This year' July 20 is Japan's summer "Dirt Ugly Day" – the customary day when every household in Japan eats eels. But this year, there may be many people who will not be able to eat eels.
The crisis of declining eel production in Japan continues. According to the Japan Fisheries Agency, from November last year to April this year, the catch of domestic eel fry in Japan fell by about 40%, 8 to 9 tons less than last year, due to the impact of ocean currents and climate change. As reported by many media such as Japan's Mainichi Shimbun at the beginning of the year, Japanese eels are facing a situation of "extreme no fishing".
This wasn't good news for Japanese restaurants, and the shortage of raw materials was immediately reflected in the food and beverage market, especially those older shops known for their eels — which had to raise prices.
According to Japan's Asahi Shimbun, the purchase price of eels in Nagoya City, Japan this year is 30% higher than last year, and the purchase price of 1 kilogram of eel (about 5 horses) is 5750 yen (equivalent to about 345 yuan). The shop had to raise the price of eel from 3,100 yen (about 186 yuan) to 3,600 yen (about 216 yuan), which had been maintained since 2014. In another eel shop, "Shirakawa (しら河)", all eel menus have been increased by 15%.
We've reported on why the decline in eel catches triggers such a knock-on effect – the most critical reason is the reproductive properties of eels.
Humans know how to raise eels, but eel breeding is still a scientific problem – it is difficult and costly to grow a small eel fry through artificial insemination. At present, the cost of an artificial eel seedling is about 60,000 yuan, which is obviously impossible to commercially mass produce.
Under the premise that wild eel fry are already scarce, human overfishing has further contributed to the shortage of eels. Freshwater eels usually grow in rivers, but spawning must be migrated to the ocean, and fry grow to a certain stage before swimming back into freshwater. This long road of growth is naturally depleted, and most of the fry are harvested and reared by humans before they swim back to fresh water. In 2016, only 68 wild eels were caught nationwide.
The eels we consume today are farmed from wild eel fry, consuming wild resources. When market demand exceeds the number of wild fry per year, eels are "endangered".
For many Japanese consumers, a summer without eel dishes is incomplete. Although there are more than one ugly day of soil use every year (this is a day calculated according to twelve branches, and there are 7 ugly days of soil use in 2018), eating eels on ugly days in summer has become a spiritual sustenance.
However, merchants are also trying to reverse consumers' "obsession" with eels. Some supermarkets and barbecue shops began to promote beef sales in the summer, and some launched summer grilled steak promotions, because the pronunciation of "cow" is the same as "ugly" in Japanese, so the merchants played the concept of "soil cow day" to replace the ugly day of the soil that must eat eels.
This practice may only be implemented on a small scale in the short term, but it may change consumers' summer spending habits somewhat in the future. After all, the earliest summer to eat eel is also a deliberate product of the merchants - the Edo period scholar Hiraga Gennai wrote a plaque for a friend's newly opened eel shop, "The ugly day of the earth is the day of the eel, and if you eat it, you will not lose to the summer heat (土用のugの日うなぎの日食すれば夏負けすソすととなし)". This made his friend's shop sell well and sparked a follow-up, and since then eating eel has become a long-standing tradition in Japan.