Fifty years ago Mayor Daly of Chicago presented the Japanese Crown Prince a gift of the Illinois state fish…the bluegill. The Crown Prince brought them home and began a breeding program in the hope folks would have a new food source. What could go wrong? How about the prolific little buggers are eating up many native species. That’s really quite a common occurrence in such situations.
Emperor Akihito, a fish expert, brought the bluegill from the United States a half-century ago when he was crown prince, hoping to offer a new source of food to Japan.
But the bluegill, once celebrated as "prince fish," has turned into a nuisance in Japanese rivers and lakes by feeding on native species, leading the emperor to offer unusually personal comments of regret earlier this month.
They are trying to encourage people to eat the bluegills they catch. A web site (not linked in the article, possibly because it’s in Japanese) offers tips in filleting and cooking what is called a “pan fish” in the USA for obvious reasons. Simply gut and scale the little buggers and put them in a cast iron skillet with a bit of oil and you’ve got some of the sweetest tasting fish you’ll ever have. Yeah, you can fillet them and make fish cakes out of the meat and maybe a dozen other recipes, but a pan fish was meant for the pan, gol darn it!
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