It’s a strange moment, and not your average night in the Orkney Club.
In front of me a talk is being given by an older gentleman flanked by a young lady. He’s speaking Japanese, which is being translated for the packed audience by his young interpreter efficiently and eloquently.
Masanobu Shibuya has come all the way from his native Tokyo for this talk, but he is no stranger to Orkney. In fact, it’s his fourteenth visit, as he has a special affinity for Orkney because of what he has learned from its fishermen and divers. During his talk he explained why this was the case in discussion with Dr Gareth Davies and Neil Kermode.
“If Shibuya can’t do it, give up.”
This is how Japan’s leading pro-diver and underwater construction expert, Masanobu Shibuya, is often described. Born in 1949 in Hokkaido, he has been engaged in a variety of underwater engineering work, including the restoration of Kobe port, which was badly damaged during the Great Hanshin Earthquake on 17 January 1995 in the southern part of Hyōgo Prefecture, including the region known as Hanshin. At least 5,000 people died as a result of this earthquake, and about 4,600 of them were from Kobe.
He also conducts a lot of field research on “Human-Dolphin Communication.” Recently, he started a project called the “Diving Integration Research Institute,” and is trying to apply diving methods to various fields, such as the rehabilitation of handicapped people.
But let’s hear this in Shibuya’s own words as he has lots of important things to say:
“I began work as a pro-diver at 25. In the beginning, I lived by a creed of “longer than anyone, deeper than anyone”, and I took great pride in my diving ability and physical strength. At 32, I founded my own company. However, during our first big underwater construction project I fell victim to decompression sickness. During my three-month hospitalisation following, I felt for the first time the weakness of the human body.
Other life lessons awaited me however. As company president, I failed to consider the feelings of my employees; I demanded too much of them, and one day they all quit at once and left the company.
I became very depressed after this, so I began to read books on spirituality and practice activities like yoga. As a result, I learnt the importance of considering the feelings of those around me. Through daily contact with nature and my wife, I began to sense things like the inner strength of tranquillity and the strength of women. I became very grateful to my wife for her quiet but unwavering support, and rediscovered the beauty of the ocean that I came so close to forgetting; I realised that through my work I had been destroying this beauty. Looking back on past construction projects, my sense of remorse grew daily, and I began to consider quitting my career.
It was in this state of disillusionment when construction of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line began. The first job was to fix the ventilating device, known as the ‘Wind Tower’, into the water. Later, upon surveying this structure, I discovered sea bream were settling there. At that moment, I began to recall past construction projects I had worked on one after the other, and how fish would return to the area after they were completed. I had a realisation; not all underwater construction is bad. If done correctly, you should be able to create an environment suitable for marine life to live in.
From that moment on, I decided to dedicate my life to ‘development compatible with the environment’, and ‘education of the spirit through diving’. Originally not a specialist, I began to study by myself from scratch about marine life and plants. I returned to past project sites and began to research the post-construction environment while making photo and video records.
This style of environmentally friendly underwater construction I was advocating began gradually to garner attention. I started to be featured on TV and other media, and the underwater world that I had been observing finally began to be shown to the outside world. After many years of quiet dedication to my work, it was truly a happy moment for me.
At present, the ocean around Japan is in a critical situation; the seaweed that fish and other marine life rely on for nourishment is declining rapidly. I want as many people as possible to know about this. If we care for it properly, it is more than possible to regenerate this ocean environment.
In the beginning, I was an ‘ocean terrorist’. Now though, I dedicate all my energy to protecting the ocean. At the moment you may be destroying the environment. However, it is never too late.”
Around the world, kelp forests are a crucial component of a healthy coastal ecosystem and an essential nursery for coastal fish populations. Kelp blades and anchors (known as holdfasts, the closest thing they have to roots) provide shelter for young fish, a place for adult fish to spawn, and food for invertebrates like urchins and other creatures. One study found that a single stalk of kelp in Norway supported roughly 80,000 organisms across 70 distinct species. Over 1,000 species of plants and animals are found in some kelp forests in California.
However, they are disappearing quickly, as many species of kelp are susceptible to sea temperature rises. In recent years in Japan the seawater temperature in kelp areas has not dropped below 15 degrees celsius, even in winter. As a result kelp has been dying back and vanishing completely in many areas. These trends have also deprived the area of its speciality, abalone, as well as devastating stocks of fish that were once in plentiful supply during the winter months.
Also, with the number of marine predators in the wild such as sea otters decreasing, kelp forests are at the mercy of sea urchins. Left uneaten, sea urchins can multiply, forming herds that sweep across the ocean floor devouring entire stands of kelp and leaving “urchin barrens” in their place.
In Japan, where only a small number of sea otters remain in the wild, nearly all prefectures have witnessed the collapse of coastal kelp forests.
And therein began his connection with Orkney.
Orkney has large forests of kelp and as Japan’s kelp forests are disappearing he came to see what he could learn.
On his travels he made connections with Orkney’s local fishermen and scallop divers. They took him out and dived with him to show how they made their living, and during one of these dives he was told how dredging the sea bed for scallops was an utterly destructive process.
He was told by one of the divers that if they avoided using dredgers which made a lot of money but destroyed the sea bed, and continued to dive by hand, then their industry could be maintained for 100, 200 or more years. This resonated with Masanoba Shimuya and he began his visits.
He has also begun his crusade to re-establish Japan’s inshore fish stocks in places where they have vanished because of overfishing and kelp disappearance, including offshore wind farms. He found that the subsurface of these structures, including their anchoring chains to buoyancy units soon became colonised with coral and some plants, leading eventually to a new population of fish.
Unfortunately this will not replace the original seaweed species which have now gone, but the corals do have the effect of eventually becoming a reef that will attract large fish populations and re-establish an inshore fishing industry that with careful management will be sustainable.
For example, a commercial-scale demonstration turbine was erected off Nagasaki Prefecture’s Goto Islands in 2013, and within just one year, schools of both migratory and non-migratory seabed fish were appearing in the surrounding waters. The turbine also stimulated growth of seaweed beds, which serve as feeding grounds and act as nurseries for young fish. It proved how effective these kinds of structures can be as artificial fish reefs. When Mr. Shibuya conducts marine surveys he always does his best to involve and work with the local fishermen.
What was humbling during this talk was Mr. Shibuya’s humility and quiet passion to change things for the better. It was extremely well attended with many academics present asking pertinent questions that he fielded with ease.
Afterwards there was a selection of Japanese food available to try, including rice balls, several type of sea weed sheets, and a wonderful mix of edamame beans with sesame seeds, soy and honeyed vegetables. This was washed down with green tea and both grain and sweet potato spirit, both somewhat reminiscent of Saki. I was also surprised to see that there in an Orkney Japan Association on Facebook!
