This is a huge week for whaling in Japan. Today the International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting kicks off in Morocco as the future of Japanese whaling hangs in the balance. Then on Saturday, The Cove, a documentary about Japanese dolphin hunting, is supposed to open here. With all this activity on the front line of the whale wars, stories are breaking left and right.
Last week, a whistleblowing whaler came clean about the underbelly of Japan’s whaling industry and recently Japanese theaters have been bowing out of showing The Cove because of intimidation and threats of violence from incensed nationalists who seem to feel the Japanese Constitution’s free speech applies only to themselves.
What I’ve been wondering is to what extent whaling really is a national Japanese tradition. I came across this analogy on the Japan Whaling Association’s Web site: “Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture is comparable to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”
Curious to find out if whale meat is to Japan what hamburger is to America, I spoke to Jun Morikawa, a professor at Rakuno Gakuen University and author of Whaling in Japan, a treatise no Japanese publisher would print. “At best, it’s a regional, localized industry in coastal areas near where whales and dolphins come and go,” he told me. “But to compare it to a meat pie or a hamburger is a gross distortion.”
Professor Morikawa did concede that some fishing villages have done it small-scale for hundreds of years, like the notorious Taiji featured in The Cove. Yet, he explained, whaling has also been taboo in other places such as Same, in Aomori Prefecture, where whales are believed to be Ebisu-sama—gods of good fortune. The only time whale consumption truly reached a national level was after World War II during a severe food shortage, but even then it was “a substitute meat,” said Morikawa. As soon as the economy got going, people bought much more chicken, beef and pork, despite the higher cost. Why? “Because Japanese consumers generally don’t like whale. They don’t buy it. And they don’t eat it.”
But surveying Japanese people I know, ranging in age from 18 to 60, I found it wasn’t so clear-cut. Nearly half, who had eaten it for school lunch and on special occasions now and then, said they like it. About whether Japan should have the right to hunt whales, views were also mixed—some told me it’s part of Japanese food culture, and therefore acceptable if done responsibly, while others said it causes too many problems for Japan, the whales, and even humans because of mercury poisoning.
In Osaka, a handful of restaurants have it on the menu, and one called Tokuya serves whale cuisine only. On the Web site, the owner mentions a talking point I’ve been hearing a lot recently: “Because whales are currently protected and may not be harvested, their numbers are increasing, and they are eating larger and larger amounts of fish, leaving many fewer fish for fishermen to take. This is an important reason for the decline of many fisheries resources around the world.” But this puts all the blame on the whales while the humans, who are guilty of rampant overfishing, get off scott-free.
I was eager for the Japan Whaling Association to weigh in, but they didn’t respond to my interview request. The site’s Q&A simply says that “marine management” is called for with whales that are great in number. It also explains why research whaling, which allowed Japan to catch 1,000 whales last year, is necessary: “A large range of information is needed for the management and conservation of whales.” Anti-whaling activists claim that the research is a sham, and any whaling would be disastrous for the species. This is why the stakes at this week’s meeting are the highest they’ve been since the moratorium on commercial whaling was put in place in 1986. All 88 member countries will vote on a compromise that would allow for the resumption of commercial whaling, albeit with greater restrictions. This sounds fair enough but for the awkward allegation, reported last week by Britain’s Sunday Times, that the Japanese government has been bribing some small countries with cash and prostitutes to vote in its favor.
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s hard to get why the Japanese government cares so deeply about this issue, considering it has to subsidize the entire industry, the demand for whale meat appears to be minimal, and the country’s international reputation is tarnished.
According to Morikawa, one way to explain it is amakudari—lucrative jobs that retired bureaucrats of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries are guaranteed by the industry. Another that’s more understandable has to do with the sense that cultural imperialists are forcing Western values on Japan. A Japanese acquaintance put it this way: “Different cultures place different values on animals. Hindu people do not eat cow because cows are considered holy. And there are people who eat dogs, cats, and rabbits. The Western concept of what’s smart, cute, and sweet is just one ethnocentric view.”
There may be something to the ‘culture’ argument. After all, it was only 50 years ago that anyone started to care about whales. Some countries that condemn whaling today had large-scale whaling industries that fizzled out not for any humane reason but because alternate sources of oil became available. Moby Dick, which is based on true stories of whales that struck back, is a relic from the peak of that era in the mid 19th-century. Thinking started to change when the environmental movement got underway in the 1960s, and Songs of the Humpback Whale, an LP of their somewhat avant-garde “singing” put out by Roger Payne in 1970, gave some a deeper appreciation of their sentience. Over the next few decades, more countries got on board, and nowadays the majority seem to oppose it. Yet a few, such as the US, might be open to compromise. So this week, thanks to the good old democratic tradition of the vote, not to mention a little bribery, we’ll find out if the whalers get their way.
Humpback whale breaching photo by macro.ca
Beluga whale photo by jspad
Whale bacon photo by enfu
Sperm whale tail photo by Strange Ones
Daniel Krieger
Daniel Krieger is a writer living in Japan. He has been writing for The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Japan Times, CNNGo, and other publications. Read more at danielkrieger.net ...
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anti-whaling, International Whaling Commission, Japanese whaling, The Cove, whale wars, whaling
