EN_UMI-NO-OYA_FULL-FILM_2025_V4_SHORT_10Kbs-H265.mp4

It’s a cold winter night.

Fishermen are harvesting nori

a seaweed now appreciated the world over

for its use in making
the famous maki sushi rolls.

Although the recipes date back
to 18th-century Japan,

when nori began to be produced
in square sheets,

it wasn't until the 1960s

that their popularity
spread in the Western world.

Nori flavor is now enjoyed the world over,

but do we really know

to whom we owe
the global spread of this delicacy?

There are many different deities.

Here we pray for maritime safety

as well as nori production

fish, shellfish

lots of things harvested from the ocean.

So every year

we hold a festival

to pray for

a bountiful harvest from the sea

In this region

nori is an important industry.

Drew contributed to

a successful nori harvest

so to give thanks for her research

she is treated like a deity.

Generally speaking, deities...

In Shinto there are deities.

This festival is to pay our respect

to this deity,

that is what makes Drew

worthy of such reverence.

This is Professor Fusao Ota

my teacher

an honored person.

It was mainly his idea

to erect a monument here.

He called for it.

This is Mrs. Segawa

she and Drew had a friendly relationship.

It was Professor Segawa who told us that

Drew had discovered that laver grows

in calcareous objects
such as oyster shells.

It seems that
Professor Segawa and Dr. Drew

had a friendly relationship.

They exchanged letters.

So in one letter, she wrote:

“Maybe Japanese nori
also burrows in oyster shells?”

It was also Professor Segawa

who passed this on to Professor Ota.

It was here that artificial seedlings

were first harvested

in 1953.

At that time, nori production

in Kumamoto prefecture

was very low.

Then there was the great Kumamoto flood

so at that time

artificial seedlings became a hot topic.

Drew made her discovery before that

in 1949

and four years later

we were harvesting artificial seedlings.

So while production had stagnated

nori production increased

according to the aquaculture harvest.

So that's how nori production increased

but I remember the time before that

as I started working
at the research institute

in 1958.

The Drew monument

was erected here

in 1963.

Yes, 60 years ago.

What is your best memory?

Well...

Inaugurating the monument

was the greatest accomplishment

of my youth.

I was really happy.

That was 60 years ago.

Do you feel nostalgic about that time?

Yes

At the time I was still single

but my fiancée was there

My fiancée wrote down what was said

beside the monument,

it’s all buried underground

like a time capsule.

The nori harvesting season

used to start on October 1st.

Now we have to wait

till around October 20.

In Uto, spring comes early

so the period for nori aquaculture

has gotten shorter.

This is because of climate change.

If we can stop global warming

the nori harvesting season can be longer

and production can become more stable.

Now due to global warming

the nori industry is gradually shrinking

and nori production is declining.

Also due to the rising price of oil

and other materials

it costs more to produce nori

so the number of nori farmers

is decreasing.

Now it's harder to make a profit

so production is declining.

So my family also quit the business.

Now we’re here.

Aquaculture used to be here

on the lower end of the Kikuchi river

there were seedling racks

Every year, according to our experience

this was the only place where seedlings

would be planted in the nori cultch.

The method was to charter a boat from here

to take out the cultch, seed the nori

then bring them back here to be farmed

as aquaculture.

They also came here

focusing on

Saga and Fukuoka prefectures

They gathered here.

Space is limited

so the local union

charges the highest fee possible

for the location.

It would be great if nori

could be seeded everywhere

but there are some places

where it doesn’t grow.

That’s why Drew tried

seeding inside the shells.

Artificial seedlings
were successfully cultivated.

In an emergency

you can cultivate them locally

in your own space.

This is sea water.

Yamamoto Sensei tells us

in 1945

people on these shores could see

the Nagasaki atomic
mushroom cloud in the distance.

Even the day after the disaster,

Kumamoto was still heavily bombed.

With the war over,

the situation was particularly difficult,

and food was scarce.

For many years,
and long before the war,

Japanese scientists
had been already striving

to understand nori’s complete life cycle

so that it could be
cultivated more reliably.

Different theories clashed,

so when young Fusao Ota

succeeded in
germinating spores on oyster shells

in 1953,

the national academic society
did not immediately

recognize these results
and even questioned it.

But the following year

its accuracy was successively proven

in neighbouring prefectures.

By 1955,

people traveling along the coast

could see the countless nets

of seaweed offshore.

My name is Yumiko Shimada

I was born and raised in Kawachi town.

Ever since I was little

I have been involved

in my parents’ nori aquaculture.

Of course

I have been helping

since elementary school

I would come home with my school bag

and look toward the factory

If the lights were on

I would drop my school bag at the door

and go help.

I watched my father and mother

struggle for a long time

but I didn't think about

spreading the goodness of nori

until I was around 30 years old.

Up until then

I just saw it as a family business.

In 1964, around then

we quit doing it the old way.

Up until then we used

the cracks in the bamboo

That was how we cultivated nori

like this, we plucked it out

we could only get 2,000 sheets

in one day.

At that time the price was 20 yen.

So we earned enough money to eat

but in summer

we didn’t make enough

so we caught fish so that we could eat.

Every day we went fishing.

Artificial seedlings

as my mother mentioned earlier

it was all natural until then.

I think it was probably in 1948 or 1949

that Professor Ota established

the artificial seedlings.

As for developing techniques for nori ,

for example

Freezing technology

and floating technology

were combined in the 1950s

so nori began to grow faster

But thanks to the prior contributions

of Professor Fusao Ota

the nori industry really began

to develop artificial seedlings

by planting them in oyster shells

and putting them on nets.

If you don't use a microscope

you can't tell

if the filaments

are attached or not.

But it's best to

buy your own microscope

then by looking

into the microscope

then right away, right there

you can work with the sea.

After the professor taught me

how to use the microscope

I was able to do it

step by step

accumulating skills along the way,

even now.

Once we looked into the microscope

we could see right away.

We could see from the color

It was lit up in color.

We followed what Ota-sensei was saying

as he taught us to recognize the shapes.

The spores were like this

all lined up...

After they came out in vertical lines

then a few hours later

they were ejected from the shells

So we had to prepare the shells.

I didn’t quite understand at first.

Of course, to us

Ota-sensei was a God

God, God.

In recent years

annual nori production in Japan

has been less than 5 billion sheets.

This year in the Ariake Sea

red tides spoiled the harvest

so we only harvested

around 5 or 6 billion sheets.

I think the nori farmers are doing this

as a matter of course.

They don’t have a particular desire

to do research.

They just want

to get good nori

delicious nori.

So in order to get good nori

they need to buy a microscope

and learn how to look into the microscope

and learn from others

how to put the seedlings on the nori.

so today I learn from my neighbor

If someone is successful

let’s see how they’re doing it

so little by little

we're doing our own research.

Due to global warming

these past 3 years

or actually 5 years

because of red tides this year

we had an unprecedentedly poor harvest.

The red tide has been
eating up the nutrients

so we did not have healthy black nori.

Also, due to global warming

the seeding date has become later.

When I was a child

the seeding always started on October 1

for sure.

Now it is done in late October.

We used to be able to harvest until

about the 10th of April

but now the season is already over

by late February or early March.

The harvesting period

has really gotten shorter

probably not even 100 days

now it's just 90 or 80 days.

Tides

flooding

algae blooms

typhoons

heatwaves

earthquakes

tsunamis

volcanos

atomic bombs

the powerful forces of the Earth System

the driving forces of human activities

In the 1950s

Professor Ota shared with passion

the new practical science
of nori aquaculture.

These were also the years

that marked the beginning

of a major acceleration

in the impact of human activities

on the Earth System.

This sudden, severe

and irreversible acceleration

making humanity
a planetary geological factor

was considered to mark
the beginning of a new era

the Anthropocene.

But humanity is too presumptuous

to agree on the issue.

And although geological institutions

accept the idea of human impact

they refuse for now

to consider it a new epoch.

To define a geological epoch

they need a located site

recording the marks of the impact

over deep time.

The thermonuclear tests

on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls

in the Western Pacific from 1952 onwards

and their radioactive fallout

have been proposed as markers

alongside other concurrent markers

from pesticides
to heavy metals or micro-plastics

all traces dating from after 1950.

Several sites

recording all these traces

were studied

such as Beppu Bay

northeast of the Aso volcano

in neighboring Oita prefecture

halfway between Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The bay also records high levels

of phosphates and nitrates

and unprecedented

microplankton community changes.

Crawford Lake in Ontario

was the final choice

of the Anthropocene Working Group.

But this didn’t convince

the decision-making committee.

With global warming and algae blooms

today’s nori producers

have to reinvent themselves.

Can we imagine
human resilient systems

still in line with a functional

and evolutionary ecology?

In order to help

our living environments to regenerate?

... which talks about
the micro and the macro worlds

of seaweeds,
of this very queer

and underestimated
biomass of planet Earth.

... so while algae blooms
have a threatening character

towards us humans,

it's also a fact
that algae blooms are...

or algae and phytoplankton

are providing more than 50%

of oxygen into our atmosphere.

Haneda Airport was built

at the time of the Olympics.

Nori was harvested in the area

of what is now Haneda Airport.

So by the time Haneda Airport opened

the nori factories had left.

Because the Ariake Sea was

a good spot for nori factories

now over 50% of the nori

that is industrially manufactured

is harvested from the Ariake Sea.

When did people
start eating nori in Japan?

It was a long time ago

in the Jomon period

when people were also probably

eating fish and shellfish.

But it seems that it was not

in the form of square sheets

like paper

It was more like wakame

dried wakame.

So people first started eating

crunchy dried wakame

in the 18th century

in the form of sheets.

We skipped past the history of nori

up to the 18th century

but before then

in the year 701

there was the Taiho Code

in Japanese law.

Nori started to be used

as one kind of tax payment.

Nori was just one

among many other ways to pay tax.

For example, you would have to give

a whole lot of wakame or fish or rice

so it was better to switch to nori.

People understood that

in contrast

nori was very efficient.

Nowadays tax is paid in money

but at that time, in ancient times

people paid tax with objects

as a contribution to the Emperor.

If they paid tax in rice or wakame

they had to contribute a lot of it

so they thought nori

was a pretty good option.

Of course, you might think

that in ancient times

everyone ate it

but most people did not eat it

It was mostly fishermen who ate it.

Fishermen ate nori

and the imperial family

thought it must be good

so they asked to receive nori.

So after 701, around that time

the noble class

wealthy people ate it.

At that time, it was not yet

in the form of flat sheets

They still ate it like this.

So it was probably mixed with rice

or eaten as is.

Today’s aquaculture is also very primitive

but they use a method

of hanging shellfish

that contain nori babies

underneath the net.

So thanks to Drew

the quantity of nori harvested

gradually expanded.

The most nori produced

was about 10 billion sheets.

Before Drew

it was only about 3 or 4 billion sheets.

So thanks to Drew

they could harvest

more than 10 billion sheets.

Although the quantity

is once again declining.

Why is nori so delicious?

Because it has 3 umami ingredients

Kombu contains glutamic acid

Bonito flakes contain inosinic acid

Shiitake contains guanylic acid

Mushrooms contain a "tasty" ingredient

called guanosine monophosphate.

The only natural food that contains

the three famous representative

tasty ingredients

the one unique natural food product

is nori.

Please try it.

... the 20 essential amino acids
that we need for life

... you see which one is hydrophilic
which one is hydrophobic...

Could we use it as seasoning?

Yes, why not

You know the phycocyanin
actually is really good

as a hormone regulator

in France they sell
as a pill like this

There's not much
scientific research going on

but as I met lot of
spirulina farmers

they all say
this colour is so magic

it's good for your hormones

for the regeneration
of your DNA as well...

I'm mad with that because
it's a bit like vinegar, but with citrus...

kefir...

then you boil it...

Also please
write down the recipes

spirulina and oil...

It's very dark, look...

you can paint with this

smells good

just that the egg white
is not coming out

during the boiling process

so now we're going
to dip it into...

What do you say?
3 minutes?

or 7 minutes?
or 10 minutes?

I think 7

7 minutes ok, 7...

This is our interpretation
of seaweed inoculation.

We're back at the Ariake Sea

The Drew Festival
takes place the day after tomorrow.

It will be the 60th anniversary
of the Drew-Baker memorial.

Today we're invited
next to Yamamoto Sensei's lab space,

to cook with
the ladies of Noriko’s Kitchen

who will prepare
the gifts for the ceremony.

We appreciate nori
more and more every day.

Next time

on the 18th or the 14th

the day after tomorrow.

Boil it

let it cool off in the refrigerator overnight

It will clump together

so you can cut it into small pieces

That’s how
you make it (tokoroten).

I think we have some here somewhere.

Then it's ready to eat?

Yes, with sauce.

When the nori gets old

you can’t eat it raw

so eating it
like this (tsukudani)

it still tastes good.

Thank you very much.

Since you left the fishing cooperative

what are you doing now?

Now I have a nori shop

I opened my own nori shop.

Oh, in Kawachi?

In Kawachi

Wow, really? That’s great

I’m doing my best

Thank you, see you later.

We will now begin

the 60th commemoration event

to the Drew Monument

Hello everyone.

As introduced, I’m the local Uto mayor

Motomatsu Shigeki

This is the 60th Drew festival.

It was a very difficult year

but I’m so glad

we were able to hold it this year

I think you all know
the story of Ms. Drew,

Dr. Drew’s discovery of nori filaments,

then Ota sensei’s development of

artificial cultivation techniques.

From these events

Japan’s nori aquaculture techniques

spread around the world

and became established.

You have been fishermen for many years

I guess you know that your techniques

are originally based on Dr. Drew's

and Professor Ota’s work.

We might have thought that

nori aquaculture would go on naturally…

The clearing fog reveals

a sea of treasures

Today another hopeful

day is dawning

In the early morning tide

the boats set out

Praying for their safety

we saw them off

Now with our own hands, we accept our task

We of the fishing village

accept our task.

A recent scientific study

has described how the microbiota

of the Japanese population

has undergone
a lateral transfer of genes

from eating nori over centuries,

enabling Japanese people
to better digest the seaweed

and assimilate its nutrients.

We evolve through what we eat.

The food system accounts

for a third of global carbon footprint.

How can seaweed
contribute to the long-awaited

food and ecological transitions?

How can we get even
more seaweed on our tables?

And how can today's nori producers

reinvent themselves and find resilience

in the face of global warming?