Photo/Illutration Some fishing boats that left a port in Xiangshan county in China’s Zhejiang province on Sept. 16 were later operating in the East China Sea, according to the Global Fishing Watch website. (Ryo Inoue)

SHANGHAI—Chinese boats are catching fish in what Beijing calls “Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water” for distribution in China, while the same marine products caught in the same area by Japanese vessels remain banned in that country.

The Chinese government imposed a blanket ban on Japanese seafood imports immediately after the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. began releasing treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant a month ago.

But fish caught in the same part of the Pacific Ocean by Chinese vessels are apparently A-OK as domestic products.

The Asahi Shimbun used the Global Fishing Watch website to analyze activities of Chinese boats in a fishing area for sauries, mackerels and sardines about 1,000 kilometers east of Nemuro, Hokkaido, in the North Pacific Ocean.

The website tracks locations of vessels equipped with the Automatic Identification System.

The monitored area extends between 40 and 50 degrees north latitude and 150 and 170 degrees east longitude.

Although China made a huge fuss when the discharge of treated water from the Fukushima plant began on Aug. 24, the number of Chinese vessels remained roughly the same from Aug. 3 to Sept. 19, ranging between 146 and 167 a day, according to Global Fishing Watch data.

Beijing banned the Japanese imports to “protect food safety and public health.”

But Chinese companies engaged in distant-water fishing told The Asahi Shimbun that they have continued catching sauries and other fish in this area in September.

Saury fishing boats usually leave Chinese ports in May and June and do not return until around the end of the year.

“(The water discharge program) has not affected saury fishing at the moment,” a source in China’s eastern Zhejiang province familiar with distant-water fishing operations said. “I have not heard of boats cutting their work short after the water release started.”

Japan’s Fisheries Agency, which follows fish catches by country, also said boats from China and other countries are catching sauries even after the ban, and that the number of Chinese boats has been around the same compared with last year.

Taiwan, China and Japan account for 95 percent of saury catches in the North Pacific Ocean, according to the North Pacific Fisheries Commission, an international organization for fisheries resources management.

The commission’s nine members, including China, Taiwan and Japan, caught 60,760 tons of sauries this year as of Sept. 16, about twice as much as in the same period the previous year, according to the Fisheries Agency.

Yasuhiro Sanada, a visiting associate professor at Waseda University, called it a “double standard” for China to ban Japanese seafood imports and allow so many Chinese boats to catch fish in the North Pacific Ocean where Japanese boats also operate.

According to Global Fishing Watch data, Chinese fishing boats are also operating more than 200 km northwest of Okinawa’s main island in the East China Sea, adjacent to an area where Japanese fishermen are catching fish, even after the water release started.

Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, on Sept. 22 posted a photograph of Chinese fishing boats operating in waters northwest of Okinawa’s main island on Sept. 15 on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” Emanuel wrote. “Chinese vessels fishing off Japan’s coast on September 15th, post China’s seafood embargo from the same waters.”

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