The Ura law, however, became invalid at the start of the Meiji period. In 1875, the Meiji government attempted to lay claim to the surface of the sea by excluding local customs ( Murota, 2013 and Niigata Prefectural Fisheries and Marine Research Institute (NPFMRI, 2012), 2012) in introducing a new form of top-down fisheries management system. This came to be known as a grand mistake and a great lesson for the state in the history of fisheries management. This type of command and control management, in which the central government controlled and managed fishing operations by disintegrating fishers' rights to organize, resulted in the over-appropriation of fisheries resources between 1868 and 1901 ( Makino, 2011, Makino, 2013 and Makino and Matsuda, 2005).