OFUNATO, Iwate — Young fishermen here have been trying hard to revive scallop farming, the main local industry that had thrived before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but land sinkage caused by the trembler is standing in the way of restarting their otherwise lucrative business.
The unloading area of the Koishihama fishing harbor that stretches about 70 meters sank about 70 centimeters, due to the magnitude-9.0 earthquake, and therefore the fishermen have been unable to unload hauls of scallops there. Atsushi Sasaki, the 40-year-old head of a youth group of the Ryori fisheries cooperative, said, "We really want at least some of it to be repaired."
In the Koishihama district of Ofunato, most of about the 30 households have been engaged in scallop farming. Sasaki and others tried to differentiate their scallops from their counterparts cultured elsewhere in and outside the prefecture and in 2003 named their scallops "Koishihama Scallops," or "Love Beach Scallops," a pun on the name of their district "Koishihama", which is literally written in Japanese as "Small Stone Beach". They then started to receive orders by telephone and to sell their scallops directly to consumers.
Read the complete story from The Mainichi Daily News.