SPECIAL FEATURE From SATOYAMA to managing global biodiversity Hiroyuki Matsuda • Mitsutaku Makino Minoru Tomiyama • Stefan Gelcich Juan Carlos Castilla Fishery management in Japan Received: 13 December 2009 / Accepted: 6 July 2010 Ó The Ecological Society of Japan 2010 Abstract There are few legal marine protected areas in Japan rather than fishing-ban areas. Fishers did not seek legal fishing-ban areas but they did establish fishing-ban areas by autonomous bases. We briefly introduce the institutional history and features of Japanese coastal fishery management, including the past decade’s major legislative developments. Japan still has a decentralized co-management system involving fishers and the govern- ment, and ca. 98% of Japanese fishers are artisanal. There are several successful cases of coastal fisheries manage- ment in Japan. However, offshore industrial fisheries have problems in Japan. We compare coastal fisheries co- management between Japan and Chile. We finally discuss the possibility of improvement for Japanese fisheries. Keywords Marine-protected area Æ Co-management Æ Artisanal fisheries Æ Territorial user rights for fisheries Æ Coastal fisheries Æ Chilean fisheries Introduction Japan once played an important role in the international institution for marine protected areas (MPAs). A marine park system was established in Japan after the 1st Conference for World Natural Parks in 1962, in Seattle. The first International Conference for Marine Parks was held in 1975, Tokyo, Japan. Despite this, there are few known MPAs in Japan because it has not been welcome to use the term MPAs among persons who relate to Japanese fisheries. This is probably because fishers did not seek legal fishing-ban areas but they establish fish- ing-ban areas on autonomous bases (Yagi et al. 2010). We briefly introduce the institutional history and fea- tures of Japanese coastal fishery management, including the past decade’s major legislative developments. Japan has one of the world’s oldest and most successful marine fisheries co-management regimes (Lim et al. 1995; Pomeroy and Berks 1997). According to the Japanese first legal provision to fisheries, which was the Taiho Code of 701, local fisheries resources were for common use and managed by local resource users themselves. This basic idea has been passed down and is still used today. For example, based on the Fisheries Law of 1949 and the Fisheries Cooperative Associations Law of 1948, qualified individuals living in the coastal com- munity were entitled as coastal fishers by rights and licenses. Fisheries cooperative associations (FCAs), the organization of local fishers, are the management body of local fisheries and resources. Based on both the traditional and scientific knowledge on the local envi- ronment, each FCA establishes detailed rules on the fisheries operations on the local fishing grounds, such as fishing gear, fishing area and season, minimum-size limit, etc., and enforce them on autonomous bases. Government supports such activities by provisioning legal and scientific information and subsidies (Makino and Matsuda 2005). Therefore, the Japanese fisheries management regimes, especially in coastal areas, can be understood as a kind of Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURFs) (Christy 1992). In addition, Japa- nese fishers set autonomous fishing-ban areas for licensed fisheries, snow crab fishery, and sandeel fishery as mentioned below. H. Matsuda (&) Faculty of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan E-mail: matsuda@ynu.ac.jp Tel.: +81-45-3394362 Fax: +81-45-3394373 M. Makino National Research Institute of Fisheries Science, Fisheries Research Agency, Yokohama, Japan M. Tomiyama Chita Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Office, Aichi Prefectural Government, Aichi, Japan S. Gelcich Æ J. C. Castilla Centre for Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity (CASEB) & Departamento de Ecologia, F. Ciencias Biologicas, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Casilla 114-D, Santiago, Chile Ecol Res DOI 10.1007/s11284-010-0748-5