Marketing and Comms
Bleak New Campaign Depicts the ‘Day Sushi Disappears’

A new campaign aims to drive home the very different reality that we could expect in a climate-changed future, as many of the delicacies we take for granted may no longer be available. "The Day Sushi Disappears" campaign — launched jointly by Japan’s euglena Co., Ltd. and renowned Tokyo sushi restaurant Ginza Kyubey — is inviting consumers to think about the future of the earth through sushi, or the lack thereof.

This campaign aims to alert consumers to the likelihood that climate change will continue to affect marine habitats, to the point that it dramatically changes the menu at sushi restaurants (see the full concept film here, in Japanese). In the campaign, euglena Co. — a biotechnology that pioneered mass cultivation of “Euglena” microalgae for use in biofuel — has illustrated a forecast of a future* in which certain popular sushi ingredients will disappear from the ocean around Japan due to climate change.

A special euglena microsite lists the 9 ingredients — cuttlefish (the first projected to disappear, by 2035), shako (mantis shrimp) (2041), salmon and salmon roe (2049), scallops (2068), sea urchin (2073), abalone (2080), flounder (2089), sea bream (2094) and snow crab (2098) — that are at risk of disappearing in the near future. Website visitors can reserve tables on the date assumed to be the last day each ingredient will be served at Ginza Kyubey.

*This forecast is based on a report by a supervisor of this campaign, Professor Shinichi Ito of the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute.