Oil Spill Threatens Fish, Future of Japanese Town

MIKUNI, Japan — Braving howling winds and sleet, the weathered fishermen and women of this picturesque town on the remote underbelly of Japan’s western coast on Wednesday pondered a future as black as the oily slop despoiling their sea.

“We fishermen are going to die,” declared Akira Shimizu, 62, as he and others scooped out buckets of fuel oil leaked from a Russian tanker that broke in two and partially ran aground last week. “We can’t make money off this polluted stuff. Who can we complain to?”

Bedecked in rubber boots and plastic rain gear, more than 100 fishermen fought to prevent the spreading oil slick from ravaging waters rich with crab, abalone and other sea treasures so famed they are sent annually to Japan’s imperial family as gifts.

But the fishermen’s primitive tools--long-handled pails and oil-absorbent mats--seemed no match for the 962,000 gallons of oil that began leaking last week from the tanker, bound for Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. And even as the Japanese coast guard and other emergency crews launched their first day of full-scale cleanup with vacuums and chemical neutralizers, powerful winds and 16-foot waves hampered their effort.

Most of the oil spilled from the ship’s bow section, now orange with rust and run aground at Mikuni, about 200 miles west of Tokyo. But the other half of the vessel could pose a major environmental disaster if it begins leaking the 4.3 million gallons of oil still in its belly. Officials are pondering ways to remove the oil from the ship’s hull, settled 2,000 feet under the sea about 70 miles offshore.

The accident’s scale is far smaller than the 11 million gallons spilled from the Exxon Valdez off the Alaska coast in 1989. But it ranks as one of Japan’s worst oil disasters.

And for the seafaring souls who live in this town of 24,300, the disaster was only the latest assault on their livelihoods: Fishing and farming provided 40% of the jobs for town residents 35 years ago; today they provide 11%. The number of ama, the area’s renowned women divers who once scoured the seabed in white kimono, has dwindled to 30. Their average age has climbed to 55 as young women shun the sea for office jobs; the town’s population is aging faster than Japan overall.

“Today’s young people think it’s more fashionable to work in a company,” lamented Noburo Dejima, a local fisherman and innkeeper.

In reverent tones, Dejima recounts how the sea’s bounty kept him from starving after Japan’s defeat in World War II. A once-in-a-lifetime encounter with a giant black jellyfish thrilled him beyond words. Years of surviving the savage surf taught him respect for the ocean. But today’s young people, absorbed with video games and personal computers, have no clue how to dance with nature, he said.

And as goes Mikuni, so goes Japan. Outside the major urban centers of Tokyo and Osaka, the nation’s far-flung provinces are struggling to replace dwindling traditional industries. Fukui prefecture, where Mikuni is located, has cast its lot with the nuclear nemesis, putting 15 power plants along some of the area’s most spectacular coast in what locals call “Nuclear Ginza.” In exchange, the prefecture receives more than $100 million annually in subsidies and fuel-tax income.

Mikuni is blessed more than most villages with its abundant seafood, famous towering cliffs dotted with pine groves and lucrative boat-racing grounds established after the war by Ryoichi Sasakawa, the late billionaire industrialist and war criminal.

As a result, city official Masahiro Honda said, Mikuni hopes to boost tourism as a leading industry. The number of visitors has grown to 4.2 million annually from 3.8 million 10 years ago but has flattened in the past few years after Japan’s high-flying “bubble economy” collapsed in the early 1990s. Officials hope to revive the industry with two newly constructed hot spring resorts and a campaign planned for this spring for nearby prefectures featuring a local beauty queen.

But as rumors about the spill spread as surely as the oil slick, officials are working in overdrive to contain the damage.

At the Mikuni Tourist Assn. office, phones rang every few minutes with queries from reporters and would-be visitors. “Is the crab OK? Has the oil reached the area? Are the inns still operating?” association official Hirotaka Kato said callers asked.

The association has prepared a flier asking reporters not to exaggerate damage, asserting that not all coastal areas have been hit. Crab, shrimp, flounder and other deep-sea fish “have not been influenced at all,” the flier says.

Still, Kato said, the association will not send the imperial family its gift of famed Echizen crab this year. And he noted that the full damage to the town’s tourism industry won’t be known for months, until the seafood is harvested and examined for pollution.

But for shop owners such as Shuichi Yamano, that is too long to live with such uncertainty.

Yamano owns five tourist shops in the town’s bustling market, including a restaurant and gift store. He sells crabs packaged in plastic containers ready for mailing, spindly boiled octopus legs, jars of salmon eggs and grilled snail-on-a-stick. Jabbing his finger at a timetable of the Japanese government’s reaction to the oil spill, Yamano said disaster had been made worse by a slow response.

Echoing complaints widely aired after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Yamano complained that it took four days after the tanker first broke up last Thursday before officials called in the Self-Defense Forces, Japan’s military, for damage operations.

Until then, the coast guard sent out research ships and officials formed crisis teams. Not until Monday did Fukui prefecture formally request that the military intervene, according to the timetable prepared by Mikuni officials.

Within one hour of the request, the Self-Defense Forces had dispatched cleanup materials such as absorbent mats and oil containers; the material arrived Tuesday and full-scale operations began Wednesday.

“What on earth were they doing for three days? They were just watching what direction the oil was flowing,” Yamano said angrily. “Our country’s handling of this accident was too slow.”

Down near the town’s port, Shimizu, the fisherman, was more succinct as he took a pause in near-fruitless efforts to scoop out the shiny slicks of oil with a long-handled pail. “Please help us,” he said.

Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.