(Still) Big in Japan
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Moronuki agrees with Greenpeace activists on one issue. The Japanese don’t want to see whales disappear either, but for a very different reason. If whales are gone, then a tradition is gone. “It is very simple, we have a tradition and culture to eat whale meat. Every tradition, in every country eats something someone else does not eat,” he said. A matter of fact, he said, he recently ate whale sashimi at a Tokyo restaurant for about four dollars per 100 grams. “So, we think, every side should respect tradition and culture.” (Greenpeace argues that the motivation has less to do with tradition than economics, and point out that younger generations of Japanese don’t eat much whale meat.)
During Greenpeace’s campaign to stop the whaling, 17 nations, including Brazil, Australia, France and Germany, asked Japan to end its whaling program in an official demarche delivered to Japan’s foreign ministry. The letter reminded the Japanese that the IWC committee had recommended they only use “non-lethal” methods for research. The United States was not represented in that multi-nation protest. Though in response to a formal complaint about Japan’s whaling from representatives of the Fujian islands, Ambassador Larry Dinger released a statement on January 17 from the U.S. Embassy in Suva, Fiji. The statement read: “The longstanding position of the U.S. government remains unchanged—we are opposed to the current practice of lethal research whaling.” He went on to write that “we are concerned about the perilous incidents reportedly taking place between whaling and NGO vessels in the Southern Ocean over the past several days.”
A few days later, the battle between activists and whalers was coming to an end, though their media and PR campaigns were just beginning and getting a bit bizarre. Both sides posted similar videos as evidence for their respective causes. Some images on one side seemed like a better argument for the other. For instance, the Japanese posted a clip of a bloody whale killing that also showed one of Greenpeace’s boats racing to put themselves between the whale and harpoon, and used it as an argument against their recklessness. Greenpeace used similar images to report the cruelty of the Japanese whalers: whales reaching skyward out of the water just as grenade-tipped harpoons struck; and whales frantically flopping, suffocating and dying in bloody water.
The first montage posted on Greenpeace International’s website in mid-January is called “Greenpeace confronts the whaler.” It shows their Zodiac boats racing along side the behemoth Japanese ships. Cut to whaling deck crew firing water cannons at activists, one man violently swinging a long gaffing poll. Cut to a whale being pulled in the Nisshin Maru’s stern ramp. Cut to a capsized inflatable and two activists crawling up onto the bottom. Cut to the bloody flensing deck, to an eviscerated whale cut neck to tail, bones visible, the crewmen working on the fins, some holding white placards that read GREENPEACE MISLEADS THE PUBLIC and another that explains what they’re supposedly doing, SCIENCE BASED LETHAL RESEARCH. Cut to the last shot of the canopied stern deck with six dead whales stacked like wet fire wood.
“We hope we’ve slowed them down,” Rattenbury said, after traveling more than 10,000 miles. He and his crew would sail through the treacherous weather and roiling seas of the infamous roaring 40s and fierce 50s (latitudes) before reaching home in early February. “If they come up 50 whales short, then that’s an achievement. But I think, now we’ve left them, they will be working as hard as they can to reach that quota.”
Adam Shemper is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.
so that they you know, jam the whalers boats.