Japanese Insistence on Killing Whales Due To Ignorant Politicians and Also To Early United States Intervention Post World War II

There are a couple good things to point out about this article:

One, it shows that really there is very little interest by the Japanese people (not politicians) to eat whale meat. It literally has to be forced on them

Two: It was the United States who originally pushed them to resume whaling, but now, thankfully, the US is opposed to the unnecessary practice.

But, unfortunately, as they typically do, the Japanese continue to engage in unnecessary and cruel practices such as killing whales and dolphins.

For more on the truth behind whaling in general see
http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/10/iceland-resume-whaling-excellent.html

For more on Japan and it’s other deranged practice of killing of dolphins - http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/11/coalition-of-marine-scientists-has.html


Article:


Whaling: A Japanese Obsession With American Roots

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/
world/asia/14whaling.html?pagewanted=2

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: March 14, 2007

AYUKAWA, Japan — Why does Japan insist on whaling?

The Japanese suffered a major embarrassment recently when they had to cut short their annual whale-hunting season in the Antarctic after a fire crippled their main ship and killed a crewman. The vessel sat idle for 10 days, loaded with 343,000 gallons of fuel that New Zealand said threatened to leak into the pristine waters, creating a potential public relations nightmare.

A few weeks earlier, more than half the members of the International Whaling Commission, led by antiwhaling nations like the United States, Britain and Australia, boycotted a conference that Japan had called in Tokyo to discuss the resumption of commercial whaling.

Why does Japan go through the annual clashes with antiwhaling ships from Western environmental groups? Why does it subject itself to the opprobrium its so-called scientific whaling elicits in the very same countries with which Tokyo proclaims to have shared values? Out of all possible issues, why defy the United States on this one?

After all, current demand for whale meat in Japan is abysmally low. Even in a town like Ayukawa — a small northern community at the tip of a peninsula that juts into the Pacific Ocean, home to a century-old whaling tradition — officials are struggling to preserve the tradition of eating whale meat by serving it in classroom lunches. Whale nuggets stewed in ketchup was on the menu on a recent Friday.

“I believe this is our traditional culture,” said Natsumi Saito, 15, a junior in high school. “It’s whaling that made this town famous.”

For Japan as a whole, whaling is a far more complex issue. It is intricately tied to Japan’s relations with the West, especially the United States.

It comes as little surprise that foreign opposition to whaling has fueled nationalist sentiments in Japan. What is far less known is how the United States instigated, at least partly, Japan’s nationalist obsession with whaling by first encouraging the Japanese in the postwar years to hunt and eat whale meat, and then urging them to stop.

Tokyo is currently leading a worldwide campaign, arguing that it has the right to manage natural resources and that whale meat is part of its traditional culture.

The clash over whaling emerged with the United States-led environmental movement, which emphasized the belief that endangered animals should be protected and that certain highly evolved ones, like whales, should not be killed at all. Under a 1986 ban on commercial whaling by the International Whaling Commission, Japan was allowed to engage in limited, scientific whaling of certain species — for things like gauging populations and tracking movements — and to sell the meat for consumption.

Japan has maintained ever since that human beings should be allowed to consume any animal as long as the fishing or hunting is sustainable. To establish this point, Japan sends whalers all the way to the Antarctic’s international waters, said Tetsu Sato, a professor of environmental science at Nagano University. In a world of diminishing marine resources, establishing this principle is critical to Japan’s long-term food security and natural resource management, he said.

“Precisely because whaling attracts so much worldwide attention, Japan can’t afford to lose,” said Mr. Sato, who supports whaling.

Last year, Japan killed 1,073 minke whales, which ended up in restaurants, supermarkets, school cafeterias or unsold. Most biologists agree that certain species of whales, including the minke, have not only recovered but are now thriving. Disagreement remains, however, about whether they can be harvested in a sustainable way or whether they are now so numerous that, as Japan asserts, they are threatening other marine animals.

But arguments about resource management do not resonate as much as those about culture.

“I was afraid that our food culture was going to die, so that’s why we began serving whale meat in school cafeterias,” said Shigehiko Azumi, 80, who served as mayor here when the ban went into effect.

Few deny that whaling is part of Ayukawa’s culture. But opinions divide over whether it is part of Japan’s.

Historically, fishermen in coastal towns, like Taiji in southwestern Japan, hunted whales in nearby waters. But things changed after the Commodore Perry’s so-called Black Ships forced an isolationist Japan to open up in the 1850s. Back then, the United States used whale oil lamps, and part of Perry’s mission to Japan was to secure the rights of American whalers in the Pacific.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
AyukawaMap
Ayukawa
Slide Show: Whaling in Japan (iht.com)

As whaling became knotted with Japan’s traumatic opening to the world and its subsequent drive to modernize, the Japanese adopted American and Norwegian whaling vessels and techniques. Some coastal towns were transformed into whaling stations, including Ayukawa, when the Toyo Whaling Company started operating here in 1906.

More Japanese, in turn, began eating whale, especially in western Japan. But it was after World War II, when a devastated Japan had few resources, that the American occupation authorities urged that whale meat be offered in classroom lunches nationwide as a cheap source of protein. For the first time, under America’s influence, whale meat became part of Japanese everyday life.

Japan’s whale consumption peaked in 1962 at 226,000 tons, then declined steadily until it fell to 15,000 tons in 1985, the year before the commercial ban took place. Whaling advocates argue that consumption fell because increasingly strict quotas by the Whaling Commission, followed by the ban, reduced supply.

“The demand didn’t die,” said Joji Morishita, an official at Japan’s fisheries agency and its negotiator at the Whaling Commission. “The supply was cut off. The Japanese didn’t have a say in the matter.”

Whaling opponents say that Japanese mostly stopped eating whale as the country became richer and alternatives became widely available.

“In the midst of Japan’s postwar food shortage, whale meat was used in classroom lunches, but it wasn’t very popular,” said Shuichi Kitoh, professor of environmental studies at the University of Tokyo. “The reaction was, ‘How can you eat that stuff?’.”

Nevertheless, to unify public sentiment behind whaling, the government promoted the argument that whaling was part of Japan’s cultural heritage and that it was being threatened by the West, Mr. Kitoh said. The argument resonated in a country where many feel that traditional culture has been lost in Japan’s confrontation with and then embrace of America; it was also in keeping with a modern Japanese tradition to construct a unified culture to face the West.

Ayako Okubo, a researcher at the private Ocean Policy Research Foundation, said that the cultural argument first emerged in the late 1970s, and was then enthusiastically and effectively used by politicians. Nowadays, most Japanese favor whaling.

“It’s not because Japanese want to eat whale meat,” Ms. Okubo said. “It’s because they don’t like being told not to eat it by foreigners.”

Japan’s unyielding stance on whaling also scratched a nationalist itch.

“Japan, in fact, can’t say no to America on many issues,” Ms. Okubo said, adding, however, that whaling was one issue where disagreement was implicitly tolerated. “It’s become like a form of stress release.”

Mr. Morishita, Japan’s negotiator to the Whaling Commission, chuckled at the term “stress release.”

“And we’re constantly saying no,” he said about pressure on Japan to stop whaling. “That makes some people feel good, no doubt about it.”

“But,” he added, “policy, of course, shouldn’t be decided based on that.”

Around Ayukawa, people are also struggling over the meaning of culture. Like other communities trying to maintain whale-meat eating, Ayukawa has tried to make the strong-smelling meat more palatable to youthful tastes by stewing it in ketchup or serving it sweet-and-sour style.

Yoichi Nishimura, 55, a city agricultural official who grew up eating whale meat, said ketchup and other nontraditional ways of preparing whale meat were just facts of modern life.

“But it definitely is a little strange,” he said.