Kiyoshi Kimura, known as the Tuna King for his record-breaking bluefin tuna purchases at Tokyo's first auction each January, is the owner of Kiyomura Corporation, which runs the Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain across Japan. According to his own account in Japanese interviews, Kimura traveled to the Somali coast around 2012 during the height of the piracy crisis to meet with former pirates. He concluded that they had turned to piracy not by choice but because foreign trawlers had depleted the fish stocks, destroying their traditional livelihood and leaving them with no other way to feed their families.
Kimura says he approached the problem as a supply issue: he provided four fishing boats, taught the crews how to catch yellowfin tuna, established freezer capacity on shore to preserve the catch until it could be shipped, assisted Somalia in engaging with the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission that manages the fishery, and committed to buying whatever they caught at a stable price so that tuna would be valuable the moment it was landed. He recounted telling them, 'They didn't even like pirating. I suggested that they catch tuna instead, and make a proud living for their families.' The source notes that Somali piracy attacks dropped from 237 in 2011 to 75 in 2012, then to 15 in 2013, and by 2015 successful hijackings had stopped altogether.
However, the International Maritime Bureau attributes this decline to international naval patrols, the hardening of vessels with razor wire and citadels, the use of private armed security teams, and the stabilizing influence of Somalia's central government. Kimura acknowledges that his program was not measured by outside observers and that four boats on one stretch of coast did not constitute a national fishing industry, but he maintains that his offer to buy fish instead of sending a frigate represented an alternative approach that addressed the root cause cited by pirates themselves: that they took to the sea because foreign fleets had taken their fish.