Not sure about the rest of the country, but the bottom of Tokyo Bay looks like the moon.

In short, I don’t think whales are cute and I don’t it is inherently wrong to kill anything. I don’t know much about Icelandic or Norwegian whaling programs, don’t live there, and don’t pay taxes there. I also don’t write on those countries, thus my opposition to Japanese whaling is stronger. This is largely because it disgusts me that a country worried about its low birthrate would poison its own children (and potentially mine!) It also strikes me as one more case of well-known corruption acting as a drain on the already world-beatingly strained coffers of the Japanese government, which I have to help fund.

As for the history, I will grant you that there are areas in Japan with a long history of coastal whaling. To the best of my knowledge, none of those communities still depend on anything other than industrial whaling, though - a far cry from traditional whaling - and all of them are subsidized for their troubles, so, in a word, no. Not good enough. Not valid.

By the way, whale meat HAS been part of the diet for many Japanese communities (with skin, blubber, everything used in full), although I am in no position to argue that they were the majority or mainstream. Does not several centries qualify as long enough?

And I repeat, I do not think whale meat consumption will increase significantly, and should stay well below the post-war levels when we relied on that as a valuable source of protein. Many people indeed associate whale meat with post-war poverty and are fed up with it, anyway.

I’ll perhaps write again tomorrow.

Good night!

Even if Western whalers had killed off most of the whales near Japan, saying that Japan now has to hunt whales in Antarctic sanctuaries implies that Japan has to hunt whales, which it doesn’t. Japan has no shortage of other foods, whale is not a common or traditional food stuff in most of the country and there is vanishingly little legitimate market demand for it even now.

But even if Japan did have to hunt whales, what is the likely culprit for Japan’s dearth of whales close to the coast now? Is it Western whaling on sailing ships and, at the very end, steam ships almost a century and a half ago or is it the large-scale coastal whaling that Japan engaged in at the end of WWII?

You know what, though? I don’t think even Japan’s own coastal whaling is to blame. The most likely culprit, by far, is the fact that whales have to eat and that the waters around Japan, in many areas, are so dead, overfished, and polluted that there’s not much for whales to live on.

What I’ve been waiting for for a couple of years now is the answer to one question: Why should whaling be continued?

It’s not my place to say what regulations Japan should enact to govern its sovereign territory and waters. What I mean is, it has the right to carry out whaling in its own territory should it see fit to do so.

Of course, nations give up some of those rights when they enter international agreements and treaties. Japan may have to reconsider some of those agreements.

But two things bother me, as someone who loves Japan and wants to see it take a stronger role in the world: 1) This is very bad, negative PR. It is not a battle worth fighting and the Japanese side has little, if anything to gain.

2) I don’t support the propping up of sunset industries. People in these communities would be better served by a government focused on getting them training and opportunities for jobs relevant to the 21st century. This is where ‘culture’ becomes a myth used to mask the real motive for this entire industry, which is cushy amakudari jobs for ex-bureaucrats. Why do ordinary Japanese have to suffer economically just to support a few rich members of the upper class? Why do our tax yen have to go to propping up sunset industries? As taxpayers, we should be concerned about such wasteful spending.

And the reason the Japanese started to go that far for whales, I am sure you know why? I’m sure they would have been happy to stay nearer, which should have been possible without competition with westerners after blubber.

Do the Inuits or Maoris travel thousands of kilometers away to pollute faraway oceans in giant whaling expeditions that burn up thousands of barrels of oil?

This is an amakudari issue. It is pure politics - getting easy, cushy jobs for retiring bureaucrats from the fisheries industry, and votes from certain coastal towns for the LDP - and has nothing to do with food sustenance.

First, Japan has not traditionally consumed whale. There has long been some amount of coastal whaling, for the same reasons that Europeans and Americans engaged in whaling - mostly to get the oil. Considering that no Japanese sailor navigated a ship out of the sight of land intentionally until after John Manjiro’s return to Japan in the second half of the 19th Century, Japan certainly does not have a long history of expeditionary whaling. Whaling for food spiked just after WWII, when the American Occupation authority encouraged it to supply much-needed calories during some very lean times. WHale consumption peaked in the early 1960s and dropped off rapidly until the moratorium came into effect in the mid-’80s. Whale consumption is now less than 7% of what it was at its peak and sales of whale meat are heavily subsidized and consist largely of government-backed sales from government-backed depositories to government-backed institutions.

How much whaling is now done by Maoris or Aboriginal Australians? Some of the current Inuit whaling is still done for survival and is not done in sanctuaries on an industrial scale to prove a poltical point and line the pockets of a few well-connected individuals. Japanese, Norwegian, and Icelandic whaling are really not at all analogous to traditional, historical whaling for survival.

Financially, this is a disaster for Japan. It’s a heavily-subsidized, unprofitable industry. There is minimal actual demand for whale. The fact that the government is encouraging its use in school lunches and other public institutions is apalling, considering what we know about the toxicity of whale meat - it is simply not safe for human consumption. Of course, the government’s retort to this is unsupported gainsaying, a la “It’s safe.” No explanation.

Whaling today is not tightly controlled at all. Every country that engages in commercial whaling does so according its own rules. Japan’s limits are set and changed by Japan’s whaling body and, in practice, violate agreements Japan has signed.

The research thing is an open joke. I would be surprised if anyone actually thought any actual research was going on. The stated goals of the research are vague and don’t explain why hunting is necessary, much less in the numbers that are hunted. The Japanese Whaling Commission’s reports are not cited by cetologists, are not published in peer-reviewed journals, and are not publicized. There are a few poorly-researched, poorly-documented, unreviewed reports available for show purposes, but they are widely disregarded or ridiculed by even Japanese cetologists. Why? Well, the whales are processed as soon as they’re killed. No real, original research is being done.

I completely disagree with the idea that Anglophone sources cannot oppose whaling because Anglophone countries used to whale for oil. By that logic, no one in the Southern US should be opposed to racism or slavery. No one in Europe should be opposed to capital punishment. No one in any industrialized country should be opposed to polluting practices. No one in any country should be opposed to war. This line of reasoning would be absurd even if the opponents of whaling had actually been whalers themsleves - people can change their ways. Considering how few actual whalers there were, ever, around the world, it makes no sense to say that, for example, present-day Australians shouldn’t oppose whaling because people in Nantucket, over a century ago, were whalers and they spoke the same language.

Some Japanese people have committed crimes, therefore no one in Japan should oppose crime. Kind of silly, isn’t it?