Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxmorj | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com