EXPO2025　Fish quiz with Sazae-san　Welcome to Japan, the land of seafoods!

EXPO2025　Fish quiz with Sazae-san

Sazae-san is a very famous anime in Japan.

June 14, 2025, our special guest is Sazae-san, a member of the Fish Day supporters.
As you all know, the Sazae-san family’s names are related to seafood.

When you think of Sazae-san, you think of shellfish.
Abalone and clams are well-known members of the shellfish family.
There are also some creatures that are not known to be related to shellfish.
Here’s a quiz!

Which species is closest to a shellfish?

Among octopus, squid, and barnacles, which of these are shellfish?

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

↓

The answer is squid and octopus.

They have shells!

How big are sea creatures?

Next, we’d like to introduce Katsuo（Skipjack＝tuna！）.
Let’s introduce Marlin, who can swim just as fast as Skipjack.
How big is a marlin?
As an exercise, try measuring its size with your hand!
How big is a saury?

How big is a Skipjack?

How big is a marlin?

 

What is the function of a marlin’s beak?

How would you use that weird, stick-like mouth?

① To surprise the enemy
② To stab the pray and eat
③ To smack the pray and eat

By the way, marlins feed on sardine and mackerels. Tuna and Skipjack dive into schools of sardine at super fast speed and gobble them down, but in addition to their speed, marlins boast large beaks, and sailfin marlin use their large dorsal fins to surprise the sardine and then corner the school and eat them.

Just learning about this marlin’s life is exciting, but there are other sea creatures that use other parts of their bodies to hit fish, weaken them, and then eat them.

Here’s a quiz!

Strategies for Marine Life

What sea creatures might use the same strategy?

① Sea scorpions
② Whales
③ Thresher sharks

First of all… sea scorpions apparently grew up to 2.5m, but they became extinct 250 million years ago, so that’s not right. It was a trick question.
Whales… are big,　and each tail weighs about 200kg, so it seems possible, but they don’t eat them by smacking them. They eat with their mouths wide open.
Whales eating fish are very tasty, and I like them, but there is a limit to how many you can catch so that their numbers don’t decrease. This year, it has been calculated that you can catch about 400, so if you see one, try eating one.

It’s frozen on the boat and then eaten as sashimi!

It’s the same technique used for tuna, so it’s fresh and highly recommended.

I’ve gone on a bit, but the creature that eats fish by slapping them like a marlin is a shark!

By the way, this one is a thresher shark, which is rare among sharks. My job is to tell people to eat fish, but please don’t eat this one. The fishermen also let it go when they catch it.
But if you’d like to try eating shark, I recommend this salmon shark!

As its name, salmon shark, suggest it loves salmon. Originally, they were caught on fishing hooks when catching tuna, and were only eaten in port cities, but recently, fillets of this salmon shark have been sold in supermarkets all over the country. It’s delicious when made into garlic steak. The fluffy texture, like that of HANPEN(steamed surimi cake)ham, is addictive.

Japan is surrounded by the sea and is rich in seafood

Well, we’ve talked about a lot of things, but do you now have a better understanding of the marine creatures you eat?
Around 600-700 types of seafood are on display in Japanese fish　markets.
Our oceans are incredibly rich, and there are many lesser known but delicious fish. If you　find a fish you have never seen before, I encourage you to pick it up and try it.

In yesterday’s workshop, we scraped a snail shell, a friend of Sazae-san, and found that the mother-of-pearl was shiny and beautiful!
If you polish a turban shell, it will also shine.
I hope that we can enjoy our lives while learning about such familiar things, and that seafood will be there for us.
See you!