Wanted: air freight cargo. Large tonnage, high value. Must be made in North America and desired by Japanese. No cameras, optics, textiles, or small electronics need apply.

Such was the mental ad composed by Akira Okazaki, then a twenty-something cargo division employee of Japan Airlines. His company had grown exponentially as Japan’s postwar economy boomed, but cargo represented only three percent of revenue. The problem: Japan imported raw materials by ship, but exported finished goods by air. The difference between profit and loss was finding a way to fill then-empty return flights. For months, Okazaki scoured the mammoth annual index of U.S. federal trade statistics. What was plentiful in North America, valuable in newly wealthy Japan, and—most important—so perishable it simply had to be shipped by air?

Eureka! Sushi tuna.

In October 1971, Okazaki and colleagues traveled to eastern coast of Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where multi-hundred-pound bluefin tuna were so abundant fisherman often buried their excess catch with bulldozers. Few locals believed these castaways were prized halfway across the world as toro, the fattest, most expensive cuts of sushi tuna. Okazaki and his team invested a year’s time and $40,000 to prove their point, developing local processing partners, documenting Tokyo fish market auctions, and designing and constructing custom refrigerated containers for Japan Airlines’s fleet of DC-8s.

August 14, 1972, at 5:15 a.m., five four-day-old Canadian bluefin finally came to auction in Tokyo. Break-even price was 800 yen per kilogram. The “flying fish,” as market veterans immediately dubbed them, sold for 1,200 yen. Soon tuna not only filled but overloaded summer Tokyo-bound Japan Airlines flights.

“We now live in the era of the flying fish: as long as you can afford it, you can eat almost anything, anywhere on earth, as if you were in the place where it was caught or harvested or slaughtered,” says Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. “This product that could lose more value more quickly than anything on earth became a staple of air cargo.”

Indeed, between 1972 and the early 1990s, as tens of millions in North America and Europe joined the Japanese as regular sushi eaters, the average price of high-grade tuna rose from $2 to $36 per pound. Japan Airlines and competitors expanded flights from Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia and New England—even eventually to Eastern Europe and Australia, where aquaculture pioneers built “tuna ranches” complete with million-dollar superfreezers able to maintain fish freshness, texture, flavor, and color for as long as eighteen months. Now, says Sasha Issenberg, “It’s not just your main course, but your side dishes that are coming by air. You might get New Zealand lamb. [You might get] asparagus. It’s a matter of margins. Given a gourmet culture, anything that’s fetching a price flies.”

Perhaps the largest lesson of the global sushi story is that logistics middlemen may not only serve, but lead. No corporate plan or customer query inspired Akira Okazaki. “It was the initiative and ingenuity and social skills of one cargo manager who sat around a table drinking beer with local fisherman that made this link possible,” says Issenberg. “He took this perennial problem, which was trade imbalance, but because he was thinking about it from a logistics point of view, he developed a level of trust across continents, time zones, currencies, and languages.”

Today, the Asian trade disparity most on American minds is that with China. Six in ten containers that cross the Pacific Ocean from that country come back empty, nearly triple the rate of just a decade earlier—and empty containers naturally travel at a loss. Air cargo rates into China run as low as 30 cents a kilogram, one-tenth the outbound price. That massive imbalance may mean a big opportunity for the next Okazaki.

What is there Chinese demand for that can be moved anywhere over the world? The problem is China is a far more self-sufficient country than Japan is, but China is going to approach a resource crunch. The person who carries the freight can become the crucial link between buyers and seller. The initiative lies with the connector. Wt

Written by:  Jeremy N. Smith