Emperor Akihito & The Bluegill
In a speech earlier this week, Emperor Akihito stated that his heart felt pained because of his role in introducing an American species of fish to Japan. As this video shows, the Bluegill Akihito brought to Japan in 1960 somehow found their way into Lake Biwa, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem and wiping out native Japanese fish:
The International Herald Tribune has more on the events that created the current situation in which Lake Biwa fishermen are netting nothing but Bluegill:
“Bluegills are the ones I brought back from the U.S. some 50 years ago and donated to a Fisheries Agency research institute,” Akihito said in a speech Sunday in the western city of Otsu.
“In those days, we had high expectations of raising them for food, and I’m deeply troubled by how it turned out,” Akihito said.
The descendants of Akihito’s souvenir have turned into an ecological nuisance, forcing local officials to exterminate them and turn them into fertilizer and chicken feed. They even have infested the moat around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
After the emperor brought an unspecified number of the fish, the Fisheries Agency then raised and cultured the donation and gave 1,400 of them in 1963-1964 to local officials for further cultivation at the nearby Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake.
Then the population exploded. The number peaked at 50 million in 2002, but an extermination campaign has cut that number in half, officials say.
Infestation of foreign fish species, including bluegill and large-mouthed bass, have become a national concern in recent years as they eat up native fish and other water creatures.
At Lake Biwa, catch of local delicacies such as crucian carp has declined sharply since the foreign fish invasion began in the 1960s, local fisheries official Koichi Fujiwara said.
Officials initially tried to fight bass and bluegill through consumption, but it never caught on. A plan to market bluegill also failed because the fish did not grow as big as expected due to overcrowding.
“It’s unfortunate, because Bluegill tastes pretty good,” said Fujiwara. “We sometimes make fried fish.”
