My name is Makoto Suzuki, an ocean and seafood lover, and an educator in Japan.
I have been passionate for exploring, since I was a kid.
When I was an elementary school student, one of my friends took me to the school library, and show me a book named ’10 Explorations That Surprised the World.’ She said, “I think you like this book.”
I don’t know why she thought I was interested, but I was captured by the book.
Discorvery of Angkor Wat in the jungle, the first flight over the Atlantic Ocean, and the first reach to the South Pole, etc.
I wanted to be an explorer, to go where no one had gone before, to see landscapes that no one had seen before, I thought.
When I became a junior high school student, I joined the Mountain Club. I used to go to trecking with a backpack inside of which there are a tent and a sleeping bag and food for one week journey. I learned how to predict weather, how to avoid risk in nature. In snowy mounains, I learned how to make water from snow, and how to sleep in the snow, making a snow cave.
When I graduate from high school, I decided to enter Kyoto University, as there is the famous Explorer’s Club of Kyoto University (ECKU). As a member of ECKU, I went shower climbing, rock climing, river kayaking, caving, etc. I went to Taklamakan Desert when I was a freshman, riding a train and bus for a week. Then, however, I gradually realized that there was no geograchic space for “explore” in the world, in the very end of the 20th centry.
National Geographic showed the way I should go.
Nat Geo quoted Henry David Thoreau’s words, “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact,” in January 1998, to show the future of “Exploration.” I was saved by the words, and I decided to front a fact.
Another edition of National Geographic featured overfishing in November 1995. I bought this in a second hand book store in 1999, and decided to confront the fact of overfishing, and try to find a way to solve this issue. My exloration began.
I have been working in the fishing industry for many years. As a trainee fisherman in the beginning, then as an auctioneer at the Tsukiji, the former largest fish market in Japan, I made myself inside the fishing and seafood business and really understand how people work there. Then I started work for Marine Stewardship Council, an international NGO and NPO for sustainable fishing and sustainable seafood consumption.
In 2021, I established an organization named “Japan Sustainable Seafood Society” to accelerate communication and learning between people who seek sustainability in seafood industry. As a part of activity of JSSS, I started an online program called “Fish Elementary School.
What I want to emphasis in this article is that, although I was working as a fisherman and fish trader, I was always trying to be an “explorer” who fronts the fact of overfishing.
Now, I am trying to apply a grant from National Geographic, named “National Geographic Explorer.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/society/our-explorers/
I already submit the pre-application.
I started this blog this morning to look back at the way I came, and fix my mind to see the future.
I will continue to write this blog to re-recognize my passion toward exploration and National Geographic.
Thank you for reading.