The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #61786 Message #995205
Posted By: Joe Offer
01-Aug-03 - 03:26 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Tiny Fish For Japan - What's it about?
Subject: Lyr Add: TINY FISH FOR JAPAN (Stan Rogers)
Here are the lyrics and notes from the Stan Rogers album From Fresh Water.
TINY FISH FOR JAPAN
(Stan Rogers, 1984)
Where Patterson Creek's muddy waters run down
Past the penny arcades, by the harbour downtown,
All the old Turtlebacks rust in the rain
Like they never will leave there again.
But leave there they will in the hours before dawn,
Slip out in the darkness without word or song;
For a few more years yet they will work while they can
To catch tiny fish for Japan.
No white fish or trout here, we leave them alone.
The inspectors raise hell if we take any home.
What kind of fisherman can't eat his catch
Or call what he's taken his own?
But the plant works three shifts now. There's plenty of pay.
We ship seventeen tons of this garbage each day.
If we want to eat fish, then we'll open a can,
And catch tiny fish for Japan.
In the Norfolk Hotel over far too much beer,
The old guys remember when the water ran clear.
No poisons with names that we can't understand
And no tiny fish for Japan...
So the days run together. Each one is the same.
And it's good that the smelt have no lovelier name.
It's all just a job now, we'll work while we can,
To catch tiny fish for Japan.
And we'll catch tiny fish for Japan.
[This song is not intended as a slur of any kind on the countries who import food products that our government won't let us eat. It is Stan's sadly ironic way of describing exactly the status of the Inland Fisheries as seen through the eyes of many a fisherman out of a job. There IS a Norfolk Hotel - Stan played there years ago. The village was dying then. Now they have one of the best Summer Theatre houses in Ontario, but that's little consolation to the men
with the boats.]
When I was a kid in the 1950's and 1960's, we caught perch in the Great Lakes, and they made for terrific eating. For perch, we fished from the breakwater with a "power line" of surgical elastic with a brick on one end, a bell on the other, and a half-dozen baited hooks in the middle. When the smelt were running, we caught them by the hundreds from the breakwaters on Lake Michigan, attracting them with gas lanterns and pulling them up with square nets suspended from a pulley on the end of a two-by-four. People would smoke the smelt, and they tasted great with beer. My home town of Racine, Wisconsin, had a fleet of strange-looking fishing boats that looked like Dutch wooden shoes - built so they could survive when the treacherous waters of the Lakes washed over them..
In the late 1960's, the lamprey eels killed off many of the fish people used to eat, and then we learned that the Lakes had been poisoned by all sorts of industrial pollution. I left Wisconsin in 1970, when the Lakes were at their worst. By the time Stan Rogers wrote this song in 1984, the Lakes had started to improve, but it still wasn't safe to eat the fish. Commercial fishery was almost completely dead in the Lakes, although I gather from the song that some pollution-tainted fish were being shipped to Japan but were illegal to eat in Canada.
-Joe Offer-