Japan’s chick-sexers can tell cockerels from pullets but soon no one may care. Bill Spindle, Staff Reporter - Wall Street Journal
BEPPU CITY, Japan. – Under chandeliers in a convention center banquet room, Junichi Goto leans over a box of downy yellow chicks. He glances nervously at the 18 men around him, all sitting before similar boxes of hatchlings. A din of chirping engulfs the room as Japan’s national chicken-sexer readies to defend his title.
Mr. Goto has mastered a difficult skill: telling female (pullet) chicks from males (cockerels) when they are just hours old. Last year, the lanky 38-year-old sorted 100 chicks in 3 minutes and 34 seconds, without a mistake. That’s moving at a clip of 1,682 chicks an hour.
Mr. Goto skills took years to master. The Japanese invented and commercialized chick-sexing in the 1920s and revolutionized the poultry business everywhere. Japan has long dominated the industry, dispatching the fastest and most accurate chick-sexers to work in hatcheries from Australia to Atlanta. Mr. Goto can trace his place in the business back to its earliest days. He works in rural central Japan, as a member of a group of 10 sexers started by one of the founders. Mr. Goto became a sexer after seeing an ad in a magazine when he was 16. He skipped his high school graduation ceremony deciding not to go to college and entered sexing school. After a 2 year apprenticeship he passed a test to become a full-fledged sexer and spent 4 years working in Europe. It is a well-trodden path for top Japanese chick-sexers. Demand for their skills grew rapidly after a Japanese poultry specialist unveiled the vent-sexing method at the World Poultry Congress in Ottawa. Until then, the industry, prizing hens for their egg laying and tender meat, wasted time and money raising both male and female chicks for several weeks until the differences between the sexes became obvious and the males could be weeded out. The new Japanese sexers fanned out across the globe, to sex chicks and set up new sexing schools. Skilled sexers made top dollar.
But the importance of chick-sexers is now on the decline. New breeds of chickens are being introduced the sex of which can be divined quickly by unskilled workers. Chick-sexers’ incomes, which once put them solidly in the middle class are falling more into the realm of burger flippers.
After years of searching, U.S. poultry breeders in the 1960s discovered a simpler way to sort chicks. They noticed the wings on some female chicks were longer than those on males and started selecting for this trait. The result: “feather” sexing, which made it possible for almost anyone to do the work. U.S. hatcheries, under pressure from consolidation, introduced these breeds and hired cheap, immigrant sexing labor. In Japan protectionist barriers kept the revolution at bay – until the 1990s. Low cost producers in the U.S. and Asia have taken to accounting for 30% of chicken consumption in Japan, up from 17% in 1990. In response, Japanese hatcheries such as the Tomaru hatchery where Mr. Goto sometimes works have rebuilt their facilities, replacing breeds that need to be vent-sexed with chicks that can be feather-sexed.
The changes haven’t wiped out vent-sexing, which is still needed to sort a small number of chicks used as breeding stock. But, on a recent day, most of Mr. Goto’s colleagues were sitting around a large, circular conveyor, performing the unskilled labor of separating by wing feathers nearly all the 80,000 chicks sorted that day. Already the number of chick-sexers in Japan has declined to about 230, from more than 1,000 in the 1950s.
“Yoi, hajime!” shouts an official to start the contest, and Mr. Goto grabs his first chick. Cradling the tiny bird between his pinky and ring finger, he flips it over to examine the underside. Excrement squirts from each chick as Mr. Goto gives a gentle squeeze to expose the cloaca, the vent where both the anus and genital organs are located. Dust rises from the squirming mass of down, so many sexers wear masks.
Yet, the 88 men and women gathered here don’t consider their work menial. Their talent lies in being able to distinguish the smaller vent muscles of the females from the larger ones of the males – no simple task because the musculature comes in a hundred confusing variations.
The chick-sexers, too, are adjusting to the new reality. This year, for the second time ever, the annual sexing competition includes a feather-sexing demonstration. Even the slow sexers sort flawlessly by feather at close to twice the vent rate. But it is only during the vent-sexing competition that the competitive juices flow. After 3 minutes and 35 seconds, Mr. Goto tosses his 100th chick aside – just one second off his winning pace of last year. Still, he fears he made at least one mistake. “I was too tight,” he frets. When the results arrive late in the afternoon after the judges have verified the contestants’ work by examining the same chicks slowly, he learned that he erred twice, enough to knock him out of contention. The winner, Hirokazu Muroya, clocks in an error-free 3 minutes and 40 seconds, collecting his 8th All-Japan title.
Having exchanged his white sexing smock for a suit and tie, the 48-year old Mr. Muroya collects his winnings: 2 trophies, an engraved plaque, and a set of luggage. He realizes the business he’s in may not have much of a commercial future, but he proudly says “We need to pass along these skills to the next generation.”
