Japan and the whale | Hacker News Reader

Japan and the whale

bbc.com

60 pointsPerados48 comments

I had cut the flesh and bones of many whale, dolphin and porpoise corpses and personally I will not eat this meat unless really hungry and disperate. And I'll never, ever, no-way, eat it raw as sashimi.

I'm not afraid of the flavor; and is not the ethics/religion/ideology behind the idea that will stops me doing this. Is not even that they are endangered species.

The main reason to me are the parasites.

I'm talking of the gastric volcanoes 'spitting' herring worms, and the pulsating 'alive spaguetti dish' picture that you see when you open the gut, and the fat tailed and 70 cm long Crassicauda worms blocking the blood vessels of the kidney; or dissolving with chemicals parts of the skull of the live dolphins.

Is also the St. Lawrence belugas accumulating high loads of mercury, lead, PCBs, PBDEs and other stable toxic compounds in the fat and having high rates of cancer by this. And the fact that whales travel thousands of miles around the planet each year, and Fukushima guys and other companies are still releasing water contaminated with toxic waste to the sea.

The flavor is not the problem, the problem is that currently this meat is not safe to human consumption.

>The main reason to me are the parasites.

I thought sashimi is frozen to kill parasites?

If somebody disinfected a plate of crap, would you eat it?

Aren't salmon somewhat similar in this regard?

Any animal high in the food chain is likely to concentrate heavy metals, which is why pregnant women are advised against eating a lot of salmon or tuna while they are pregnant.

Salmon flesh is not, to my knowledge, infected with parasites. I've eaten it straight out of the fish in Alaska and it was clean, soft, and tasty.

I dont eat Salmon sushi because of the potential for parasites which some other(true salt water fish) do not usually carry.

Salmon are kind of infamous for worms, which is why they're not traditional sushi fish.

Some species are worst than other in this sense, Cod for example. Salmons are relatively clean, but Ocean Sunfish... oh my..., prehistoric life forms everywhere :-)

Exact, and cetaceans have lots of fat and very long life cycles, so is a group specially problematic in this sense.

At the grocery store Winco I have seen inside the package of a fresh side of salmon a little white worm crawling around. Their produce is otherwise seemingly very fresh and I've never had quality issues buying from them. I have no idea if that worm was at all dangerous to humans, but ever since then I have assumed that all of the salmon I eat is similarly affected and I am extra careful with preparation.

I don't know about any particular variety but worms in seafood can definitely make you sick.

Hum, yes and no. Some parasites of salmon are dangerous of course, but here is a different feeling.

First because salmons are fishes. A common dolphin's heart could easily pass by a human heart, is not really much different in size or shape, so when you spot a long worm titillating inside, you can't help to make the connection in your mind and is specially disgusting.

And second because all is much bigger and more numerous in cetaceans and sharks.

I think there is another strong element that was completely missed out in the article, though I would like a Japanese person to confirm this:

The right wing political groups in Japan have a disproportionate sway on politics. They push very hard the idea of "Japanese-ness".

In the grade schools here, once a year, the children are served whale for lunch as a way of teaching them their "feeling of Japanese identity" I have always assumed they (the right wing) were one of the driving forces behind this.

Aside from that, people rarely eat it. The folks who like it talk about its unique flavor, but I've never thought it was anything special & I think most folks here feel the same.

>as a way of teaching them their "feeling of Japanese identity"

In my opinion, if it must be taught rather than naturally experienced, it can't be worth much. This just goes to show how much people are invested in using anything to push their own agenda.

That said, it's hardly uncommon to create an identity, say that it exists, then control people with it. Look at any nation in any war for example.

For me, it doesn't make any sense to have an idea of "Japanese-ness"; it's based around culture and that can be learned an experienced. If all that's to it is knowledge, there's no reason to push it as something unique. It's not dissimilar to a physicist teaching their fellow physicists the "feeling of physicist identity".

When I was in Iceland I was told it's a kind of food supply insurance plan. Both Iceland and Japan are small, and in the even of a war, blockade, or other trade limitations access to whale meat is necessary.

The skills required to successfully hunt whale are only learned through whaling, and therefore it's necessary to keep doing it on a small scale to have the ability to spin it up in the future.

It's a good narrative, but I can't say whether or not it's accurate...

There's truth to this.

After the famine in Germany during and after WW1, the German high command decided running out of butter (as in "guns and butter", it's both, not one or the other: you want guns you need butter) would not happen again. Even before Hitler became chancellor, the military prepared for WW2 by buying whale oil at low prices to stockpile and building up a whale factory fleet with assistance from the (largely unemployed) Norwegian whaling fleet. As a direct result, during WW2, Germany was well fed.

Given large enough whale stocks, it's a very viable strategy for wartime or blockade.

This is a myth; we forget the more logical option. Krill shrimps are edible also, there is plenty in the sea and you just need a net. Is by far much less dangerous option for sea workers and human consumers. In famine times you need to save as many energy as you can, and use the precious fuel wisely. In any case, not enough strong fishermen would be available to go to a dangerous and demanding fishing trip, because the men will be at thousand km of home, doing war.

> Both Iceland and Japan are small

Really? Iceland is small will 300k people, yes. But might I remind you Japan is 127 million people...

Maybe it was poorly phrased - land available for agriculture is small relative to their population. Iceland is huge but largely barren, Japan is even bigger but feeding 127m people is probably not possible with the land they have available

It would be more easy to do if they stopped promoting single farmer work, and actually made an industry of their agriculture. One person taking care of a small piece of land is ridiculously expensive and that shows in the price of fruits and vegetables here - way more expensive that about anywhere else in the world. (also because the restrict importations severely, thanks to the JA Mafia).

Except that it is. Japan is self-sufficient for food. Land marked for growing rice is essentially "eternally locked" to growing rice; you cannot sell it or use it for other purposes, and are required to plant it.

Until the TPP puts them all out of business and they retire (the average age of farmers in Japan is 66)

There are a lot of subsidies for Japanese rice growers too but I think this is primarily because without them they would not be competitive with American imports.

hmmm...yes to the first part, but the rice grown in NA is of a different variety they don't particularly like here.

Japan is currently the #2 market for US rice (or it was 5 years ago, anyway): http://westernfarmpress.com/rice/demand-us-rice-increasing-j...

Also, the issue of US rice exports was one of the biggest stumbling blocks for US-Japanese TPP negotiations, so I don't think Japanese rice producers believe Japanese people will not eat medium-grain rice.

Japan is the 10th largest country in the world by population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

I think they meant geographically

What's wrong with cannibalism?

From a practical perspective, tons of parasites. From a moral perspective it becomes much harder to trust someone who no qualms about eating you.

The fact that this is being downvoted so heavily shows that the food industry is next to be disrupted.

Even that's not entirely accurate. Japan is larger than the UK. That's England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined.

Japan is actually closer to the size of Germany - which isn't a large country but certainly isn't small either.

From a food perspective the problem is so much of Japan isn't arable - 11.6% compared to Germany's 34.1%.

While that's true, Japan aren't unique in that respect either. For example most of the scandinavian countries have a lower percentage of arable land as well as a smaller land area size. Yet, bar Norway, they've adhered to the whaling ban.

Population-wise, the Scandinavian countries are tiny. The problem in Japan is the combination of a relatively large population and a small amount of arable land.

Sweden, Finland, and Norway have 21.7, 16.2, and 15.6 people per square kilometer, respectively. Japan has 335.6. While the Scandinavian countries do have a lower arable land % (5.9, 6.5, 2.7) than Japan (11.6), the ratio of population to arable land is much lower.

If they were blockaded and could no longer import food, would they really be able to send factory ships to the arctic?

I had whale in Ishinomaki a couple years ago -- I didn't actually know it was a whale restaurant when I went in (everything was in Japanese, no one spoke English other than via a barely-working google translate on android), and while there was a picture of a whale somewhere, I just think of that as a "sea" thing, not food.

Once I was in, I didn't want to be rude and leave, and was curious. It was basically beef or very fatty tuna taste; not worth the drama. Not bad, but I don't think it's worth the international condemnation to continue eating it.

(JPY 3000 or so all-in; Japan outside the big cities is actually cheap.)

For reference, though, that's kind of expensive as far as Japanese meals go. You can easily have a pretty nice full Japanese meal with less exotic protein (chicken, pork, beef etc) for Y1000.

In Tokyo it's more like 1300+, but anyway there's a wide range of meal prices in Japan. You can eat for cheap but you can also pay a lot more if you want to go higher end.

Yeah, but you can buy a big whale steak for like 400 yen if you're looking in the right places. Whale is cheap.

We had whale regularly when I was a kid in Norway in the early 80's. Once a week maybe. It was basically used as a cheap beef substitute, exactly because there was always that extra taste to it that while it wasn't bad, wasn't exactly something you'd seek out. It was also tough and required a lot of extra work to tenderize it.

I think that at least in Norway whaling would have diminished further by now if the anti-whaling campaigns hadn't been so totally unsympathetic that it basically became a matter of national pride to keep it going - whale meat became less and less common to eat as the Norwegian economy grew and most people would just opt for beef anyway. Gently pushing for ever smaller quotas and stricter regulations instead would have suffocated the remaining industry quietly without most people even noticing.

JPY 3000 is way too expensive.

I paid ~ 2000 JPY in Shibuya (downtown Tokyo for those who don't know) and this was at dinner (dinners are significantly more expensive)

This was a multi hour meal involving a lot of alcohol, most of it shared with the staff.

This is a small town and was basically ruined by the tsunami and trying to recover, so I was trying to spend as much as possible there. (I was also on my way back from one of the cat islands so in a particularly good mood.)

Understood.

Good deal then.

I had some raw whale meat in Norway, and it was really delicious. A lot like beef tartare. Not gamey at all, as the article implied.

(They have quotas on the number of whales that can be killed, and this meat was legally harvested, or at least that's what I was informed. I had no way of checking myself.)

I suspect if you're in somewhere like Norway you're not likely to have been misled on the whale's origins

In recent years the quotas for Minke whale has rarely even been met, so there's very little incentive for someone to risk illegal whaling. I think most of it basically goes to tourists now, with a small proportion to people nostalgic about the old days.

I don't quite get how someone would find it amazing - to me, as I've mentioned elsewhere, it basically used to be an acceptable cheap beef substitute.

It was a wartime food. It's the equivalent of American cheese, or apple crumble/carrot cake in Britain.

I had whale meat mainly in Iceland. Minke meat is quite probably the best meat I have ever eaten, it's amazing.

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