Company history

Steam trawling was expensive new technology, encouraged by an 1897 law that subsidized the move from coastal to offshore fishing. Tamura Ichiro could afford it: a son of Kuhara Shozaburo and brother of Kuhara Fusanosuke, who founded the Hitachi mine, he used his inherited share of the family fortune to build the first steel trawler made in Japan, the 199-ton Dai-ichi Maru. Its trials in the Inland Sea disappointed, so in July 1910 he sent Kunishi Kosuke to England to supervise a better ship: the 188.84-ton Minato Maru, completed in March 1911 and sailed home by Kunishi himself. On her arrival, in May 1911, Tamura founded Tamura Steamship Fishing at Shimonoseki and put Kunishi in charge of the trawling business.

The fleet overshot the market almost immediately — 139 trawlers by 1912 — and the industry consolidated into Kyodo Gyogyo in 1914. The First World War then emptied it: Japanese owners sold their hulls to Europe as minesweepers and lookouts at high prices, leaving seven steam trawlers in the country by 1917. Tamura bought up the shrunken Kyodo Gyogyo, merged his own company into it in 1919, and spent the 1920s absorbing freezing, warehousing, wholesaling and box-making firms until it was the largest capital-fishing enterprise in Japan.

Ownership then passed out of the founder’s hands. The Kuhara mining company had become Nippon Sangyo under Aikawa Yoshisuke, and in 1934 Kyodo Gyogyo was merged into the Nissan combine — twenty-three years after Tamura started it, his company was a zaibatsu division. Under Nissan it swallowed the crab factory-ship operator, the whaling specialist and, in March 1937, an ice and canning company, taking the name Nippon Suisan: 61 of the country’s 70 trawling licences, three Antarctic whaling fleets, twelve crab motherships, some 300 ice and freezing plants, and by 1940 more than 13,000 employees and 237 vessels. In 1943 wartime control split it in two — the catching side stayed, while freezing and distribution went to what became Nichirei. By the surrender its 257 ships and 136,000 tons had fallen to 75 ships and about 20,000 tons: the licences and the knowledge survived, the means did not.

Protein was the national emergency, and Antarctic whaling reopened in 1946. Nippon Suisan rebuilt from there: capital raised to ¥350m in March 1949 and doubled again in December, a Tokyo listing in May 1949, North Pacific salmon fishing resumed in 1952, Bristol Bay crab in 1953. Fish sausage went into mass production at Tobata in 1952, giving households a cheap animal protein. By 1955 the fleet was back to 114 vessels and about 100,000 tons.

Then the ground moved. In April 1956 the Soviet Union announced salmon fishing rules for the North Pacific that amounted to a ban, and three of seven fleets never sailed; by 1959 the market had written the whole industry off as declining. The response was the five-year restructuring plan drafted in October 1958 by Nakai Haruo — open new fishing grounds, modernize processing and distribution, and enter shipping — pushed through with the dividend cut to 6%, a 20% pay cut for directors, and ¥40.7bn of capital spending between 1959 and 1964. Tonnage doubled to 290,000; revenue rose from ¥28.9bn to ¥55.2bn; borrowings rose from ¥14.3bn to ¥34.1bn and equity fell to 22%.

Even the diversification kept flowing back to sea. Of the ¥24.5bn spent from 1965 to 1968, 85% went to vessels and 15% to land, as Nakai — having seen European cost inflation in 1965 — concluded that the answer was to build ships faster. Deep-water grounds down to 1,000 metres and trawling off West Africa were developed precisely because they lay outside international quotas. The processing and distribution side, meanwhile, was held back by the company’s own caution: retail prices of frozen fish ran two to three times the wholesale price through a maze of small wholesalers, and management, worried about its distributors, did not move to reform distribution until 1971.

When President Ford signed the 1976 fisheries act, giving the United States a 200-mile zone from March 1977, the largest asset Japan’s fishing companies owned — access to distant waters — was erased from outside. On 16 August 1976 the presidents of ten major fishing companies stood outside the Nichigeki theatre in Yurakucho wearing sashes reading “let us all protect distant-water fishing,” handing out canned goods printed with advocacy notices and collecting signatures for a petition to the Fisheries Agency. Joint ventures off Chile, Argentina and New Zealand softened the blow, but the 1978 catch was half the 1972 level, and the gap was filled by trading and import development rather than by fishing.

The company nevertheless doubled down. Under Oguchi Shunichi, a former vice-minister of agriculture who became president in 1980, four new trawlers were built from 1980 — including the 2,800-ton Echizen Maru, launched in September 1983 at a cost of about ¥3bn — for some ¥12bn in total, at a time when Nichiro, Kyokuyo and others were quitting trawling for food manufacturing. The reason was simple arithmetic: in 1983 fishing was 16% of sales against trading’s 54% and processing’s 29%, yet nearly all the profit came from fishing. Oguchi said it plainly — at a 1.39% recurring margin, “in the wide field of food, we are a low-profit company.”

The land businesses kept failing: mayonnaise abandoned after a decade, instant noodles after eight years, cheese, retort foods. Frozen foods, surimi products and fish sausage held top-group volumes on thin margins. A Chilean salmon farming company, Salmones Antártica, was bought in 1988. By 1990 a vice-president was describing distant-water fishing under the Japanese flag as “virtually annihilated,” and the company posted its first recurring loss since listing — ¥260m in the year to March 1990, ¥1.4bn the next — and cut its trawler fleet from fourteen to eight. Net losses followed in 1995, 1996 and 1999.

In 2001 the company bought what it had never been able to build: for $175m in cash it acquired from Unilever the North American retail frozen seafood business — Gorton’s, the US market leader, and BlueWater Seafoods in Canada, with three plants and about 750 employees on $250m of sales. Twenty years after Oguchi’s call to become a food manufacturer with real brands, Nippon Suisan finally had shelf space abroad. More followed: King & Prince Seafood in 2005, F.W. Bryce and Denmark’s Nordic Seafood in 2006, France’s Cité Marine in 2007.

The brands came with a balance sheet. Goodwill and intangibles peaked at ¥38.5bn at March 2006 and were written down through the decade — King & Prince in the year to March 2008, a Georgia subsidiary and Chilean land in 2009. In the year to March 2009 falling fish prices, currency losses and impairments produced ¥16.4bn of extraordinary losses and a ¥16.2bn net loss, even though operating profit stayed positive at ¥3.2bn: the damage came from what the company owned and from prices, not from what it did. Net losses recurred in 2011 and 2013.

What rebuilt it was the domestic food business — by the year to March 2018, food revenue of ¥325.3bn and ¥12.9bn of profit exceeded the marine business — and under Hamada Shingo, president from June 2020, the company made the shift explicit. The 2022 long-term vision Good Foods 2030 was followed by the sale of the pharmaceutical subsidiary to Shimadzu, and in December 2022 the name Nippon Suisan, carried since 1937, was replaced by Nissui. By the year to March 2025 food led on both revenue (¥471.0bn) and profit (¥28.7bn) against marine’s ¥364.0bn and ¥8.4bn.

The second wing is farming rather than catching — shrimp in Thailand from 1986, coho salmon in Miyagi from 1987, yellowtail through Kurose Suisan from 2004, with fully closed-cycle breeding achieved in 2022 — and in January 2026 Nissui bought Chile’s Pesquera Yadran outright for $133m, about ¥20.5bn. Whether that removes the volatility is unsettled: farming carries feed costs, market prices and mortality, which are the same kind of risk that fishing carried. Dropping “Suisan” from the name is not the same as escaping what the name meant.