Photo/Illutration A Shonan Hamaguri brand clam, seen here in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, on July 17, weighs more than 300 grams. (Arisa Inaba)

FUJISAWA, Kanagawa Prefecture—Fishermen, Japan Coast Guard officials and surfers are working together to crack down on clam poachers along the Shonan coast here.

The priority is protecting the “Shonan Hamaguri,” a branded specialty product in the popular summer vacation spot.

Around noon on a recent Saturday, a surfer on the shore at Tsujido Beach in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, strolled through a crowd with two clams in his hands.

A plainclothes officer with the Shonan Coast Guard Station questioned the surfer as he was about to put the clams in a bag.

He admitted to having gathered the clams himself, and he said he thought it would be OK if nobody knew what he was doing.

Clamming in this area constitutes poaching.
The Shonan Coast Guard Station plans to refer the surfer to prosecutors by the end of August on suspicion of violating the Fishery Law.

Poachers face a maximum fine of 1 million yen ($6,900).

PRODUCT OF SHALLOW WATERS

Ichiro Hayama, head of the steering committee of the Fujisawa branch of the Shonan Fishery Cooperative Association (JF Shonan), complained about the rampant clam poaching.

“What a mess,” he said. “We have been working so hard to raise them.”

Shonan Hamaguri grow in the fine-grained, quality sand beneath the shallows leading to Enoshima island, a famous scenic spot.

The molluscs are characterized by their meatiness, rich savor and the thick stock they produce, Hayama, 80, said.

The clam population has dropped, but the JF Shonan Fujisawa branch began releasing clam fry in 2001 to restore the resources.

The efforts led the Shonan Hamaguri to be recognized as a Kanagawa Brand product by the prefectural government in 2017.

The officials again released 110,000 clam fry, each 3 centimeters long, in May this year.

They said the fry take four to five years to grow to about 7 cm, which is big enough to be eaten. The clam’s market price is about 350 yen each.

In June, notices and flags along the shore of Tsujido Beach said: “Clamming is a crime! Fines up to 1 million yen!”

“All surfers nowadays know that you would be fined for clamming,” said a surfer in her 40s. “Previously, however, many surfers would dig sand with their legs beneath the water and put clam into their wetsuits.”

Hayama said some volunteer surfers have been on the watch in recent years for poachers. The situation has improved, thanks partly to coast guard crackdowns, he added.

Shonan Coast Guard Station officials said, however, that clam poaching has been rising again since coronavirus-related restrictions on people’s movements were lifted.

They took action last year against 14 men and women, including pleasure visitors and surfers, on suspicion of violating the Fishery Law or other regulations by gathering clams and other marine products.

Clams spawn in summer, when they move so much they sometimes hit human legs in the shallows, officials said.

“We hope to work more closely with the coast guard and other parties to defend our clam,” Hayama said.

DESIGNATED ‘VULNERABLE’

Domestically produced clams have become quite rare in recent years.

Environment Ministry officials said clams previously inhabited broad areas from Aomori Prefecture in the northeast to Kyushu in the southwest, but their habitats worsened amid tidal mud flat reclamations and other developments starting in the 1980s.

Fisheries ministry statistics show the annual clam catch dropped from 30,000 tons in 1963 to only 867 tons in 2006.

In 2007, clams were downgraded to a category called “other shellfishes,” for which no species-specific statistics are available, partly because the hauls were too small.

The Environment Ministry designated the clam a “vulnerable” species, meaning it faces a high risk of extinction, in 2012.

Authorities in various parts of Japan, including Kumamoto, Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures, are trying to preserve domestically produced clams, officials said.

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