The ties that bind Japanese to whales

Kwan Weng Kin, Straits Times 7 Feb 08;

TOKYO - THE city of Nagasaki in western Japan probably has more restaurants with whale meat on their menus than any other place in the country.

Once Japan's premier whaling port, it wants to popularise whale meat and, in the past year, has even put the delicacy on lunch menus at about 100 schools.

All over Japan, there are similar moves to educate the younger generation about the country's traditional whale culture, both through school lunches and free tasting sessions for the public.

Middle-aged Japanese remember the taste of whale from their schooldays, but most young people have not tried it.

Whale is served raw as sashimi, or cooked in a wide variety of styles, and even processed into bacon. Champions of whale meat say that it is high in protein and low in fat and calories.

Japan's relationship with whales has been thrust into the spotlight again with the skirmish last month between an American environmental activists' group and the Japanese research whaling fleet in the Antarctic Ocean.

Australia, which is also against whaling, sent a customs vessel to monitor the Japanese, presumably to gather evidence against them.

Western media reports tend to demonise the Japanese for bucking global anti-whaling sentiments now prevalent in many Western countries that were once whaling nations.

The issue is not just that Japan is seen to be hunting an endangered animal which others fear will be driven to extinction.

There is an emotional side to the argument too, when people ask how the Japanese could possibly want to eat such wonderful living creatures whose relatives include the intelligent dolphin.

The Japanese view such criticisms as nothing less than cultural aggression.

Whales are deeply entrenched in the Japanese psyche and in their culture. The mammals were believed to have been hunted by Japan's earliest inhabitants nearly 6,000 years ago.

The emotional ties of the Japanese to whales can be seen in a grave for whales that stands on a spot overlooking the beach in Nagato city, Yamaguchi prefecture, in western Japan.

It contains the remains of 75 whale foetuses, buried between the late 17th century, when the monument was erected by local whalers, and the late 19th century.

'The grave was built close to the beach so that the dead whales could always look out to the ocean and other whales could come by and pay their respects,' wrote Mr Masayuki Komatsu, a former Fisheries Agency official well known in international whaling circles, in a book explaining Japan's whaling culture.

In a nearby temple, there is a register of dead whales that spans the course of a few centuries. Besides listing their death dates, the temple has even given each whale a posthumous Buddhist name.

Every year, devotees offer prayers to the dead whales, just as they do for relatives who have passed on.

Throughout Japan, there are in fact many plaques and tombs dedicated to whales, especially in former whaling communities.

In Akehama-cho, in Seiyo city, Ehime prefecture, a huge whale ran aground in June 1837 and its meat helped starving villagers stave off famine.

In appreciation, the dead whale was given a posthumous Buddhist name of a grade equal to the local feudal lord and enshrined lovingly.

Whale meat was once the food of the masses in Japan. But after commercial whaling was banned in the early 1980s, it became an expensive meat.

Supplies come via the scientific whaling programme that Japan conducts under the sanction of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to study the global whale population.

The IWC requires that the meat from whales caught and killed for such research be used, not discarded.

Critics have accused Japan of using its scientific whaling programme as a pretext for continuing to hunt whales. But Japan insists that there is no other way to determine what is happening to the world's population of whales.

The long-running battle between Japan and anti-whaling nations will no doubt continue.

Meanwhile, many former whaling communities in Japan are urging the government to push for the resumption of limited whaling along the Japanese coast.

Some experts believe that whales have to be culled because they are eating up too much of the world's fish stock, at the expense of the world's growing human population.

Mr Komatsu, once a key member of Japan's delegation to the IWC, has long believed that while some species of whale may be endangered, the minke whale that Japan targets in particular is far from becoming extinct.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were an estimated 80,000 minke whales in the world. There were 760,000 by the beginning of the 21st century, according to experts.

'The perception that whales are going extinct is shared not only among many Japanese but also by many people in the world. It is a fallacy,' he says in his book.

'The whales that Japan hunts are limited only to those varieties that are plentiful enough for hunting.'

With minke whales reproducing at an estimated rate of 4 per cent to 7 per cent a year, there is no possibility of them running out at present rates of culling, he maintains.

Anti-whaling Western nations, however, do not buy it.

But that is certainly not going to stop the Japanese from continuing to celebrate whales in their culture and in their cuisine.