iStock/ Hakase_
I recently read a 2005 study that stated about 70% of Japanese people believe fish don’t have feelings.
Japan eats more fish per capita than many countries and fishing is deeply tied to national identity. To test the study’s accuracy, I, in a very scientific manner, asked my Japanese friends. “Do you think fish have emotions?” Indeed, most blinked, tilted their heads, and said, “Not really. They’re just fish.”
That simple answer stuck with me. They were all so matter-of-fact.
So, do fish have feelings? And why does Japan, a country where respect and mindfulness are often tied to food, seem to draw a hard emotional line when it comes to seafood?
Let’s dive in. (Pun intended).
iStock/ Chamith B
Fish and Feelings: What Science Actually Says
This isn’t just a cultural question—it’s also a scientific one. For a long time, science and society assumed that fish lack the neural machinery to process pain or emotions. No facial expressions, no yelps and no limbs to clutch in distress. Seemed straightforward.
But recent studies have challenged that. Researchers like Victoria Braithwaite found that fish have nociceptors—nerve endings that respond to harmful stimuli. When injured, fish can exhibit pain-avoidant behavior and their brain activity shows signs of stress.
A 2014 study even showed that zebrafish given painkillers were less stressed than those untreated. That doesn’t prove they feel emotions the way we do, but it raises ethical questions. Especially when you think about how often fish are gutted or sliced alive in restaurant kitchens from Tsukiji to New York.
Ethical Cooking Practices
You’d be hard-pressed to find a Japanese kitchen that doesn’t have fish in some form—whether it’s a slab of maguro (tuna) sashimi, a grilled aji (horse mackerel) or a bento-box staple like shiozake (salted salmon).
iStock/ SYMFONIA
Lobsters are commonly boiled alive in Western culinary practices. In most places, raw oysters are typically served either still alive or freshly shucked just before serving. Japan also has ikezukuri, a controversial practice in which live seafood is prepared in front of the customer, most often fish, but occasionally crustaceans as well.
Odorigui (“dancing eating”) is a Japanese term for eating seafood such as squid or octopus while it’s still moving. It’s usually served with soy sauce, which triggers a twitching or “dancing” motion due to a salt reaction with the nerves. Though the seafood is usually already dead by this point, it has often been killed just moments before, similar to the Korean dish san-nakji.
Why Japan Thinks Differently
So why is the fish-feelings question met with a shrug in Japan?
Part of it could go back to Buddhist influence. While many forms of Buddhism promote non-violence, Japan’s adaptation, Zen in particular, developed alongside Shinto practices that placed different values on animals based on utility, purity and proximity to humans.
Cows and horses? Valuable, visible and rarely eaten until the 19th century. Dogs and cats? Companion animals. Fish, on the other hand, were seen as non-domesticated creatures hunted in the wild, more distant from humans and thus less morally fraught to eat. Unlike pigs or cows, fish weren’t raised specifically for slaughter. This distinction made eating fish more permissible.
Throughout Japanese history, various emperors and shoguns placed restrictions on eating meat. In 675, Emperor Tenmu issued a ban on the consumption of certain animals—often referred to in Buddhism as the “five animals”: cows, horses, pigs, dogs (or sheep, depending on the version) and chickens. Fish were typically excluded from such prohibitions and, at least “on paper,” weren’t considered the same category of animal.
Even fish consumption wasn’t widespread until the rise of a more commercial urban food culture during the Edo period, when seafood became more common among wealthier citizens. As a result, fish came to be seen as a source of animal protein that was less ethically complicated than meat from land animals.
The country’s reverence for nature coexists with its practicality about eating from it. It’s why you might see a sushi chef bow before a tuna.
The Role of Fish in Japanese Food Culture
Eating fish here isn’t just common—it’s ceremonial.
From elaborate kaiseki (seasonal multi-course) dinners to everyday izakaya skewers, fish is integrated into the flow of seasons, festivals and even language. Phrases like “sakana ni naru” (literally, “to become a fish”) refer to food that goes well with alcohol. It’s not uncommon for a Japanese person to eat fish at every meal of the day—grilled saba (mackerel) in the morning, chirashi zushi for lunch and sashimi with sake at night.
iStock/ kazoka30
With this level of normalization, it’s easy to see why few pause to consider a fish’s inner world. It’s not cruelty—it’s distance. Fish are treated almost like ingredients from the start.
A Linguistic Question? How Japan Defines “Feelings”
When I asked my friends, “Do fish have feelings?” I leaned on words like kanjo (emotion), kimochi (a term that can mean both feeling and physical sensation) and itami (pain) to explain myself. In Japanese, these words are most commonly used to describe human emotional or physical states, not animals.
Kanjo implies complex, often socially expressed emotions like joy, anger or sadness—concepts not typically attributed to animals unless they are mammals with recognizable expressions. “Her inspiring story stirred up strong kanjo in me.” “You need to control your kanjo!”
Kimochi is broader and can refer to both emotional moods and physical comfort. Example sentences I’d hear people say kimochi would be “the cool breeze feels so kimochi!” or “the warm onsen water is so kimochi!”
Itami is more concrete to define. It’s understood as physical pain, but it’s often discussed in human contexts, especially when tied to vocal or visible suffering.
This linguistic framing reflects a cultural lens where animal experience is seen more in terms of instinct and function than inner life. So when you ask Japanese people if fish have “feelings,” the ambiguity in the language itself may lead to philosophical insight, confusion or a flat no.
Is Japan Changing Its Tune?
There’s growing international pressure on Japan to consider fish welfare, especially with the rise of documentaries like Seaspiracy and movements toward sustainable fishing. Japan now has ten MSC(Marine Stewardship Council)-certified fisheries, up from just two in 2015. These include longline skipjack tuna and oyster fisheries that meet international sustainability standards. In 2020, a Japanese longline tuna fishery even became the world’s first to gain MSC certification for bluefin tuna, demonstrating leadership in sustainably managing high-demand species. Major retailers like Aeon are also adopting sustainable chains of custody for seafood, while the domestic Marine Eco-Label Japan (MEL) has earned global recognition.
iStock/ Nuture
Japan has long practiced humane methods like ikejime, a traditional technique that instantly destroys the fish’s brain and spinal cord to minimize suffering and preserve freshness. In fact, ikejime is now promoted globally as one of the most ethical methods. Some Japanese aquaculture businesses are actively highlighting these traditional techniques to educate international markets and reinforce Japan’s longstanding commitment to both culinary quality and animal welfare.
Fish, Dolphins and Whales
Time to navigate into darker waters. While fish clearly react to harm, the deeper debate is whether they experience conscious suffering—the emotional side of pain.
Most modern researchers now agree that some species, especially bony fish (like salmon, trout, carp), almost certainly do. The UK, Norway, Switzerland and parts of the EU now officially recognize that fish can feel pain and have welfare regulations for their treatment.
Whale meat for sale. iStock/ LewisTsePuiLung
Whales and dolphins are another category entirely, as they are mammals belonging to a group called cetaceans. Now widely recognized by scientists as highly intelligent, they are emotionally complex animals, much like pigs, cows and other land mammals. Their advanced nervous systems and large brains support behaviors that reflect self-awareness, long-term social bonds and intricate communication. Countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK have strongly condemned whaling for consumption, a practice maintained by Japan, Iceland and Indigenous communities in places like Greenland and northern Canada.
That said, ethical debates around hunting cetaceans are deeply layered. Some argue that it is hypocritical for Western countries to condemn Japan for consuming whale or dolphin meat while eating land mammals like cows or pigs, which also show high cognitive abilities. Unlike industrial livestock farming, where animals are bred for slaughter, whale and dolphin hunts target wild populations, raising different ecological and emotional questions. While the hunt itself can be traumatic for the animals, it does not involve lifelong confinement, feedlots or factory farming practices, another form of suffering rarely highlighted in these critiques.
Another important dimension is the racialized framing often embedded in Western criticisms of whaling by Japan, Iceland and others. As scholars like Dr. Anthony Leeds (University of Toronto) note, these critiques often carry orientalist assumptions, ignoring Indigenous and local perspectives on marine resource use while exempting Western practices from similar scrutiny.
The concern is not only ethical but also ecological. Western industrial whaling, particularly by Britain and the US from the 18th to 20th centuries, decimated global whale populations, with blue whale numbers dropping by over 98%. Today, whales remain a focus of conservation discussions due to their intelligence, cultural symbolism and historical overexploitation. However, today, with whaling only practiced by a few cultures for culinary purposes, many whale populations have shown signs of recovery. Blue whales now number around 10,000–25,000, and North Pacific humpbacks have grown to over 33,000. Though the North Atlantic right whale remains critically endangered with just ~372 individuals, despite no longer being hunted for food.
Modern culinary whaling by Japan, Iceland and Indigenous groups is minimal compared to historical industrial hunts. Japan’s current coastal whaling takes only a few hundred whales annually under strict, science-based quotas to maintain sustainability. However, critics argue that international oversight is limited since Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019, stating that the IWC had shifted away from its original mission of managing sustainable whaling to focusing purely on conservation. Japan maintains that its catch numbers remain within established quotas and are reported transparently.
iStock/Cristi Croitoru
While some defend these hunts as cultural traditions, growing Western criticism, rooted in both ethical and conservation concerns, highlights a dilemma that is also shaped by cultural bias. This debate raises broader questions about how we judge the consumption of different animals, whether whales and dolphins, land mammals, or fish.
Final Thoughts
So, do fish have feelings? Probably. Science is inching toward yes. But part of the confusion lies in how we define “feelings” or “emotion.” But the survey wasn’t actually asking whether fish feel pain or stress; it asked if fish have feelings, a word that can mean anything from sensory perception to human-like emotions, depending on culture and interpretation. The result was taken out of context and turned into tabloid headlines, fishing (pun intended) for clicks rather than offering meaningful nuance.
iStock/ Sergio Yoneda
In Japan, people have long understood that fish experience stress. That’s why techniques like ikejime were developed centuries ago—to kill fish instantly and painlessly, reducing suffering while preserving flavor. It’s an approach rooted in respect, practicality and taste.
At the same time, modern ethical debates often focus on intelligence as a moral threshold: dolphins, whales, and octopuses deserve protection because they’re “smart,” while fish or shrimp don’t. But intelligence itself is defined on human terms—measured by skills we value, like language, tool use, or self-recognition. It’s a hierarchy humans created, deciding which lives matter based on how closely they mirror our own.
In Japan, fish sit in a strange spot: respected, consumed, and emotionally neutral. That’s not likely to change overnight, but conversations about animal ethics are slowly seeping in. If you’re eating fish in Japan, and honestly, you will, it’s worth thinking about what that means.
Not to guilt yourself, but to eat with intention. Because when we stop asking questions about the food on our plate, we stop learning. And that’s the part that should really make us uncomfortable.
