Fishing is an interesting subsistence activity. Some are simply performed by bricolage of existing skills and devices, while others are large-scale and well-organized with most-advanced equipment and boats. Although we cannot ignore this variation to oversimplify, it can be said that the future of mankind depends on sustainable development of fishing, because fishery is indispensable in supplying sufficient food to an ever-growing population.

Industrial progress is often considered as an increasing scale in investment or mechanization, but neither is good for development of fishing. The key to the future is not evolution, or expansion of fishing grounds to outside in search of one fish species, but involution, or finding unused resources close at hand. Only this latter is one of the few ways to gain a deeper understanding of the limited waters to increase the catch.

To make fishing more and more intensive, we have to learn a lot from small-scale fishing. The fishermen who have produced the maximum catch by minimizing investment not only knows every corner of the sea but also have creativity to develop novel fishing methods as soon as they come into contact with new knowledge and tools. Finding out how small-scale fishery relates to the surrounding natural and socio-economic environments is a great project to gain the wisdom of living on earth as our own experience.