There was a signboard on the beach where I played as a child, in a fishing village on the coast of Hokkaido. The sea is the fisherman’s field. One day, I was in elementary school, I watched a fisherman throw his trash into the water right in front of it. I remember feeling, in the wordless way a child feels such things, that I had just learned something about society.
Not that the fisherman was a bad man. Looking back, I do not think the sign and the gesture even contradicted each other. A field is something you work. It is also something that belongs to you, and what belongs to you receives whatever you leave in it. The sea took the trash, closed over the wrapper, and went on shining. I went back to playing in it.
The gesture, in his hands, had once been true. He was of my grandfather’s generation. When he first learned the sea, most of what a coastal household threw away was organic. It sank, dissolved, fed something. The sea he grew up with could be trusted with anything. Then the materials changed. The wrapper in his hand was plastic, but the hand had learned its movement half a century earlier, and a habit handed down across generations does not update on the schedule of materials. The hand had not heard the news. Karma, as I use the word, is this. Not fate, but a groove worn by repetition, a movement that continues after its conditions have gone. On that beach, the groove was visible to a child.
I was asked this summer to contribute a reflection to a report on fisheries, and that beach is where my mind went first. Not to doctrine. To the sign, the gesture, and the water that accepted both.
Shinran, the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist teacher whose path I follow, reached for the ocean whenever ordinary words gave out. The vow that carries all beings was an ocean to him. So was birth-and-death itself, in its endlessness, an ocean hard to cross. In the hymn chanted daily in temples of his school, he wrote that when people turn and enter the vow, the wise and the foolish, those guilty of the gravest wrongs, even those who slander the vow itself, they become one in taste, like the many waters entering the sea. 凡聖逆謗斉回入、如衆水入海一味. Rivers argue with each other. The sea does not.
For Shinran, the ocean was the image of that which receives everything and refuses nothing.
The village sign saw a field. The fisheries system of our century sees a stock. These are stages of the same grammar, scaled up, the water as a unit of production. A stock can be measured. Quotas, certifications, traceability codes, sustainability labels. Few of our relationships with wild living systems are so thoroughly counted. Yet the report begins from an uncomfortable observation. A fish can be perfectly legal, certified and traceable while the crew who caught it are trapped in debt they cannot repay, a coastal town watches its food sail away as animal feed, and a seabed that took centuries to grow is gone in an afternoon. Our reflex is to conclude that the counting has not gone far enough. One more label, one more audit, one more data field.
The report suggests something else. The trouble is not that the system is under-measured. The trouble is the spell that measurement casts, the belief that everything the ocean involves can be converted into a single currency and summed.
This is why one design decision in the report strikes me as its wisest move. Its framework sets out six conditions for judging a fishery, and then refuses to combine them into a total. “A healthy stock does not cancel forced labour,” the authors write. Revenue does not offset extinction. There is no overall score.
The refusal is not a technicality. Optimization, as our age practices it, needs a common currency, one number into which every good and every harm can be traded. Withhold the exchange rate and the trades stop. Nothing can be paid for with something else. The spell does not have to be denounced. It has to be refused, harm by harm.
Even this framework travels with a toolkit, and the toolkit includes checklists and a scorecard. This is not hypocrisy. It is gravity. Every framework leans toward the single number the way a drawn circle wants to close. Which is why the refusal cannot be a settlement reached once in a document. It is a discipline, renewed every time someone asks, “but overall, is this seafood responsible?” The most truthful answer may be that there is no overall. Look at the crew. Look at the shore. Look at the seabed.
There is a reason I trust Shinran on this subject. He was stripped of his ordination and exiled to Echigo, a cold northern coast far from the capital’s scholars. The accounts that reach us place him there among farmers and fisherfolk, and whether or not the details are history, the words that came down from him are. In the Tannisho, a record of his spoken words kept by a disciple, he speaks of those who draw nets and lines in the seas and rivers to cross through this world, and he places them below no one, because all of us act as our karma disposes. The man who called the vow an ocean refused to rank the people who fished it. I grew up, eight centuries later, among their kin. Some of them threw trash in the water. A teaching that took shape beside those boats has no balcony from which to look down on them.
Shinran’s image has another side, and the beach showed it to me. That the ocean receives everything and refuses nothing is its grace. In an economy of extraction, it is also its defenselessness. The water cannot say no. It takes the wrapper, the trawl, the discards, and closes over them without comment. Shinran was speaking of salvation, not ecology. I am carrying his image out of its home waters, and I know it. But it carries something true all the same. Whatever refusal is going to be spoken, the water will not speak it.
The people inside the system are another matter. They can say no, and are not heard. A crewman bound by debt says no, and the boat does not turn around. That is the difference the report’s list of non-negotiable harms answers to. Forced labour, a child in the hold, women coerced into sex as the price of access to fish, a habitat destroyed beyond recovery. It reads to me like a No spoken in two directions, alongside those whose refusal is ignored, and on behalf of what has no refusal at all.
The sixth condition of the framework is the one I sit with longest. Abstain. Where harm is extreme, irreversible or ungovernable, do not proceed. Shinran’s school never imposed abstinence from fish. He ate what the people around him ate, and so do I. So I cannot read Abstain as a rule about diet. I read it as subtraction, the movement I begin each morning with a broom. Not adding a better justification. Removing a grasp. And restraint without repair would be abandonment. What the grasp has taken must also be returned.
Shinran spent his exile years within sound of a winter sea. Whatever he understood there became the strange, patient image at the center of his teaching, not a ladder, not a ledger, but water that takes in every river and makes them one taste. The rivers still run down to the ocean. What has changed is what we send down them, and what we haul back out. The ocean received us first. I learned that on the beach, and the other thing too, on the same afternoon. Before we ask whether a catch is responsible, there is an older question underneath, the one this report asks between its lines. Can we still see the water as something that receives us, rather than something we take?
In one line: A signboard on a Hokkaido beach, Shinran’s ocean that refuses nothing, and a fisheries report that refuses to add its harms into a single score.
Themes: karma as habit, the ocean as image, optimization and the single number, restraint and repair, Shinran among the fisherfolk.
The occasion: Faiths for Oceans invited me to contribute a reflection to The Moral Catch: Fisheries, Justice, and the Living Ocean, published on 22 October 2026 at the UN biodiversity conference. A shorter version appears in the report.
Related: A Fish from the Stream, AI is a Karmic Amplifier, The Circle That Will Not Close, The Shoreline
English is not my first language. AI helps me write across that distance.