Our second day of preparation for our trip began with an hour of Japanese. \u79c1\u306f\u4e00\u5e74\u751f\u306e\u3067\u3001\u3080\u305a\u304b\u3057\u304b\u3063\u305f\u3067\u3059\u3002We went over honorific structure and introductions… hopefully we will be able to practice it more!<\/p>\n
Afterward, biology professors\u00a0Amy Johnson and Olaf Ellers came to lead the discussion on the following readings:<\/p>\n
Biology is almost entirely absent in\u00a0discussion on fisheries.\u00a0<\/strong>To begin, Professor Selinger asked what disciplines we thought these papers belonged to. I would have\u00a0never thought to ask a question like that, but it is such a\u00a0relevant question considering the focus of our trip is to view subjects through an interdisciplinary\u00a0lens. We decided that the first article seemed like it was written by a (social) historian\u00a0while the second article seemed to be written by an\u00a0anthropologist. Biology was never mentioned because whenever fisheries were talked about, there were only nonspecific descriptions–there was no mention of what species, where they came from, etc. I actually didn’t notice this upon reading (shame on me), but I’m glad it was pointed out. I would just assume that scientists would be involved in fishery management, but this is actually not the case! However, we did have two biology professors in the room, so we dove right into population growth curves and what the maximum sustainable yield model is. One of the problems with this model is that it does not account for environmental variation. Basically, it works until it doesn’t.<\/p>\n Professor Johnson showed us a graph\u00a0depicting the fishery boom, which happened shortly after World War II. What was really surprising (but actually not that surprising when you think about it) was that this pattern–basically, stability then boom then collapse then stability then collapse–happened in pretty much every\u00a0country. It is not unique to Japan (yay we’re all greedy and ignorant).\u00a0Another interesting tidbit: when we fish, we tend to take the biggest ones available. This adds a selective pressure, allowing the smallest and\/or slowest-growing fish to survive and reproduce. Eventually the fish become\u00a0all small, which is not desirable for humans. How do we prevent this? The easiest solution would be to either stop fishing or select for small fish, but I doubt anyone would ever do that…. This is probably why we\u00a0farm fish and genetically modify them to grow bigger and at a faster rate. There is also the Roughgarden model, which basically allows for an optimal population size despite the unknown variables (such as how many fish there are in the population and what their reproduction rate is). Sounds perfect! Except that no one cares for some reason (maybe it’s not as profitable?). Again, there is a problem in the fishery industry in that scientists are only begrudgingly involved, if there’s any involvement.<\/p>\n Hope is a thing with scales.\u00a0<\/strong>(With all the talk about hope, I couldn’t help myself.) From the second reading, we learn that fishermen described the disaster on March 11, 2011 as four-fold: there was the earthquake (natural), tsunami (natural), radiation contamination (manmade), and deadly rumor (manmade). The words in the parenthesis reference what kind of disasters they were. Something interesting from the reading is that Professor\u00a0Takahashi\u00a0makes a distinction between the social repercussions of each type of disaster. Natural disasters bring people together whereas manmade disasters don\u2019t since people don\u2019t want to rebuild in contaminated areas. But there’s hope to be had! Some interesting questions that came up from this reading include: what is hope vs delusion?\u00a0Is hope having alternative fisheries to sustain you?\u00a0What about a\u00a0fishery available for many generations? Or is hope\u00a0just doing something to pay our bills? (Like fishing out whatever you can to sell then fishing for the next.) And what happens when we use tourism\u00a0to help out fisheries (like opening a seafood restaurant or farmer’s market)? It seems likely that the fishery will cease to exist.<\/p>\n Questions to ask Professor Takahashi:<\/p>\n It was another\u00a0intellectually-engaging day in the Asian Studies conference room! The significant\u00a0takeaway from this session is that we were able to discuss\u00a0these readings from a biological perspective. We also\u00a0were able to prepare some questions for when we meet Professor Takahashi in Japan. Big thank you to Professor Johnson and Professor Ellers for meeting with us, and of course thank you to our senseis for\u00a0organizing everything.<\/p>\n P.S. Unfortunately, I will be missing the next two meetings (currently writing this post in a hotel room in Baltimore) because I have to watch my sister graduate. But fear not, I will still be doing the readings and updating the blog while I’m away.<\/p>\n P.P.S.\u00a0The past two discussions had a common theme of distrusting science. It’s interesting to note that Japan has\u00a0a\u00a0general trust of science whereas the US does not. So, I want to put in a shameless plug for\u00a0an outreach project in science communication that Bowdoin students\u00a0(including myself) have put together: click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our second day of preparation for our trip began with an hour of Japanese. \u79c1\u306f\u4e00\u5e74\u751f\u306e\u3067\u3001\u3080\u305a\u304b\u3057\u304b\u3063\u305f\u3067\u3059\u3002We went over honorific structure and introductions… hopefully we will be able to practice it more! Afterward, biology professors\u00a0Amy Johnson and Olaf Ellers came to lead the discussion on the following readings: Endless Modernization\u00a0by\u00a0Satsuki Takahashi Four-fold Disaster\u00a0by\u00a0Satsuki Takahashi Biology is almost … Continue reading “Fisheries and the Distrust of Science”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":483,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-24"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/483"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n