“WE URGE a halt to the emotional approach,” thundered the Yomiuri newspaper,
Japan’s largest daily. “Cool heads are needed when dealing with the issue.”
The “issue” is whaling. The whole thorny subject hit the headlines when Japan
expanded its “research” whaling operations into the North Pacific this summer
and the US imposed sanctions. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa also
weighed in with a demand that the debate should be “based on scientific logic,
rather than emotion”.
Japan says that all the emotion is coming from the whale-hugging hotheads
across the Pacific. Its own approach—which includes the idea that an end
to whaling will threaten both Japan’s whale-eating culture and the job security
of its whalers—is apparently cool, rational and “scientific”.
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The world long ago woke up to the fact that most Japanese don’t eat whale
meat and don’t care about the tiny minority who do. As for the poor, jobless
whaler, even the Establishment newspaper Asahi concedes that “the ocean-going
whaling industry is already long dead and there is no longer any real need to be
concerned for the economic welfare of the nation’s once-numerous whalers and
whaling-related businesses”.
Which is why Japan recently came up with a new argument: “The priority for
Japan’s whale research in the North Pacific,” proclaimed a statement from the
government’s Institute of Cetacean Research, is “to study the consumption of
fish by whales in relation to the fisheries that provide food for humans”.
No prizes for guessing why they’re so keen to gather this data. It could
greatly increase Japan’s support among members of the International Whaling
Commission who do not have an interest in whaling but who do have a stake in
fishing, countries such as Russia, South Korea and China. The ICR estimates that
cetaceans consume “three to five times the amount of marine resources harvested
for human consumption”.
Based on preliminary results from the North Pacific research, Seiji Ohsumi,
the ICR’s director-general, even seems to believe that whales are responsible
for a decline in fish stocks. “In the waters around Japan,” he says, “we have a
situation of declining catches in certain fisheries while at the same time the
sampling from our research programme reveals that minke whales are eating at
least 10 species of fish.”
The oceans are indeed now depleted of fish, however this has happened in the
century that the fishing industry took to using sonar, factory ships and
100-kilometre drift nets. Before that, cetaceans caught fish for 70 million
years without endangering the resource.
The bluefin tuna, for example, has been fished almost to extinction thanks to
Japan’s large fishing fleet and a healthy national appetite for sushi. This is
not a fish targeted by whales. If the Japanese government is so concerned about
fish stocks, it might first consider banning drift net fishing and curtailing
its catches of endangered species like bluefin tuna. Yet the government opposes
these moves.
Blaming whales is neither rational nor scientific. It ducks the real reasons
and creates yet another excuse for killing the beleaguered whale. Arguments
about “food culture” and protecting jobs are surely—pardon the
pun—dead in the water.