half times as much meat as fish.

▼ Our reporting team’s taste test of Kiki’s Delivery Service hamburgers further contributed to Japan’s meat consumption levels.

This dietary shift has been getting renewed interest recently, in part due to a column in Japanese online news magazine JB Press, which cited the statistics mentioned above. That column speculates that one reason Japan is eating less fish these days is that Japan has fewer specialized fishmonger shops than it used to, having gone from roughly 50,000 such businesses in 1980 to only 10,000 or so today. This theory, though, doesn’t hold much water. Fishmonger shops didn’t close down because of a lack of demand for fish after 1980 (per-person fish consumption continued to grow until 2001, remember), but because shoppers started buying more of their fish, along with many other categories of groceries, at supermarkets, which offer a more comprehensive product lineup and convenient, centralized locations, especially for residents of urban and urban-adjacent areas.

The ministry itself offers a few more plausible explanations, saying in its report that while fish is broadly seen by the Japanese population as healthy and delicious, modern consumers also find it expensive and a hassle to prepare, with some not even knowing how to it at all.

▼ Fish are cooking’s hard mode.

Let’s take a closer look at those points. First, fish may not be as premium-priced in Japan as it is in some other countries, but even in Japan, meat is often the more economical option at the supermarket in terms of calories per yen, so if your goal is to have a full stomach and a mostly full wallet, it’s usually more budget-friendly to cook with meat (pork and chicken especially) than fish. The same goes for eating out, too: It’s much easier to find meaty cheap but filling options (beef bowls, hamburgers, karaage fried chicken) than fish ones.

Shifting the focus back to cooking at home, it’s also often a lot easier to expand meat-centric recipes. If you’re making curry or pasta, doubling the recipe size is pretty simple: just toss in twice as much chicken into the roux or ground meat into the tomato sauce. Cooking more fish, though, often entails a lot more work, whether that’s turning over individual fillets so they cook properly on both sides, keeping a close eye on simmered fish so that it doesn’t fall apart in the pot, removing heads, skin, or tails prior to cooking, or a number of other inconveniences that you don’t have to worry about if you instead cook something that uses, for instance, a pack of pre-sliced pork strips. Fish also tends to keep for a shorter time after cooking than meat dishes do, so in addition to the hassle of making it in the first place, the benefit of making enough to have leftovers is reduced as well.

▼ There’s a reason we cooked 53 packs of curry all at once, not 53 fish.

One factor that neither the ministry report nor the JB Press column seems to consider is the shift in Japanese household sizes and work patterns. It’s now far more common for single young adults in Japan to move out of their parents’ homes than it was a generation or two ago. Many people are staying unmarried much later into adulthood than their parents or grandparents did, and with roommates being an uncommon living arrangement in Japan, the result is many more people living alone, often in small or studio apartments.

When it only takes you a few long strides to go from one end of your living space to the other, that means that nothing in your home is very far away from your kitchen, and it’s not uncommon for people in such situations to avoid cooking fish at home so as not to have fishy odors transfer to their clothing, bedsheets, and other non-culinary-related belongings. Also, as discussed above, it’s a lot easier to make large batches of food that’ll keep for a longer time if you’re making meat-based dishes. If you’re an adult who lives by yourself, the idea of making a giant batch of food al at once and then coasting on the leftovers instead of grocery shopping and cooking every day after you clock out of work starts to get very attractive. Even for married couples, it’s now the norm for both husband and wife to work, further increasing the need to focus on quick, easy-to-prepare meals.

So perhaps the most accurate takeaway from all this is that it’s not so much that Japan doesn’t like eating fish as much as it used to, but that a number of modern lifestyle aspects are making it comparatively more difficult to eat fish than it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago. With work/life balance becoming something that a lot of people in Japan are reevaluating these days, maybe “I want to get home from work with enough time to relax and cook fish” will become a new workstyle paradigm.

Source: JB Press via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin
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