The Global Seaweed Coalition will be visiting Japan in April! Our local partners from UN Global Compact Japan are working on organizing a great seaweed conference at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo (April 26th, 2pm) in partnership with the French Embassy & Riken Food Ltd.
The conference will gather high level japanese policymakers, NGO’s, business leaders and stakeholders to discuss seaweed’s non food potential, that is getting traction internationally but is still relatively new to Japan.
After a series of meetings in Tokyo with government, academics and industry stakeholders (April 18/19), our co-founder Vincent Doumeizel will travel to Sendai to visit Riken Food Ltd and seaweed producers during the harvest season (April 20/21). He will then be welcomed by the municipality of Toba, the city in Japan with the largest number of ama, women who brave the dangers of the seabed to gather seaweed and shellfish, perpetuating a 2000-year-old tradition (April 22/24). A townhall will be organized at Lloyd’s Register in Yokohama on April 25 on behalf of our founding partners from Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
Since the start of our journey, learning from and working with the asian seaweed sector has been at the heart of our action. As our Japan-based seaweed ambassador Pauline Casaux stresses in a recent article, thanks to millennia of consumption as a sea vegetable, seaweed is mainly seen as a food in Japan. In the West, on the contrary, seaweed is a relatively recent (re)discovery as a food resource, with cultural habits taking a long time to change, but western non food seaweed applications are highly interesting to Japanese audiences. Increased cooperation and work with Japanese stakeholders will allow to learn more from our mutual experiences and exchange visions and ideas for innovation, to the benefit of the whole global seaweed sector.
Keeping with our inclusive approach, if you know any stakeholder, farm, institution, business you think we should be visiting, or have recommendations of any kind, please reach out to us!
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Art: “The seaweed-gathering ritual at Nagato”, Totoya Hokkei, 1835
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