The ocean is far too big to really care about whether divers bang into a few coral heads, or whether some people treat living things as playthings in front of you. It's messing with your view, and just because you have managed to finally avoid kicking coral yourself does not mean other don't get to make the same mistakes now that you have finally managed to stop doing so.
Trust me, there are lots of places where the coral is pristine in the Pacific because we won't take any of
you people there. We will take slings and spearguns there, though. Absolutely.
I'm not arguing against local culture.
Yes you are
exactly arguing against local culture. You are
completely missing the point if you eat fish that you do not catch yourself. It is only a colonizer's hubris that allows you to you try and make trouble for people who do catch their dinners in front of their better bred masters. You are part of a commercial food machine that does do permanent damage to the very ocean environment you are helcoptering in to look at. Island dwellers are just doing what people who actually live with the ocean do: interact with it on a (hopefully) sustainable basis.
You want people living in a place you simply do not understand, and could not live in, to behave the way you want them to, apparently because you have not thought out the damage that your back-home lifestyle does to the earth and our very Pacific oceans. And because you think you have the wisdom that we silly island people just do not have. Trust me, we do get to hear you, and those just like you, all the time. It sounds no less haughty this time than it ever has.
Granted, Japan is so much better than the US in terms of reducing waste and recycling, and using human powered transportation and public transportation that this would be better aimed at someone not coming from Japan.
None the less, you are asking that people not catch their own food while the boat is actually running from place to place
simply so you don't have to see it. That mindset, ( that "fill in the blank with an adjective that emphasizes self-centered shortsidedness" mindset), says that as long as the environmental degradation from commercial fishing is out of view it is A-OK (since you do eat fish). But when people do the completely environmentally invisible thing of throwing a line off an already moving boat that
you are on for no other reason than to go diving they are somehow offending your sense of, what? Propriety? Entitlement? Colonial power?
The only people on that boat doing anything environmentally slightly defensible are the ones fishing off of it. It is the commercial fishing done now by the colonial powers, and the damage from those colonial wars for island possessions that the colonial powers fought in the Pacific that caused and continues to cause the scarcity of the fish populations.
Go ahead and read about Potemkin Villages. Think about what you are asking for. Not change in how you take from our oceans, but for simply the things to be hid from your view.
The arrogance of the colonial mindset is rarely as clearly stated as you have done so when you emphasize that these locals will not be getting more of your money unless they build sufficiently pretty Potemkin Villages to entice you back. Please take some time to read up on sovereignty issues, particulary in the overall former Trust Territories of the Pacific (all of Micronesia including Guam), where the US has acted abominably, and before them the Japanese, and before them the Spanish. Mix in some French and German for the full European flavor. The story you don't apparently realize you are repeating could just as easily be restated as any island former colonial possession of any Empire 'wasted' on those that live there.
It's always rather breathtaking to hear that colonizers are just simply unaware of who and what they are. It is the system, always and ever, that overpowers and destroys. Not any individual actions. Asking that the "unpleasantness" be hid from you is pretty much all an islander has to hear to know where you are coming from.
The Pacific Gyre was not produced by any Pacific Islander. None of the various wars fought to colonize the Pacific Islands were fought by Pacific Islanders.
