ABSTRACT
Since pre-modern times Japan has heavily depended on marine fisheries as a source of food protein, and a cluster of technological innovations in the early twentieth century opened the way for development of fisheries as a modern industrial sector for the island nation.1 In the interwar period, Japanese fishermen began to utilize larger and mechanized vessels, employ various catching devices that permitted efficient harvesting of marine resources, and adopted refrigeration techniques to embark upon distant-water operations. Japanese commercial fishing boats began to expand their sphere of activities beyond the nation’s coastal waters across the Pacific Ocean, well into the high seas off Alaska and Canada’s British Columbia province. That Japanese fishing fleets began operating in the high seas in the far-off Northeast Pacific meant that it was necessary for them to share the zone of commercial cultivation with North American fishing boats with pre-existing stakes in that part of the ocean. The commingling of fisheries in a shared and increasingly crowded ocean space brought to the fore a dissonance of ideas and practices between Japanese and North Americans and led to frequent international conflicts involving this primary industrial sector.
