Securing Fish for the Nation: Food Security and Governmentality in Japan

Abstract

Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including for food. Protectionist practices have led to entrenched interests in some sections of government and industry. Protectionist ideas are used in nationalist arguments against food imports. The protection of domestic food production, however, resonates positively well beyond the groups that benefit economically from protection and those that indulge in chauvinist notions about the dangers of “foreign” food. The issue, therefore, is broader than interest-group capture or xenophobia. We find it is deeply embedded in Japanese policies relating to food domestically and internationally, and goes beyond government policy as such, involving ways of thinking about protection of national culture, and social and environmental responsibility. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality helps to explain this approach to food security, accounting for the balancing act between free trade and protection as well as the pervasiveness of this rationality beyond government as such.

魚の確保は国家のため: 日本の食料保護と「統治性」

日本は1800年代の後半の近代化開始以来、食品の供給 確保は、日本の政治の 関心事である。その傾向は、日本が1980年代に裕福な国としての地位を固めた後でも、国際競争から国内の食糧生産を守るために、大きな政治的懸念として続いている。 食品を含めて世界貿易に依存している日本が保護主義をとるのは予想に反する政策である。保護主義政策は、政府や産業のセクションが既得権を持つ原因となった。また、保護主義的なアイデアは、食品の輸入に対してナショナリストに論議で援用されている。しかし、国内の食糧生産の保護は、経済的利益を目的とするグループや、“外国”食品の危険性を訴える国粋優越主義的な思想を持っているグループに留まらず、これより広くいろいろなグループにも共感を呼んでいる。そのため、問題は、保護主義に関心を持っているグループや排外主義よりも大きい。 つまり、保護主義思想は、国内外での食品に関わる日本の政策に深く関っており、国の文化の保護、保護に関する社会的及び環境的責任に対する考え方をも含むことより、単なる政策にとどまらないと考えられる。当論文ではミシェル フーコーが提唱する「統治性Governmentality」の理論を援用し、自由貿易と保護の関係だけでなく、政府を越た視点で日本における食料保護について解明する。

Keywords:

• Japan
• food security
• governmentality
• free trade
• market intervention
• fisheries
• whaling

Acknowledgments

This paper was much improved by helpful comments from Shiro Armstrong, Graeme Smith and Peter Drysdale, as well as two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Our point here is not to engage in whether such a defence of whaling is spurious (which it no doubt is) but rather to draw attention to the extent to which food security has permeated the framing of Japanese fisheries policies.

2. Members of the Friends of Fish group include Argentina, Australia, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, Pakistan, Peru and the USA.

3. Centrally, in the Kyoto Action Plan the notion of “sustainability” enables the emphasis to be placed on the production of food (in this case, fish) rather than on trade as a means of securing the provision of foodstuffs. Moreover, “sustainability” is also arguably a red flag with regards to the WTO, given the latter’s poor environmental record and its perceived role in forcing through free trade at the expense of national environmental protection initiatives. Lastly, historically tensions between the FAO and the WTO are not new.

4. We use “neoliberal” and “governmental” state interchangeably.

5. In his lecture Foucault (2007) shows how the state’s increasing involvement in fuelling and funnelling the accumulation of riches called for new forms of power, where power was no longer exercised as top-down expression of sovereign power (the power to kill) but rather bottom-up, productive power to enable and enhance the population’s own productive capacities, such as discipline (which is exercised over the individual) and biopower (which targets the population as a whole).

6. For more expansive analysis of the role of fisheries in Japan’s imperial expansion, see Koh and Barclay (2007) and Chen (2009).

7. The Japanese system of fisheries regulation is thus famous for being an effective and efficient form of “co-management” (Makino and Matsuda, 2005).

8. For a more expansive discussion of gaikaku dantai in fisheries see Barclay and Koh (2008).

9. Katsuobushi – smoke-dried and mould-cured skipjack – is a widely used condiment and flavouring in Japanese cuisine.

10. For a case study of public spending on tuna fisheries being used for political ends, see Barclay and Koh (2008).

11. The source does not reveal the design of the survey, which could have been constructed to elicit such an emphatic result.

12. Interview by Kate Barclay and Sunhui Koh with Shōdanren (Consumers Japan) members Toshiko Kanda, Yasue Itō and Takako Hasuo, Tokyo, May 2003. Since 1998 Japan’s self-sufficiency ratio in food calculated on a calorie basis using the Food Balance Sheet method has been around 40 per cent, the lowest among wealthy countries. South Korea is under 50 per cent, Switzerland between 50 and 60 per cent, Australia is over 200 per cent, and France and the USA are both over 120 per cent (Hasegawa, 2010).

13. As evidenced by its website, which features papers such as ‘To What Level Could Japan’s Food Self-Sufficiency Recover?’ (Mashimo, 2009) under the ‘Food Security’ tab.

14. See Epstein (2008) for an extensive development of this argument.

15. A well-known example of this kind of representation is the award-winning documentary The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos.

16. Once again we are setting aside the issue of whether this is done most efficiently: even if it is done less efficiently than another mix of policies would do it, it still sustains the life-enhancing goals of governmentality.