Japan's commercial whaling to restart July 1 after 3-decade hiatus | Hacker News Reader

Japan's commercial whaling to restart July 1 after 3-decade hiatus

japantoday.com

50 pointsUltramanoid37 comments

Sigh... I blame Greenpeace. Really. Japan was slowly moving away from whale meat. The only people who ate it were older people who nostalgically ate it because it used to be in their school lunches 50 years ago. Everyone I ever talked to said that they didn't like it the few times they ate it. "The Cove" was aired and it moved public perception of eating dolphin meat and whale meat into something embarrassing. It was almost certainly going to disappear.

And then Greenpeace decided it would be a good idea to confront Japanese whaling ships and throw rancid butter onto the decks. It hit all the big news outlets in Japan. From that point on, all I heard was, "What are these people children? Why are they doing such anti-social things to our fishermen?" It put everybody's backs up. In defiance, a few izakayas started featuring whale meat. It still wasn't popular but there was this idea of "This is our cultural identity and it's under attack". So people ate it.

Now whale and dolphin meat are in every supermarket I've been to in the last few months. It's so incredibly stupid. On top of that, I'm hearing people talk about tuna stocks and say, "All those foreigners are eating sushi now and the tuna is disappearing. It's not their culture. Why does Japan have to suffer from the selfishness of others?" Of course, the average Shunsuke in the street has no idea that Japan takes 80% of the tuna catch and that it's been unsustainable for decades.

It is so frustrating when I see people make such hamfisted efforts on such important issues. If you want to convince Japanese people, you can't use the tactics you used in other cultures. You need to understand Japanese culture and you need to be very careful because if you get it wrong it will backfire spectacularly.

> If you want to convince Japanese people, you can't use the tactics you used in other cultures. You need to understand Japanese culture and you need to be very careful because if you get it wrong it will backfire spectacularly.

In my experience, these tactics don't really work in any culture.

I think it's important to note that Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaign started in 1975 in a world that was much less environmentally conscious than it is now. It can be argued that protests, lobbying and direct action on the part of Greenpeace eventually led to the acceptance of a moratorium by the IWC in 1986. So I think it's a bit unfair to blame Greenpeace. But I agree that it's debatable whether or not the same tactics are useful today. And you bring up a really good point- tuna is a HUGE issue but doesn't get nearly as much attention- perhaps in part because it's not a "sexy" issue. While I think it is important to be extremely sensitive regarding cultural differences and even "eco-imperialism", we also can't just ignore problems so as not to offend anyone..

You're generalizing a bit, though. IIRC, you're in Shizuoka prefecture, which has a history of dolphin fishing (I don't know about whales).

I live in the adjacent prefecture, Aichi, and I've never seen dolphin or whale meat in supermarkets.

I agree. It is not common at all in most of Japan.

My own anecdotal experience, but for reference, I believe horse meat is orders of magnitude easier to find and consume in EU countries than whale in Japan. And yet I'd argue most Europeans wouldn't consider horse meat common at all.

I think is was the Sea Shepherd group that was confronting the whaling ships and spoiling the meat. They had a TV show on Discovery called Whale Wars which documented the confrontations. The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, was one of the founders of Green Peace but parted ways due to his beliefs that active measures should be taken to stop whaling.

This seems a little overblown when put into context...

Commercial fishing kills 300k cetaceans annually. [1] For contrast, at the peak of Japanese whaling, less than 40k were killed per annum[2]

China alone, in 2010, had 8.8 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste came from China with an estimated 3.53 million metric tons of it ending up in the ocean. [3] What happens when cetaceans lose their only environment to pollution?

I'm a conservationist, myself, but I feel so much energy of conservationists is misdirected at things of little consequence (banning plastic straws is an international debate among first world countries), whereas many of the big issues (unsustainable fossil fuel use and farming techniques) is ignored.

1. http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?281850/Bycatch-is-the-biggest...

2. https://www.organicauthority.com/energetic-health/commercial...

3. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Things like this are more a reflect of a general spirit, and fought as a symbol.

Or outright diversions from the real issues. But more often just plain ignorance among the public. Among journalists too, but if a narrative is not rooted in public conceptions then it dies. On a deeper level, probably an effect of click-chasing web news. Or at least seriously exasperated by.

> banning plastic straws

Can be viewed as the first step to banning all/most non-degradable/plastic packaging. Which is not a small problem, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/people-e...

Please keep in mind, Japanese consider cetaceans just another fish. They simply don't understand all the anti-whaling rhetoric.

The other thing to keep in mind is the demand for whale meat has sharply decreased. Japanese would rather eat beef. If you want to eliminate whaling, do so with economic tools. I.e. cheap beef.

Lastly, if you find you are anti-whaling but love a juicy steak, I consider you a hypocrite. They're both mammals. I've never seen any conclusive evidence that whales are any better than cattle. All the 'intelligent' behavior I've ever seen reported of is comparable to other animals 'intelligent' behavior that most have no issues of eating.

You make Japanese people sound stupid...of course they understand. They simply choose to ignore it.

> They're both mammals.

Whales are not domesticated. They are not farmed. Cattle are not threatened with extinction.

What does domestication or farming have to do with anything.

Whaling is a highly regulated industry in Japan, they have no interest in hunting animals to extinction. "Each year, 62 Baird's beaked whales are hunted commercially in Japan, with the meat sold for human consumption."

"Estimates for Baird's are of the order of 30,000 individuals." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_beaked_whale

More interesting, the meat contains high levels of mercury and PCBs. Just lost my interest in eating it...

International anti-whaling treaties were signed precisely because whales were being hunted to extinction.

> What does domestication or farming have to do with anything.

Pretty much everything? You can't really dismiss the parent with: "Naw. I'd rather argue against something you didn't claim". I also hold the impression that the bigger concern with Whales is a question of hunting them to extinction, not a matter of relative intelligence.

Fortunately, you do actually end up addressing it anyway; I have no idea if 30,000 is a lot, but if it can really be sustainable fine, eat em.

But that just reenforces the idea that a domesticated, farmed population would remove most non-vegan people's concerns.

Also note that the Minke whales that are being whaled, are not threatened with extinction. In fact, they are classified as "least concern".

So, let's hunt them to make sure they get back into a more pressing category? Seems like a bad idea.

This is not binary. It is fully possible to hunt them to keep the population stable. It is not a bad idea at all as long as it is properly regulated.

Surely whales r not cheaper than chicken???!!!

Is tuna cheaper than chicken? Is that why they look ready to fish it to extinction?

Moral relativism between species is an endless logic labyrinth. For instance, there are profoundly more impactful conservation and ecosystem role considerations for wild whales compared to domestic cows.

Your free market solution is fantastical, and your supposition that it is more effective than the largely successful international whaling treaties even more so.

> Japanese consider cetaceans just another fish.

And Japanese are short, can't speak English, too ?

We don't eat whale at home, never have, nobody we know eats whale, neither can you see whale on display as a matter of course around you in Japan. Sure, you can find it if you want it. Also, even children as a rule can usually explain what a whale is, and how is different compared to, say, tuna or mackerel. Schools are a wonderful thing.

That said, your other point is quite apropos on the massive hypocrisy in general when it comes to meat and fish consumption.

The horrific process that brings chicken or beef to people's plates would be something to consider way before looking at whaling.

( Edit : Not vegetarian or vegan, by the way. )

( Edit 2 : And for clarity's sake : Not in favour of whaling for any reason, myself. )

Do you know if maybe the majority of whale is then exported to other countries, with a "made in japan" / japanese quality label on it?

Don't have any specific figures, don't know. There isn't that much whale to deal with to begin with, it is highly regulated as already explained in another comment. We'll see if this whaling 'restart' brings changes to that -- or if it even lasts.

Seems like political nationalistic posturing from a government that's done a number of things in this regard, more than anything else. There are no real economic ( or gastronomical ) reasons to it that I can see.

I've never gotten the impression that a majority of Japanese support whaling. I don't think I've ever met someone who was in favour of it; mostly Japanese seem ambiguous about it, and some against.

Environmentalism is fairly strong in Japan though. Is there so little political opposition to whaling?

There is little political opposition to the present government, which explains why a leader with such lousy support among the population at large ( Abe's administration has been riddled in corruption scandals almost non-stop, and has been hovering between a 30% and at best 50% in polls ) is about to become the longest serving Prime Minister.

The opposition is fragmented, weak in all respects, hasn't had a plan when in power, doesn't have one now, was mercilessly attacked when in power because of their handling of Fukushima among other things, and people have no real choice when it comes to voting.

Yuriko Koike took Tokyo Metropolis by storm and raised the prospect of a strong alternative political force to the ever in power LDP and the broken opposition, but then quickly fizzled out and renounced national ambitions.

This new whaling push seems to be just a political statement from the Abe administration, in essence.

I think this whole argument will be largely solved when meat substitute (tasty protein) is synthesized from non-animal products. I heard of a company that did that quite successfully but I don't know if they will be able to scale all that well. Anyhow - it seems that this is an issue that will be resolved by engineering a solution out of it.

Not sure that's the proper way though. I think that such big scale moral issues are something of a species test (our species). Engineering our way out of the moral argument feels like cheating and actually might backpedal our collective ability to create consensus and solve problems as a society.

Some may oppose whaling on ethical grounds. I don't. But I thought the problem was the declining whale population.

Except cattle are herded and comercially farmed while whales aren't. I'd much rather eat beef, thank you. Your solution for whale meat demand offset is brilliant otherwise.

I had the same argument with a friend a few days ago, only it was centered around the brutal and senseless (IMHO) slaughter of pilot whales in Faroe Islands. There is a simple answer why it is much worse from an ethical standpoint to murder an intelligent sea mammal versus killing a cow and it is based on how that organism came to be in the first place. Cow was there as a result of intentional breeding. It was created in the first place by humans/industry to be eaten (we can argue on how brutal that is in itself but let's not be sidetracked by it for now). Sea mammals were there independently of human actions - and if anything we destroy and downgrade their environment and standard of living implicitly with a myriad of ways. So - there you go. It is much more wrong to kill whales than killing cows. And it is extra wrong to do it while nobody really needs to for survival.

The difference is we have a well-established process for making more cows. We don't have a similar process for whales so if we fuck up their population, we won't be able to make more whales.

> Please keep in mind, Japanese consider cetaceans just another fish. They simply don't understand all the anti-whaling rhetoric.

I am a Japanese (so sorry for bad English) and I think this is true. It does NOT mean we don't understand whales are mammals. We all understand that fishes and mammals are taxonomically very different. We eat many kinds of animals underwater like fishes, shellfishes, crustacean, eels, octopuses, etc. Whales are one of them.

We should not eat whales because whales are intelligent? There are many evidence that octopuses have very high intelligence.

Because whales are mammals and humans are mammals? We (including non-Japanese) eat pigs and cattles, which are mammals.

Additionally, this is my personal opinion, I think "the animals which have higher intelligence should not be eaten" is not a common sense in Japan. Intelligence is not a only value of creatures.

The hiatus provided cheap large fishing vessels to other countries, does this imply a boom in new fishing vessel orders?

Paragraph 2: "A fleet of five vessels belonging to six whaling operators from Abashiri in Hokkaido Prefecture, Ishimaki in Miyagi Prefecture, Minamiboso in Chiba Prefecture and Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture, who have been conducting the last round of Japan's so-called scientific whaling around Abashiri port since June 1, will embark on the mission."

You sick fucks.

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