The Shark Hunt

Fishermen off Okinawa were losing their catch to sharks. Day after day the sharks would come, tear through the nets, and disappear with the fish. At some point you stop calling it nature and start calling it a problem.

So they hunted them back. Hooks, knives, spears—whatever worked. The sharks kept coming, the fishermen kept killing them, and it became part of the routine. Brutal. Direct. There’s no ambiguity about what’s happening: you kill the thing destroying your livelihood, or you don’t eat.

What strikes me is how cleanly this sits outside the modern conversation about nature. There’s no tragic tone, no hand-wringing about the ecosystem. The fishermen are doing work that needs doing. The violence isn’t something to feel bad about—it’s incidental to the purpose. And they celebrate it with a yearly festival, not to mock the sharks but because the work deserves marking.

I watched a documentary about this and what got me was how unapologetic it all felt. Not performed toughness, just the work itself. The masculinity in it isn’t flexed—it’s the unavoidable result of meeting a problem head-on, with steel and skill. No ideology, no performance. Need and response.

There’s something clean about that. Something I can’t quite let go of.