Local fishermen in Kumamoto, Japan, say that it was long and widely known that Chinese and South Korean littleneck clams were being imported and sold in Japan as “Kumamoto-grown.”
The Kumamoto Prefectural Government in southwestern Japan is poised to suspend shipments of locally harvested Japanese littleneck clams — or asari — to catch out the fakes and end the mislabeling. However, most of the catch is distributed without going through the prefecture, so it will not be easy.
“I first heard about the fake labeling decades ago,” said Tamio Hamaguchi, the 71-year-old head of the Ouda fisheries cooperative as he stood on the tidal flat facing the Ariake Sea in the Kumamoto Prefecture city of Uto.
In the 1970s, over 60,000 metric tons of Kumamoto-grown Japanese littleneck clams were harvested annually, comprising some 40% of the nationwide total. But starting in the latter half of the 1970s, sand was extracted from riverbeds to make concrete, decreasing the sand deposits on beaches and tidal flats. Due to the deterioration of the environment for growing clams, harvests dropped in the 1980s; in 2020 the clam harvest was just 21 tons. And yet, “Kumamoto-grown” clams continued to line the shelves at stores across the country. The fisheries ministry estimates that 2,485 tons of them were sold between October and December 2021.
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