Japan’s whalers defend their right to hunt

A whale’s bleeding carcass bobbed in the surf, a steel harpoon jutting from its side. Then butchers at this Japanese fishing village went to work, turning a motorized winch to haul the beast ashore.

On the flensing floor, the men blessed the leviathan with rice wine, then hacked through its blubber and sinew with long-handled knives, slicing vermilion flesh from the massive spine. Blood gushed from the 30-foot Baird’s beaked whale like water from a hydrant.

Finally, the meat was chopped into brick-sized blocks, weighed and priced for townsfolk who lined up for their purchases. Restaurateurs drove away with plastic drums full of meat.

For the world’s anti-whaling activists, it’s an atrocity that must be stopped. But the men who harpoon, flense and sell these whales at four small-scale coastal hunting communities have another word for it: tradition.

“Coastal people have been eating whale for 400 years and we have a right to decide what we eat,” said Yoshinori Shoji, head of the Gaibo Hogei whaling company, based in Wada, a two-hour drive east of Tokyo.

These days, that tradition is much harder to maintain.

Even though the 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling applies more to the high seas than to Japanese coastal operations, it has severely cut supply, driving prices higher and speeding the plunge in the meat’s popularity.

The moratorium also restricts the types of smaller whales that can be hunted, such as a former favorite of the coastal operations, the minke. Small-time whalers now commercially hunt only whales that are not regulated internationally.

Japan’s coastal whalers also suffer from a global PR problem.

Amid an active anti-whaling movement, many people in Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand consider killing whales an environmental and moral crime, and grisly scenes such as the ones in Wada reinforce the image of whaling as barbaric.

The campaign touches a nationalist chord among Japanese, who feel it’s discriminatory and hypocritical, given that Japanese whaling took off after World War II only because U.S. occupation authorities encouraged it as a source of food.

“They just completely reject people whose thinking isn’t the same as theirs,” says Yoji Kita, the industry’s point man in the southern whaling town of Taiji. “In their ‘global standard,’ there are a lot of double standards.”

When people here speak of tradition, they mean family-owned company boats targeting small game just 20 miles from shore, rather than the Japanese factory fleets, which range as far afield as the Antarctic Ocean and pull in a total of more than 1,000 whales per year.

This year, coastal whalers operating out of four main ports are set to take a total of 66 Baird’s beaked whales, 72 pilot whales -- which look like dolphins -- and 20 Risso dolphins.

Minke whales have been banned from the hunt by the International Whaling Commission since the 1980s, though Japan takes many minke whales -- and eats the meat -- as part of an IWC-allowed scientific whaling program. Coastal whalers used to take 300 minkes a year.

The whaling companies, however, say the moratorium is sinking their business.

Japan’s eight coastal whaling companies now use only five of their nine whaling boats for coastal operations. Populations in whaling towns have dropped, and village administrators complain about shrinking tax bases.

“Everyone here is in the red,” Shoji said as his men sliced fat from the cubes of meat and dumped buckets of innards into a huge vat for processing into fertilizer.

The complaint gets little international sympathy.

A Japanese proposal to win “community whaling” status that would have allowed limited minke whale hunts failed at an IWC meeting in May. Critics argue that Japan’s coastal operations are strictly commercial, using modern industrial methods such as mechanized harpoon guns, while community hunts are conducted by aboriginal people as ceremonies or to harvest a vital food source.

“Long ago, they used their own boats and caught whales with nets. But since the early 1900s, they’ve been using methods imported from Norway,” said Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan. “So it’s not at all as if they were preserving a tradition.”

Japan’s industrial whaling may be 20th century, but its roots are old.

Organized whaling began in the early 1600s in Taiji, a town about 300 miles southwest of Tokyo, whose phone book is full of names rooted in whaling, such as Seko (harpooner) and Ryono (whaling boat sailor).

Shrines to the animals, including one where feudal hunters brought fetuses found in pregnant whales, dot the town. Villagers stage a whale festival on the bluff where spotters in the 17th century watched for approaching whales.

“Whaling is not just an occupation for them, it’s pride, it’s history,” said Hayato Sakurai, curator of the Taiji Whale Museum, which was established in 1969 and features an enormous replica of a blue whale skeleton .

The town’s hunts of old involved hundreds of daredevil hunters on wooden boats who would surround a whale, spear it and drag it to shore. But those ways vanished when a typhoon wiped out Taiji’s fleet in 1878.

By 1900, whaling was based on modern steamships and grenade harpoons.

Today Taiji is feeling the pressure, and Western visitors to City Hall and the wharves elicit suspicion that they have come to smear the town.

Coastal whalers argue that they hunt whales as food and fertilizer, whereas the Western whalers of old wanted only their oil and discarded the rest.

Also playing into the argument are race, the legacy of the war and a sense of Japan being perennial odd man out in global affairs dominated by the United States and Europe.

“It looks like we’re part of the club, but then something happens, and they point at us and say, ‘You’re the country that started the war!’ ” Kita said. “I feel the whaling issue is a racial discrimination issue.”

Towns such as Wada and Taiji have instituted campaigns to teach pride in the whaling tradition in schools.

Wada brings school groups to witness whale flensings, though the copious blood and stench occasionally sickens pupils. The children then gather at a nearby cafeteria for a whale-meat breakfast.

“We want them to know about the things that are done in the town where they were raised,” said Tomokazu Shoji, a teacher accompanying his fifth-graders to the flensing.