On Whaling in Japan
From Burkhard Bilger’s “The Lunchroom Rebellion” under the heading “In the Kitchen” in the September 4, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, in the course of an otherwise fine article on a chef trying to improve public school food:
“Children can learn to eat almost anything, given time. In Mexico, they consume fiery chilies; in Japan, whale meat; in Sweden, pickled herring.”
Wait a second. Hold on. In Mexico, kids eat fiery chilies. OK. As far as I know, that’s largely true. Many Mexican kids do eat fiery chilies. I don’t know how popular pickled herring is these days among kids in Sweden, but I saw pickled herring being served in restaurants and hawked to tourists on my one (admittedly brief) trip to Sweden, so I can believe that kids would eat it, even like it.
Kids in Japan, though, rather rarely even eat whale, much less learn to like it.
First, the disclaimers: I know I’m picking on four words out of a very good article that runs nearly seven pages. Those four words are just what made me decide to write this. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. (The article is not even about Japan, much less whaling, at all.) I know Japan does indeed have commercial whaling and I know that whale meat was foisted on elementary schools in Wakayama. I also know that it is possible to order whale in both nice and cheap restaurants.
My point here is to try to clarify the issue of whaling and whale meat, from an observer’s perspective, because it is an oft-debated issue with a boatload of misinformation being thrown around.
First, a brief rundown of what is going on.
Until this year, a moratorium on commercial whaling, as agreed upon by the IWC (International Whaling Commission) had been in place since 1986, after being agreed to in 1982. Japan decided not to oppose this vote mainly because of their fear of US sanctions. Since then, though, Japan has continued to hunt whales, primarily Antarctic minke, of which the Japan Whaling Association (JWA), citing IWC estimates, says there are roughly 761,000, and of which Japanese whaling vessels killed 1,073, including forays into Antarctic whale sanctuaries. Last year, though, Japan added the endangered fin whale to its list, planning to catch 50 this year. The JWA says there are 47,300 fin whales in the world. To round out last year’s totals, Japanese whaling vessels killed ten fin whales, 100 Sei whales (not mentioned on the JWA site), 50 Bryde’s whales (pronounced bru-des, a close cousin to the Sei and also not mentioned on the JWA site), and five sperm whales (also not mentioned on the IWC site. Of all of those species, only minke and sperm whales seem to have relatively large populations (a few hundred thousand animals, possibly more than one million in the case of sperm whales, although that is debated.) Most species of whale are classified as endangered, or at least protected, by international agreements, including decisions of the IWC.
“How can they hunt so many whales if they agreed to a moratorium that just ended? And why was the moratorium lifted if most of the hunted species are still endangered or protected?” you might ask.
The only logical answer, assuming that no one is lying, is that, despite Japan’s position at the forefront of so many areas of scientific and technological advance, the generally high quality of Japanese schools, and even the much-vaunted Japanese work ethic (the Government likes that one), Japanese cetologists are absolutely incompetent.
I don’t think Japanese cetologists are incompetent. I don’t think they need up and over 1,000 minke whales a year for research. I think they’ve learned most of what they’re going to learn from dead, harpooned, dissected minke whales.
In other words, there’s some lying going on. Japan now holds the rotating chairmanship of the IWC and set about, as their first act, getting a lot of poor landlocked countries, such as Mongolia, to back them up in a push to repeal the moratorium. I’m not sure why Mongolia is even in the IWC. Japan says it did not offer increases in foreign aid or cash payments in exchange for the support of those countries, but they also say they need to kill thousands of whales every year for research purposes. The only country that seems to be legitimately on Japan’s side in this is Norway. While I’m sure there is some controversy surrounding Norway’s positions within Norway, I’ll say no more of it here only because it appears that Norway makes money off of whaling and that makes their case for it better than Japan’s.
Now, I’m not saying that profit makes everything OK. I am, however, saying that profit is a comprehensible reason for doing something. You might say that Japan must be making money off of those whales it hunts, otherwise they would not risk the opprobrium of so large a section of the international community and the enormously bad PR. You would be wrong.
Normally, in such a situation, there would be a demand for the product, in this case whale meat or other whale products, and suppliers, in this case whalers, would try to obtain as much product as they could sell. That would be the ideal capitalist case for whaling and is what caused decreases in whale populations around the world in the 19th century. That’s the cycle that has caused such a precipitous drop in Atlantic cod populations in more recent years. That is not what is going on with whaling in Japan.
Some in the Japanese pro-whaling set claim that it’s culture, that it is unfair to ask Japan to stop whaling because whaling and whale meat are integral to Japan’s cultural identity. This is, possibly, slightly more true than saying that whaling is integral to modern mainstream French or American identity.
Yes, whaling has a history in Japan, people have hunted whales and used whale products, including edible meat and blubber, since at least 712 AD, just as they have in many other countries. When Commodore Matthew Perry pulled his famous black steamships into the harbor at Shimoda in 1853, he asked for what seafarers in those days always wanted - the rights to land, maybe get some food, and reload on coal. He also wanted whaling rights in Japanese waters. In that respect, whaling was a large factor in Japan’s initially being pressured to open up, which led to many other reforms and not a small amount of turbulence. But there are many other aspects of late-Edo period Japanese culture that are no longer considered important - a taboo against eating meat from four-legged animals, for instance. (Japan is now second only to the US in the number of McDonald’s restaurants per capita and McDonald’s is far from alone in selling large amounts of four-legged animal flesh to everyone from elementary school kids to me to my mother-in-law.)
In the lean post-World War II years, whale was a widely distributed foodstuff as whales were relatively easy to catch and are enormous, thus providing a lot of calories at relatively low expense. People, especially children ate whale largely because a hungry person eats what he can. People also develop a fondness for the foodstuffs of their childhood, which is why Hoppy and Denki-Bran still sell despite the ready availability of easily affordable beer and whiskey.
Japan has let many aspects of its traditional culture fall by the wayside as it kept or even bolstered others - every nation has. Just as Hartford, Connecticut discovered insurance and in none the worse-off for it, most Japanese whaling centers have since moved on. Married women no longer blacken their teeth, taxes are no longer paid in rice, boys are no longer encouraged to die for the emperor, and whale is no longer, if it ever truly was, a staple. This is natural, this is good. This is progress.
Some Inuit and otehr indigenous groups in many areas, especially Greenland and the arctic and Pacific Northwest of North America, are rightly allowed to continue whaling because they use traditional methods and are preserving a culture that is both endangered and centered on whaling. None of that applies to Japan in any way.
As I write, it has been announced that Iceland has killed a fin whale, thus joining the resurgence in whaling. Japan’s chairing of the IWC might be having an impact. Iceland sees it as an industry. It is not one, in any sensible way, in Japan.
So, the question remains: Why does Japan hunt whales?
Here’s the answer: No one seems to really know.
They’re losing money on it. Apparently a lot of money. Whalers make money in ultimately one way in Japan: government subsidies. Why is whale meat making its way back into schools? Because no one is buying it, even at the heavily subsidized prices at which it is sold. When it takes a crew on an expensive ship weeks to go down to Antarctica to kill whales with expensive equipment, whale meat loses the economic and efficiency benefits it once had.
We’ll set aside for the risks that whale meat poses to children - PCB, dioxin, mercury, and the highest concentration of Endocrine Disrupting Compounds (EDCs) found in any animal all having been found in the blubber of minke whales, which are Japan’s favorite research subjects, you recall. (Perhaps I’m going at it the wrong way. Perhaps the scientific research being done is on what happens when you poison schoolchildren to legitimize some kind of political agenda.) We’ll just focus on economics here.
There of 5,000 tons of frozen whale meat sitting in storage in Japan. 5,000 tons of product for which there is a minuscule demand at best. On top of the costs of storing, and keeping frozen, 5,000 tons of frozen whale meat are the costs of the expeditions to go, literally, to the other side of the Earth to get more product for which there is no demand. There is also the cost of subsidizing the whale butchers, hawkers, and transporters, all of whom get enraged when they feel they’re not getting the support they deserve to engage in an industry that, in many cases, was dead when they entered it. All for a product people only want when they’re either repeatedly told that they want it or when it is forced on them. Someone failed high school economics here. As with many government subsidies for pointless production, in many countries, it would make a lot more economic sense to just give huge cash payouts to everyone who depends directly on the industry and let it die.
But that would make sense and sense is not what’s going on here. Instead, the government of Japan spends money to get landlocked countries to back it in the IWC, it spends money to push whale meat onto a largely unreceptive market (it’s own people), it spends money to continue to procure even more whale, it spends money on a public relations campaign to deflect criticism, and it spends money on all the accoutrements for which there is insufficient space in this article.
So, why does Japan hunt whales?
Maybe they want to make Burkhard Bilger appear prescient.
Related Posts:
- TPR News: Monday, November 20, 2006 - Fundamental Law of Education and a joint China-Japan history study
- TPR News: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - Yanagisawa, Ishihara, Nakasone, whaling, and Japan blogs
- A New Agriculture Minister, Pensions, Exports, Whaling and Miss Universe Riyo Mori: TPR News for June 3, 2007
- Crime, Constitutional Reform, Foreign Workers, the Economy, and Crime: TPR News for Monday, May 21, 2007
- TPR News: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 - Business, Luxury, Elections, the A-Bomb in 3 Contexts, &, of course, the Gaffe
