The Sushi King Who Went to Somalia: How Japan’s Most Well-known Tuna Purchaser Says He Turned Pirates Into Fishermen

At the peak of the Somali piracy disaster, with twenty navies patrolling the coast, a Tokyo restaurant proprietor flew in with 4 fishing boats and a promise to purchase no matter they caught. The assaults collapsed. Who deserves the credit score continues to be argued.

The coast, 2011

In 2011, Somali pirates attacked 237 ships.

They have been working a whole bunch of miles out into the Indian Ocean from motherships, boarding tankers and bulk carriers with ladders and rifles, and crusing them again to anchor off the Somali coast. At any given time they have been holding a number of hundred sailors hostage, generally for years, ready for ransoms that bumped into the tens of millions.

Most of the globe knew the issue from one incident two years earlier: the April 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the seize of its American captain, Richard Phillips, which ended with Navy SEAL snipers firing from the fantail of a destroyer and have become a Tom Hanks movie.

By 2011, the response was huge. Warships from the United States, the European Union, NATO, China, India, Russia, Japan and others have been operating patrols by the Gulf of Aden. Shipping firms had begun placing armed guards aboard. Ships have been hardened with razor wire and citadels.

None of it had stopped the assaults. The 12 months earlier than, Somali pirates had taken extra hostages than in any 12 months on report.

The sushi man

Kiyoshi Kimura was not an apparent individual to get entangled.

He was, and is, the proprietor of Kiyomura Corporation, which runs the Sushi Zanmai chain throughout Japan. In Tokyo he is named the Tuna King, as a result of each January he buys the costliest fish on the first public sale of the 12 months on the central market, pays a worth that makes the entrance web page of each newspaper, and sells it in his eating places on the regular menu worth. In January 2026 he paid 510 million yen — about $3.2 million — for a single bluefin from Oma, a globe report.

Tuna is his commerce. And tuna is the rationale he says he went to Somalia.

The waters off the Somali coast are a number of the richest yellowfin grounds within the Indian Ocean. For 20 years, with no functioning authorities to police them, international trawlers had been fishing them out. Somali fishermen, who had as soon as labored these waters from small boats, had been pushed off their very own coast.

Many of them, by the accounts that emerged in these years, have been the boys now doing the hijacking.

What he says he did

Kimura has advised the story in Japanese interviews, and the main points come from these.

Around 2012, he went to the Somali coast and met with males who had been concerned in piracy. He says he needed to know why they have been doing it.

His conclusion was that they didn’t need to be pirates. They needed to feed their households, and the fishing had collapsed.

So he handled it as a provide drawback.

He says he supplied 4 fishing boats. He taught the crews to catch yellowfin tuna. He arrange freezer capability on shore so the fish would preserve till it may very well be shipped. He helped Somalia have interaction with the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, the physique that manages the fishery. And he dedicated to purchasing what they caught, at a secure worth, so {that a} tuna was price cash the day it got here out of the water.

“They didn’t even like pirating. I urged that they catch tuna as a substitute, and make a proud dwelling for his or her households.”

What occurred to the numbers

Somali piracy didn’t fade. It collapsed.

By 2015, profitable Somali hijackings had stopped altogether. The anchorages off the coast the place hijacked ships had sat for years have been empty.

Who will get the credit score

The International Maritime Bureau, which compiles the figures, has a transparent view of why. In its phrases, the decline got here from “transnational navies, the hardening of vessels and different suggestions within the delivery {industry}’s Best Management Practices, the usage of non-public armed safety groups and the stabilizing affect of Somalia’s central authorities.”

Kimura’s title shouldn’t be on that listing. It doesn’t seem in any naval or maritime-industry account of how the disaster ended.

What his program did shouldn’t be one thing anybody exterior his personal interviews has measured. Four boats on one stretch of coast shouldn’t be a nationwide fishing {industry}. The males who stopped hijacking ships in 2012 did so, overwhelmingly, as a result of boarding a ship had turn out to be a great way to get shot or spend life in a Seychelles jail.

But the pirates’ personal rationalization for why they began — international fleets took our fish, so we took their ships — was by no means actually contested. And the one one who confirmed up providing to purchase fish as a substitute of sending a frigate was a sushi restaurant proprietor from Tokyo.

He has by no means claimed to have completed it alone. The web has claimed it for him, repeatedly, normally within the type “a Japanese sushi chef ended Somali piracy,” which isn’t true and which he has not mentioned.

The two tuna tales

There is a model of Kimura that Japan is aware of properly: the person within the white coat and the large grin, standing over a record-price bluefin with a cleaver each January, having simply spent a fortune on a fish he’ll promote at a loss. It is a publicity stunt, and it’s a superb one.

The Somalia story is the opposite model of the identical man. The intuition is an identical — in order for you the fish, go the place the fish are and pay for them — and so is the self-promotion. He tells the story as a result of it’s good for commerce.

Both issues could be true. The publicity stunt that places his face on each entrance web page in Japan can also be, by any affordable accounting, the costliest commercial within the nation. And the fishing program that he describes in Somalia, no matter its actual scale, was a sushi man’s reply to an issue the navies of the globe had spent 4 years failing to resolve by pressure.

So it’s a footnote, or it’s the half everybody else missed. The numbers say navies. Kimura says tuna. It was most likely each, in some proportion that no one is ever going to measure — and the one one who went ashore to strive the second was the Tuna King.