Hitoshi Kakishima-san, President of the Kakishima Trout Farm, welcomed us. First, he told us about the difficulties in running a trout farm. There are three problems. One is "diseases". A disease that the farm owner is most afraid of is a "virus" from foreign countries and only trout has the disease. There is no remedy for it, so he cannot do anything but seeing the death. And one more thing, trout stock in a river brings a new virus back to the farm. If trout had a virus-related disease, no medicine is available in this high biological technology world. Nature is warm to life, but gives enemies to it. Next, about "weather conditions." Trout lives in a cold water. The optimum temperature is between 6℃ and 14℃. At 0℃, it can live though it doesn't eat. However, at 25℃ or higher, it dies. In this farm, the water temperature goes up to 24℃, so to prevent oxygen shortage, a water fan is used to supply oxygen. And a typhoon is a problem that occurs in summer. When the farm is hit by a typhoon, the water gate is clogged by dirt, and the farm workers have to remove dirt through the night in a storm. After the storm, some trout die and some are gone away. So he has to start the farm again. Kakishima-san's farm was hit by a typhoon ten year ago and all trout died, so since then, he has been insured and installed a danger alarm.
Water shortage is also a big damage to the business. If it doesn't rain in spring, the damage continues throughout the year. He had a hard time in last winter due to lack of water. In addition, a very cheap fish has been exported from foreign countries. So domestic farm owners are afraid of it. Kakishima-san used to farm other fish, but now he only farm trout. Trout is cheap in Japan, so he can do a good business when compared with imported fish with a transportation fee. We didn't know that there were lots of problems in trout farm. His farm doesn't use any chemical products, so the trout was sold as a natural product at a Department Store in Tokyo.
We asked him about the following. "Where do you obtain a trout fry?" "We raise eggs in Otaki Land and bring up the fry here for one month until they become 30g. Until then, lots of trout were dead or suffered from a disease. We bring up them up to 150g at seven months." "What do you feed them?" "Mostly fish powder mixed with a flour. Now I use an automatic feeding machine that I fabricated by myself." "Amazing!" "We cannot do our business unless we can do everything. I built this office by myself and I have a license of YUNBO for typhoon attack." "There is no one who can do everything,"
When we asked him about recommendable trout cooking, his wife answered.
"Well, generally, broiling with salt or meunier but in our house, we cook it with miso. We eat it after preserved in miso. If you leave it in a refrigerator, it lasts for one month. Our children are never bored if they take it at breakfast, lunch and dinner."
Although we can get and eat trout easily, behind it, there are a great efforts in farming it. After that, Kakishima-san's taught us about the view of life and the way of thinking through his experiences. It was most impressive in his talk that if there is something you feel hard, just endure it. Most of hard things are solved if you wait for a while."