OTOSHIBE, Japan - The Shinei Maru Number 66 looks like the dozens of other fishing boats moored in this Japanese harbor. But its builders say it is the world’s first hybrid fishing trawler. By switching between oil and electric-powered propulsion, it uses up to a third less fuel than conventional boats.

“It’s like a Prius for the sea,”said Tadatoshi Ikeuchi, 62, the boat’s owner and captain.

Until very recently, commercial fishermen around the world have been laboring under the weight of high fuel prices. In Europe last year, fishermen expressed their frustration by blockading ports to protest prices and taxes.

Japan, meanwhile, is searching for high-tech solutions. The hybrid boat engine, which is still just a prototype, is part of a multimillion- dollar government-led effort to rescue Japan’s fishing industry from escalating energy costs, which are likely to rise again once the global recession ends and demand comes back.

As part of the two-year-old program, the Japanese are also testing biofuel-powered marine engines, computer-engineered propeller designs and low-energy LED lights on squid boats, which use bright lights to lure their catch.

There is a vast international market for such solutions. Many Japanese boat engines that use computers to raise fuel efficiency are already popular among American fishermen. And Yamanaka, the Tokyo-based maker of the hybrid engine for the trawler, which is called the Fish Eco, says the United States and Europe are large potential markets.

Japan’s agriculture and fisheries ministry, which has led development of the new technologies, will subsidize their introduction as part of a $700 million aid package announced in July to help the fishing industry.

But fishermen say they doubt the effort will be enough to break the deep sense of malaise that has started to afflict fishing communities like this one in northern Japan.

The number of the country’s commercial fishermen has shrunk by 27 percent in the last decade, to 204,330 last year, hurt by declining birthrates and migration of young people to the cities, according to the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations, an industry group representing fishermen.

The federation warns that rising fuel costs could force an additional 25,000 to 45,000 fishermen to hang up their nets. Before the recent fall in prices, boat fuel, known as heavy fuel oil, was accounting for about 20 to 30 percent of a fisherman’s costs in Japan, almost double its proportion three years ago.

They cannot pass the increase on to consumers in the form of higher seafood prices for fear of losing sales to cheaper imports from Asian competitors, like China and Vietnam.

They also worry that higher seafood prices would only worsen the shift in Japanese consumer tastes away from a traditional seafood-centered diet? a trend known as“sakana banare,”or flight from fish.

“Higher fish prices will just encourage Japanese to eat more hamburgers and fried chicken,”said Nobuhiro Nagaya, a managing director at the fisheries federation.

While their multimillion-dollar projects recall the governmentorchestrated technology drives of previous decades, officials express far more modest expectations in an era of tight budgets and limited economic growth.

“Technology cannot be the only answer,”said Kazuo Hiraishi, an assistant chief in the ministry’s maritime technology research division.“But Japan’s excellence in electronics and energy-saving should be of some help to our fishermen.”





By MARTIN FACKLER