JAPAN: The Giant Killers

Fearlessly at home in the water, the way a fisherman’s sons often are, the Fukushi brothers splashed about last week in the protective shallows breaking over the narrow shale shelf of their little beach on Okujiri Island, ten miles off Hokkaido’s southwestern shore. When 14-year-old Masami Fukushi plunged off the shelf and sprinted out into deep water toward a rock 50 yards away, his younger brothers, Masakatsu, 12, Takeshi, 10, and Takeaki. 9, quickly gave chase.

With his head start, Masami had a long lead. But suddenly he whipped about and started churning for shore, crying: “Same da! Nigero!” (It’s a shark! Run!) Closer to the shelf, his three brothers quickly made it back to safety and stood up to watch Masami’s progress. Some ten yards behind him, but rapidly closing the gap, a glistening black triangle cut through the waves. Moments later Masami’s brothers screamed with horror when the dorsal fin slipped from sight; the shark had dived to attack from below. Warned by their cries, Masami abruptly flailed his arms backward, and the shark’s jaws snapped on empty air. As the fish flashed by, Masami instinctively wrapped his arms around its slippery middle and hung on for his life.

Without a word, his three brothers dived into the roiling fray, now almost at the shelf’s edge, and clutched the shark’s body, fins and tail. Panic-stricken, the shark lunged to escape—but in the wrong direction, toward the shelf—and an incoming swell lofted the four boys and the fish in a thrashing mass into the shallows’ foot-deep waters. Grabbing rocks, the brothers clubbed the shark to death. Ten minutes later, alarmed fishermen racing to the scene found the four small boys, exhausted but proud, resting beside their unorthodox catch: the still twitching body of a 7-ft., 180-lb. salmon shark. Admitted the littlest, Takeaki: “I was scared.”