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Comment by Ultramanoid | Hacker News Reader

> 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. )

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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.

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.

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.

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