Trade ministers from the 12 countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership are now set to meet in Maui, Hawaii, from July 28 to the 31st and maybe - just maybe - wrap up a deal. In the U.S., the focus is, of course, on America's goals with respect to each of the other 11. In fact, though, there are an array of bilateral issues to be resolved. One set of issues involves the negotiations between Japan and Canada over logs from British Columbia. Not many of them are exported. That's because British Columbia reserves most of its logs for local processing. (The U.S. too restricts log exports, but that's another matter.)
In TPP, Japan seems especially concerned with Canada's policies. One expression of the problem is summed up in a Canadian government note this way:
"Discussions with Japan are ongoing but have been difficult. Japan has very clearly linked the elimination of forestry tariffs [in Japan] to B.C. eliminating or significantly modifying log export controls."
How will that turn out? We could know in a month.
That said, our topic today isn't really TPP. It is rather the societies that border the Pacific and the links between. There are millions of them, and one of them is highlighted in
"The unsinkable Somatsumaru" a must-read
Globe and Mail story by
Mark Hume. There are wonderful people in this story, but the centerpiece is a fishing boat, The
Somatsumaru. Since 1985, the boat had belonged to
Kou Sasaki, a scallop fisherman. On March 11, 2011, it was moored near Ofunato, Japan, north of Sendai. When the tsunami hit, the wave came almost two miles inland, killing some 420 people (out of 15,000 in Japan) destroying almost 3,500 houses, and carrying off Mr. Sasaki's boat.
In 2013, the battered boat and its Yamaha outboard motor washed ashore near "the First nation of Klemtu," on Swindle Island in British Columbia. The folks at Spirit Bear Lodge there cleaned it up and are now using it for bear viewing. They also set about trying to find the owner, and, with some expert help, they did. If all goes according to plan, Mr. Sasaki will travel to British Columbia next month, where, in Klemtu, he will be the guest of members of the Kitasoo First Nation. And he will visit his boat.