Japan’s Enoshima Island and its seaside town is a popular destination for Tokyo tourists. While its swimmable beach, temples and shrines, and clear views of Mt. Fuji lure folks in by way of a clanking, centuries-old train the fresh local seafood is one of the biggest attractions.
Just as Maine has lobster and Dungeness Crab season opens on the West Coast with a clamor, Enoshima has its own destination delicacy. It’s a baby sardine called shirasu, a rare and fragile treat, and photographer Alanna Hale found an old fisherman willing to tell its story.
Mizushima Shinichi has been a shirasu fisherman for 50 years. He lives just 300 meters from the dock of the Koshigoe Fishing Port on Enoshima Island, located an hour outside Tokyo. Like his father before him, and his grandfather before that, Mizushima wakes up at 4 o’clock every morning through the shirasu season. Now that he is nearing 70 he simply drives the boat. His son, along with two other young men, do the fishing.
Although various forms of shirasu are a staple of the Japanese diet, Enoshima is perhaps one of the only places you can eat shirasu raw. Situated on the Pacific Ocean, the island boasts a warm current in the spring that carries swarms of shirasu past the island about a month after they are born. In the months when shirasu fishing is prohibited from the 1st of January to the 10th of March Mizushima harvests wakame (seaweed) by planting seeds in thick ropes and dangling them in the sea.
Shirasu are particularly delicate fish. Their meat is soft and spoils quickly. They do not freeze. If fresh they must be consumed within the same day. The Chinese character for shirasu consists of two symbols meaning fish and soft, weak. They cannot even travel the distance to Tsukiji, Tokyo’s largest and most famous fish market, without spoiling. Bags of ice are tossed on the boat at the end of the day so they are ready to go the next morning.
As soon as the shirasu are taken from the water, they are placed in coolers filled with ice and raced back to shore. Mizushima fishes only long enough to catch what can be handled in one day’s work. Just steps from the dock his wife is waiting to process the morning’s haul.
The largest fish, less keen to breaking, are kept fresh to be served raw. The rest are lightly boiled in salted water, spread out on screens and then carried outside to dry in the sun.
The shirasu products have different names depending on their degree of processing. Raw baby sardines are nama-shirasu. Boiled baby sardines are kamaage-shirasu. Boiled-then-70%-dried baby sardines are shirasu-boshi, while ones that are dried completely after being boiled are chirimen-jyako. Sometimes just chirimen for short, this is the form most commonly found in nearly every Japanese home.
Modern Farmer Media, 2014