The season for seaweed harvesting is between the end of February and the beginning of May. You should check it out if you are here during this period. Fishers from other parts of the country are shocked by the wakame seaweed here, often remarking that they had never seen such natural wakame in their lives before visiting Chiburi. Why don’t you try to find wakame somewhere on the Island?

Here we take a moment to speak to Mr. Tokuda who runs the wakame processing plant. Before working here, he worked at the city hall, but he took over the family business and became a fisherman.

──Where can you collect wakame?

You can get it almost anywhere in Chiburijima. They grow thickly around the rocks and wharf right up to the edges of the beach. They even grow by the wharf in Kurī Port Terminal. When I was small, I would also run around collecting Wakame.

──What kind of special qualities does the Chiburi Wakame have?

The fact that it is so natural. It’s completely different from the kind of thickness meat has. The density of the ocean water in these parts is said to be high is these parts with a particularly bold flavor.
──Is natural Wakame really so rare?

Nowadays, almost all Wakame is grown in cultivation. It’s very difficult to harvest natural wakame. The process is the same as catching sazae (turban shell). While looking through a hydroscope in the ocean, you lower a long sickle into the ocean to cut the wakame and then pull it up. In places where the coastal tide is more rapid, the wakame will escape in the current as soon as it’s cut, making things quite difficult.

──If you were to try to do that from scratch it seems quite difficult.

Unlike sazae, Wakame doesn’t move and grows densely along the ocean floor, so all you have to do is drop anchor and start cutting. It’s like shaving a head bald. You don’t need any naval skills. But, it’s quite difficult until you get used to it. There are also a lot of older fisherman in Chiburijima, so the question of whether they can continue or not depends on whether they have successors or not.

──And so that’s why you have chosen to become a fisherman?

Yes, I’ve decided to give it a try.

──So in the processing plant you clean the wakame and dry it? For some reason there are so many washing machines.

Once we harvest the wakame, we have to remove the salt with tap water and then dehydrate them in the washing machines. After that, we lay out a net and place the wakame, one by one, in rows in order to remove the remaining moisture. Then we blow warm air on the wakame and dry them out even further using a machine that looks something like a hair dryer. Of course, you can dry them in the sun but that isn’t the most efficient method. Since the fishing season for Wakame is limited, if the weather isn’t the best, we can’t dry the wakame. In this sense, the machine is the more stable alternative. On top of that, the color of the wakame surprisingly turns out better when we use the machine. It’s a very pretty green.

──The fishing season is between the end of February and the beginning of May right? What do you do outside of the fishing season?

That’s when we will harvest sazae and work on a slew of other things.

The name Chibu was mentioned in an old text from the Nara Period (710-794 AD). In that text, which was a sort of tax document, it detailed that Chibu sent Wakame to the Imperial Court in Nara as an offering.

Wakame harvesting has been around since ancient times, and since the water around Chiburijima is rather shallow, it is a breeding ground for species, like Wakame, sazae, and abalone, which all tend to favor shallow waters. This is called “kanagi fishing”—a quite a primitive fishing style where you look into the water to find your prey, and it hasn’t changed very much over the years.

There are other fishing methods too, such as fishing for squid on rowboat and pole-and-line fishing. But, as times have changed, engine-powered boats have come to allow us to fish in places farther away. As these developments continued, more people began to work away from the island, and fishermen decreased in number, thinking that if they have to go far to fish anyway, they might as well find somewhere more convenient to fish at than Chiburijima. And so, slowly the number of fisherman started to decrease in Chiburijima.

However, compared to the other methods kanagi fishing, is fairly easy to get into, and so the number of people pursuing it has stayed fairly stable.