In the fall of 2021, a harmful algal bloom spread along the open-sea coast of eastern Hokkaido. What the Japanese call akashio—red tide—swept through coastal waters, triggering one of the worst fisheries disasters Japan has ever experienced due to a harmful algal bloom. Sea urchins, whelks, sea cucumbers, and octopus died en masse, with damages estimated at up to 10 billion Japanese yen (Siswanto et al., 2024), highlighting fishers’ vulnerability to red tide outbreaks which are expected to become more frequent with climate change (Gobler, 2020).

Figure 1: the 2021 Red Tide in Eastern Hokkaido affected many kinds of fish and shellfish, including salmon, whelks, and sea urchins. Photo taken on October 6, 2021. Photo Credit: Akkeshi Fishery Cooperative. 

This vulnerability falls hardest on fishers who have been working to manage their local stocks, like the Akkeshi Fishery Cooperative’s sea urchin harvesters (see Figure 1). Die offs like this raise environmental justice concerns when we see how communities that contributed least to the causes of climate change are disproportionately impacted by its consequences (Williams, 2021). In this essay, we draw on a policy analysis we conducted to explore how to better protect Japanese fishers against such distributional injustices.

A Fishery Built on Voluntary Local Coordination

Among the hardest hit by the red tide event were sea urchin harvesters in Akkeshi, a small coastal town where diving for short-spined sea urchins is more than an occupation. Unlike industrial fisheries, Akkeshi’s sea urchin harvesters work only a few months each year. They transplant juvenile urchins, which are harvested once they mature. They carefully manage harvests, and even halt fishing when stocks are at risk. This collective practice has been established among the sea urchin harvesters over many years, based on past experience and lessons learned from local stock management. The sea urchin harvesters also coordinated the reduction in the number of operating boats in the fishery to three total, with all 31 permit holders working together, choosing intragroup cooperation over competition (Ota et al., 2024). Their experience offers a powerful example of voluntarily coordinated local fishery management.

Figure 2: Drifted sea urchins near the Akkeshi shoreline. Photo taken on September 28, 2021. Photo Credit: Akkeshi Fishery Cooperative.

While sea urchin harvesting continues through unique local management efforts, the practice of sea urchin diving exists in a gray zone from a policy perspective. Sea urchin harvesting is considered neither fully wild capture nor a conventional aquaculture practice (Agatsuma, 2020). Urchin seedlings are released into coastal waters and tended, but they are not fed. They grow in open coastal ecosystems, which are shaped by currents, temperature, and kelp forests rather than cages or pens as in conventional aquaculture. After the red tide struck in September 2021, divers chose to stop harvesting entirely to prevent long-term depletion of the resource, which led to their suffering significant income losses. The policy gray zone especially matters in these types of cases, because when disaster hits, it leaves harvesters without solutions for income and feeding their families. Sea urchins harvesters end up falling through the cracks of Japan’s fisheries compensation system.  

When Safety Nets Don’t Fit Reality

Built on principles of shared risk, Japan’s fisheries mutual aid system pools fishers’ contributions to distribute financial losses among participants rather than relying on direct government subsidies. Japan’s fisheries mutual aid system has supported fishers for decades. But Akkeshi’s sea urchin harvesters discovered a painful truth: systems designed for “typical” fisheries often fail those who do things differently.

Losses tied to juvenile sea urchins, purchased, released, and then wiped out by red tide, were not covered. The important policy and legal  distinction for sea urchin fishers is their “semi-cultivated fishery” designation, which ultimately means that the fishers do not qualify for aquaculture insurance. While certain existing policies compensate for the cost of purchasing new seedlings, it takes years for these urchins to reach marketable size, leaving harvesters economically stranded in the interim. Eventually, decisions regarding the scope and coverage of the mutual aid system made at the national level left little room for local cooperatives to respond flexibly, even though they possessed specialized and inherited knowledge of the waters and species with whom they work and interact.

As a result, fishers who had acted responsibly by conserving stocks and coordinating harvest decisions were left economically exposed by the combination of a red tide incident (which have become more frequent due to warming water resulting from climate change, as well as the impacts of pollution) and the particularities of policy decisions about which they lacked representation. In this way, we can begin to see the contours of at least two prongs of environmental injustice at work, that of representational injustice within the overarching policy framework in which the fishers found themselves, and the distributional, material injustice that was the result.

Rethinking Adaptation: From Compensation to Capability

Red tides are not new to Japan, but climate change is altering their scale, frequency, and geographic reach (Gobler, 2020). Warmer waters and shifting nutrient dynamics are creating conditions where harmful algae can thrive in places they rarely did before.

For Akkeshi, the 2021 event was not just an anomaly to sea urchin harvesters—it was a warning. Climate change is testing governance systems built on the assumption of stable ocean conditions. Yet, the event reveals that those whose livelihoods are protected and those whose are treated as exceptions can have very different outcomes in practice as we face greater climate impacts.

So, what does meaningful adaptation look like in this case?

Our policy analysis explored options ranging from modifying mutual aid systems to investing in community-based hatcheries and incentivizing sea urchin farming. But the deeper lesson goes beyond any single policy tool. Climate adaptation must move from compensating losses ex post, to strengthening the capacity of communities to respond, adapt, and decide for themselves. In other words, policy-making must make space for the expertise and agency of marginalized fishers, and it must be flexible so as to encompass harsh unforeseen future scenarios.

That means:

• Recognizing hybrid and place-based fisheries such as the sea urchin harvesters in Akkeshi
• Empowering local cooperatives to play a real role in designing safety nets that serve their needs
• Treating climate impacts as collective responsibilities 

Why This Story Matters Beyond Japan

Akkeshi’s sea urchin harvesters are not an isolated, or otherwise exceptional instance. Around the world, small-scale and community-based fisheries are facing climate shocks that existing policies are not designed to handle. Small-scale fisheries are often the least protected, despite contributing minimally to climate change itself. And so, as the ocean continues to change, the question is no longer whether adaptation is necessary, but rather: who are the policies and adaptations serving? 

In sum, the red tide in Hokkaido reminds us that equity is not an add-on to climate policy, but a process that sensitizes us to multiple dimensions of environmental injustice (O’Neill, Schneider, and Lozano 2025). If we are serious about creating just and sustainable ocean futures, we need to start listening more closely to communities like Akkeshi, because that will ensure that their local knowledge is recognized, respected, and meaningfully incorporated into policy design.

The full policy analysis is available here: “A Policy Analysis for Climate Adaptation in Japanese Fisheries.”

About the authors:

Yulan Kim (lead author) is a postdoctoral researcher at Ocean Nexus. She earned her PhD in Public Policy and Management from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on promoting equitable policy analysis and improving modes of public service delivery that employ cross-sector collaboration focusing mainly on collaborative governance. Before joining the Evans School she worked as a research associate at the Korea Development Institute (KDI) where she managed a public program that provides policy consulting for governments of developing countries. She holds a MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BA in International Studies from Ewha Womans University.

Shingo Hamada is a professor of food studies at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Osaka Shoin Women’s University. His research revolves around the environmental history and cultural politics of seafood in coastal communities, with a special focus on fermented seafood and commoners’ fish such as herring. Using ethnographic research methods and the approaches in the anthropology of science, his dissertation research investigated how a collaborative stock enhancement program for regional herring stocks develop in Japan while managerial responsibility and coastal stewardship are blurred in an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors.

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