Japan's most famous tuna buyer says he turned Somali pirates into fishermen

At the height of the Somali piracy crisis, with twenty navies patrolling the coast, a Tokyo restaurant owner flew in with four fishing boats and a promise to buy whatever they caught. The attacks collapsed. Who deserves the credit is still argued.

The coast, 2011

In 2011, Somali pirates attacked 237 ships.

They were operating hundreds of miles out into the Indian Ocean from motherships, boarding tankers and bulk carriers with ladders and rifles, and sailing them back to anchor off the Somali coast. At any given time they were holding several hundred sailors hostage, sometimes for years, waiting for ransoms that ran into the millions.

Most of the world knew the problem from one incident two years earlier: the April 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the capture of its American captain, Richard Phillips, which ended with Navy SEAL snipers firing from the fantail of a destroyer and became a Tom Hanks film.

By 2011, the response was enormous. Warships from the United States, the European Union, NATO, China, India, Russia, Japan and others were running patrols through the Gulf of Aden. Shipping companies had begun putting armed guards aboard. Ships were hardened with razor wire and citadels.

None of it had stopped the attacks. The year before, Somali pirates had taken more hostages than in any year on record.

Kiyoshi Kimura was not an obvious person to get involved.

He was, and is, the owner of Kiyomura Corporation, which runs the Sushi Zanmai chain across Japan. In Tokyo he is known as the Tuna King, because every January he buys the most expensive fish at the first auction of the year at the central market, pays a price that makes the front page of every newspaper, and sells it in his restaurants at the normal menu price. In January 2026 he paid 510 million yen — about $3.2 million — for a single bluefin from Oma, a world record.

Tuna is his business. And tuna is the reason he says he went to Somalia.

The waters off the Somali coast are some of the richest yellowfin grounds in the Indian Ocean. For two decades, with no functioning government to police them, foreign trawlers had been fishing them out. Somali fishermen, who had once worked those waters from small boats, had been pushed off their own coast.

Many of them, by the accounts that emerged in those years, were the men now doing the hijacking.

What he says he did

Kimura has told the story in Japanese interviews, and the details come from those.

Around 2012, he went to the Somali coast and met with men who had been involved in piracy. He says he wanted to understand why they were doing it.

His conclusion was that they didn’t want to be pirates. They wanted to feed their families, and the fishing had collapsed.

So he treated it as a supply problem.

He says he provided four fishing boats. He taught the crews to catch yellowfin tuna. He set up freezer capacity on shore so the fish would keep until it could be shipped. He helped Somalia engage with the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, the body that manages the fishery. And he committed to buying what they caught, at a stable price, so that a tuna was worth money the day it came out of the water.

“They didn’t even like pirating. I suggested that they catch tuna instead, and make a proud living for their families.”

What happened to the numbers

Somali piracy did not fade. It collapsed.

By 2015, successful Somali hijackings had stopped altogether. The anchorages off the coast where hijacked ships had sat for years were empty.

Who gets the credit

The International Maritime Bureau, which compiles the figures, has a clear view of why. In its words, the decline came from “international navies, the hardening of vessels and other recommendations in the shipping industry’s Best Management Practices, the use of private armed security teams and the stabilizing influence of Somalia’s central government.”

Kimura’s name is not on that list. It does not appear in any naval or maritime-industry account of how the crisis ended.

What his program did is not something anyone outside his own interviews has measured. Four boats on one stretch of coast is not a national fishing industry. The men who stopped hijacking ships in 2012 did so, overwhelmingly, because boarding a ship had become a good way to get shot or spend life in a Seychelles prison.

But the pirates’ own explanation for why they started — foreign fleets took our fish, so we took their ships — was never really contested. And the one person who showed up offering to buy fish instead of sending a frigate was a sushi restaurant owner from Tokyo.

He has never claimed to have done it alone. The internet has claimed it for him, repeatedly, usually in the form “a Japanese sushi chef ended Somali piracy,” which is not true and which he has not said.

The two tuna stories

There is a version of Kimura that Japan knows well: the man in the white coat and the enormous grin, standing over a record-price bluefin with a cleaver every January, having just spent a fortune on a fish he will sell at a loss. It is a publicity stunt, and it is a very good one.

The Somalia story is the other version of the same man. The instinct is identical — if you want the fish, go where the fish are and pay for them — and so is the self-promotion. He tells the story because it is good for business.

Both things can be true. The publicity stunt that puts his face on every front page in Japan is also, by any reasonable accounting, the most expensive advertisement in the country. And the fishing program that he describes in Somalia, whatever its real scale, was a sushi man’s answer to a problem the navies of the world had spent four years failing to solve by force.

So it is a footnote, or it is the part everyone else missed. The numbers say navies. Kimura says tuna. It was probably both, in some proportion that nobody is ever going to measure — and the only person who went ashore to try the second one was the Tuna King.