The Japanese tenure rights system is primarily responsible for the sustainability of small-scale fisheries.

The TBTI Global Book Series, Life Above Water (Jentoft 2019), has resonated with the public and received a great response in Japan. In a remarkable display of collaboration, dozens of researchers, government officials, and fishers have worked together to publish its translation. That may be because the country is currently “in the midst of a debate on whether voluntary/community-based management or quota-based management, small-scale/family operation or large-scale/corporate operation, fairness or efficiency, cooperation principle or competition principle, under the new Fisheries Act (2020), which has transformed the former coordination-oriented law into the resource management-oriented law after its first major revision in 70 years.”