The Sea Doesn’t Negotiate

Off the coast of Okinawa, a group of fishermen got tired of watching their catches get torn apart by sharks and decided to do something about it. Not "something" in the sense of lobbying a maritime authority or installing better nets—something in the sense of arming themselves with hooks, knives, and spears and going to war. A VICE documentary captured what followed, and it is exactly as blunt as that sentence makes it sound.

The setup is elemental: fish, sharks eat fish, fishermen’s livelihoods erode, breaking point reached. What follows is less a nature documentary than a record of people who have decided the sea owes them and are prepared to argue the point with sharp implements. They hunt the sharks methodically, they’re good at it, and they enjoy it enough that they’ve built an annual festival around the practice. There is something almost medieval about the whole operation, which is not a criticism.

My reaction to this isn’t complicated. It’s brutal, it’s direct, and it has the specific dignity of people solving their own problem with their own hands. The festival detail is what stays with me—the idea that you would celebrate a war against something that keeps trying to ruin you, that you’d make it into a communal ritual. You could read that as a metaphor for almost anything. Or you could just watch men in Okinawa fight sharks and feel, briefly, that some problems still have clear solutions.