This
year I was commissioned by a British newspaper to
research a Japanese company called Hakudai, which
was reputed to be putting whale meat into dog
food.
I found the company in Chikura, a
sleepy fishing town in Chiba prefecture with a
long tradition of whale hunting; local
supermarkets were selling fresh minke, and
pro-whaling advertisements decorated the walls.
One poster showed a whale gobbling fish
from an image of the Earth with the top sliced
off. The blurb, written by the Fisheries
Agency, proclaimed that
"whales eat five times more fish than humans" so
they "must be caught within limits".
Hakudai turned out to be a shop attached
to a small plant employing about two dozen people,
some of whom were cutting slivers of whale meat
and drying them in the sun. The boss was Kiyoshi
Okawa, 43, who inherited the shop from his
grandfather.
The shop sold small bags of
whale jerky for 400 yen (US$3.60) each. "People
like to spoil their pets with treats," explained
Okawa. Okawa was friendly and open, even though he
acknowledged that whaling was unlikely to get a
fair hearing in Britain. "I know how you people
feel, but I honestly can't understand how you can
consider whales cute. Lambs are much cuter to me
than whales, and I don't eat them."
When I
pointed out that lambs are not going extinct, he
said he was assured by the Fisheries Agency that
there are "plenty of whales", especially minke.
"And I believe them," he said.
I sent off
the interview transcript, minus any
editorializing, knowing that the eventual story
written in London would likely play into the
stereotype of the cruel, barbarous Japanese.
In the end, my story was trumped by a
rival newspaper, which splashed its article
prominently and helped make Hakudai the target of
an e-mail campaign that forced its website to shut
down. Okawa thought I was the culprit and left
angry messages on my answering machine. "You've
ruined my business," he said.
Last month,
I got an even angrier letter from the Japanese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs - my first - after the
newspaper I write for in the United Kingdom
published a separate story on Japan's push for an
end to the 1986 whaling ban. The letter said our
coverage was "illogical" and "discriminatory".
Foreign journalists in Japan have long
struggled to bridge the cultural divide over
whaling between this country and the readers they
cater to abroad. But this job is about to become
much more difficult.
Japan and the
pro-whaling nations of Iceland and Norway are
likely to win control of the regulatory body the
International Whaling Commission (IWC) when it
meets in the West Indies in June.
Led by
Tokyo, which has tirelessly lobbied for the return
of commercial hunting, the three countries hope to
secure 51% of IWC votes, paving the way for the
reversal of the whaling ban that the environmental
movement counts as one of its biggest victories.
Although scrapping the ban requires a 75%
majority, control of the commission will be a huge
propaganda boost to Tokyo's campaign and will
allow secret voting and other measures likely to
help its cause.
The prospect of an end to
the two-decade moratorium will make the conference
the most vitriolic yet, after years of tension
between the two bitterly opposed camps.
The IWC has failed to stop the three
pro-whaling nations killing about 2,000 whales a
year. Japan's whaling fleet recently returned from
a "scientific expedition" to an Antarctic whale
sanctuary with a haul of almost 1,000 whales, in
defiance of the whaling body.
Pictures of
the harpooned, bloodied animals went all around
the world, and Australia was one of several
countries that labeled the expedition "a sham".
But Japan has worked for years to win the support
of more than a dozen smaller nations, by buying
their votes with foreign aid, claim critics.
Tokyo says the IWC has been hijacked by
environmentalists and is "totally dysfunctional".
Armed with its own surveys on whaling stocks, the
pro-whaling lobby is relishing another skirmish
with what it calls the West's "culinary
imperialists".
"We think it's possible to
use whale resources in a sustainable way," said
Hideki Moronuki of the Fisheries Agency. "We don't
have much land, we have the sea. Japan has lost so
much of its own culture already. Countries like
the UK and America have their own resources. We
don't tell them what to eat."
But strip
away the rhetorical fog about "culture" and the
issues become clearer. Sending factory ships
thousands of kilometers from Japanese ports to
hunt whales in sanctuaries is not the same as some
idealized picture of locals engaged in sustainable
fishing.
The agency claims there are close
to a million Antarctic minkes and that it can hunt
at a "scientifically sustainable" level, but so
many other sources dispute those figures that it
is simply impossible to take them at face value.
Moreover, "sustainability" arguments were heard
when other species, such as gray whales, were
being hunted to near-extinction.
These
issues, and the enormous damage that an end to the
ban will likely cause to Japan's international
reputation, should be the topic of a national
debate, but the media in Japan have so far
remained silent.
In the meantime, the
terms of what little debate there is are being set
by a small nationalist clique. Indeed, most
foreign journalists are struck by the tone of
wounded national pride that emerges in discussions
with whaling supporters.
"The consumption
of rice has decreased because we were forced to
consume bread in school after World War II in
order to import huge amounts of flour from the
US," argued Moronuki.
Japan's whaling
"research fleet" is backed by a lobby of
nationalist politicians in the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party, including Agriculture, Forestry
and Fisheries Minister Shoichi Nakagawa. The lobby
has spent billions of yen in a tireless diplomatic
offensive to reverse the 1986 ban. The same LDP
politicians can be found behind other right-wing
causes, such as revisionist history textbooks.
Without their support, there is little
prospect that whale hunting would be economically
viable: the sale of whale meat barely covers the
cost of sending Japan's eight whaling ships out of
harbor.
One problem faced by this lobby is
falling whale-meat consumption. Even before 1986,
when the moratorium on whaling began, whale eating
was declining and about 1% of the population now
eats it regularly, say most surveys. With whale
cuisine confined mostly to a handful of outlets,
the pro-whalers have struggled to dispose of
Japan's growing stocks of whale meat - almost
5,000 tons, according to one recent report.
This problem is being worked out by
stealth. Last year, schoolchildren in rural
Wakayama prefecture found deep-fried whale in
their lunchboxes, and similar schemes are afoot in
government-related organizations that don't have
to struggle for the consumers' pocket.
"It
should be simple to work out our differences, but
things seem to get so emotional," said Okawa. Now
the whaling discussion is about to get even more
emotional.
David McNeill writes
about Japan for the London Independent and other
publications and is a coordinator for Japan
Focus.
