Japan's killing culture

Protesters in Seoul carry out a representation of whale kill. But Japan argues that killing whales is part of its culture and, consequently, none of anyone's business. Yonhap

By Amanda Price

When backed into an intellectual corner, clinging desperately to the last remaining shreds of an argument, it is not unusual for people to play the "culture card."

Flipping this card on to the playing table effectively ends the game without winning it.

Players cautiously step back, debates disintegrate and everyone becomes aware that the playing field is no longer level.

This week, Japan, long proud of its modernization, returned to the outdated practice of hunting and killing whales for commercial use.

Of course, the Japanese have been shooting harpoons through the loopholes of lethal scientific research for years, but now, we are told, the resumption of whaling is motivated by Japan's pride in its little known whale-killing culture.

This culture received scant attention in Japan until last century.

As for the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan has contemptuously tossed its membership card overboard.

Japanese whaling ships have already triumphantly returned with their first kills and begun dividing up the pitiful profits they will make from the lifeless bodies of two aquatic giants.

But there are a few small glimmers of something resembling hope.

Japan, having left the IWC, will no longer be able to continue the deception of slaughtering whales for scientific research. It will no longer be able to use money pledged for overseas aid to bribe under-developed countries to vote with them.

And Japan will now have to stay in its own backyard.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe defends a culture of killing whales while a survey of Japanese citizens revealed that there was no demand for whale meat outside of a few fishing communities. At times, whale meat has been stockpiled in warehouses because it could not be sold. Kyodo News via AP

Ironically, Japan is taking this defiant stand against the international community without hungry hoards hankering for whale meat. The Japanese are also unhappy that money is being poured into an industry that benefits Japan in no substantial way, or rather, an industry that is likely to hurt Japan in several substantial ways.

Yet despite this lack of national enthusiasm, pro-whaling politicians and industry advocates are insisting that killing whales is their inalienable right and a much-loved and treasured tradition.

Pro-whaling bureaucrats, pandering to the demands of a few small whaling communities (ironically in leading politicians' electorates), have claimed that killing whales is "an expression of ancient Japanese culture" that all must respect.

This "ancient Japanese culture" must come as a shock to many Japanese citizens, unaware that killing whales formed part of their cultural identity.

Masayuki Komatsu, Japan's commissioner to the IWC and a Senior Fisheries bureaucrat, wrote that the acceptance of other cultures' dietary traditions and the promotion of cultural diversity "is as important as saving endangered species and the promotion of biological diversity."

Because accepting "dietary traditions" is as important as saving animals from extinction, Komatsu argues that "no-one has a right to criticize the food culture of other people," especially "cultural imperialists".

Komatsu also maintains that hunting whales is the only way that humans and whales can live in harmony. Seeking to live in harmony with nature, Komatsu explains, is also part of Japanese culture.

Although many countries have committed environmental crimes, I wonder where that "ancient tradition" was when Japanese colonists wiped out the Korean tiger, or when Japanese over-fishing led to the extinction of the Japanese sea lion and otter?

Was this environmental love affair occurring when a Japanese fertilizer company, for several decades, pumped copious amounts of mercury into Minamata Bay, killing thousands, causing thousands more to be disabled, poisoning the environment and slaughtering millions of sea creatures?

I wonder if the fishermen who, each year, pitilessly massacre dolphins lured into Taiji Cove, felt a oneness with the dolphins as they flung their nursing calves back into the sea to die from starvation?

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When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was challenged about the brutality of Taiji dolphin hunters by U.S. ambassador Caroline Kennedy, Abe responded, "Dolphin hunting is an ancient practice rooted in their culture and supports their livelihood … they are practices and ways of living and culture that have been handed down from ancestors. Naturally, I feel that they should be respected."

A scientific journal has described whales as "swimming forests". They are the largest and most indispensable regulators of the planet's oceanic eco-systems and their empathetic abilities are only beginning to be understood. Experts have testified that there are no humane ways of killing whales. Unsplash

The crux of the whaling matter for Japan, according to Abe and his men, is the protection of their centuries old culture … a culture that is inscrutable, unquestionable and intractable.

As the killing of whales is part of Japanese culture, it cannot, as the Imperial meat-eaters claim, be considered cruel, inhumane or superfluous, and no one has the right to question it because it is cultural.

I must admit I had trouble working out which logical fallacies best described this argument.

Attempting to build struts under this argument in favor of cultural supremacy, pro-whaling academics have found evidence of Japan's ancient whaling practices. Ancient drawings found in burial mounds, whale bones and crude harpoon-like instruments, have led academics to claim that "gyoshoku bunka" ― the whaling tradition ― began as early as the Jomon period.

According to Japanese experts, these artefacts prove conclusively that whaling is an ancient legacy that modern commercial whalers, with their radars, sonars and specialized ships, are simply upholding.

But for Masayuki Komatsu, the whaling debate is also a culture war, a war between the Anglo-Saxon "meat culture" and the Japanese "fish culture". As Komatsu said at a 1989 IWC conference, "The meat culture" is being permitted by the IWC to eliminate "the fish culture".

"The meat culture" of Africa, however, is exempt from criticism.

When Komatsu was asked about eating gorilla meat, he defended the practice, claiming it was "arrogance" to object to the killing of gorillas while it was part of the social structure and culture of African people. Komatsu added that, as long as native people were not eating "an unreasonable number of gorillas", people had no right to interfere.

But according to Komatsu, culture and power go hand in hand. While he demands nations respect Japanese culture, Japan is under no obligation to respect other's nations' sovereignty. For this reason, Komatsu has called Japan's exit from the IWC "stupid."

"We should go because it's common property of the ocean," Komatsu claimed. "The more Australia claims it is their own territory… the more that Japan (should keep going) because Australia is a minority. Japan … the U.S. … China and Russia, we are the majority (nations)."

It is no wonder that IWC member nations have criticized Japan for its conflicting and confusing arguments.

Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered in water. The oceanic eco-system is the eco-system of primary importance for the continuation of life on earth. We focus on the land because that is where we live. By contributing to the health of the oceanic eco-system, whales are indirectly contributing to the health of our land environment … and therefore to us. Unsplash

Japanese pro-whaling advocates fail to understand that animals whose existence is essential to the health of the earth, do not fall under the domain of any one nation's culture.

Through modern marine research, we now know that whales are effectively ecosystem engineers, balancing the oceanic environment through their impact on other species and organisms. A New Scientist article described whales as "swimming rainforests."

We do not have the right to eat whatever life form takes our fancy, no more than we have the right to use culture as justification for killing the world's largest environmental regulators.

Even whales' faeces and whales that die natural deaths maintain an equilibrium that oceans cannot do without.

Should we just give this one to the Japanese whaling community and trust that it will be responsible?

That might be possible if industry had not for years been hiding catches and providing data that was anything but factual. In fact, "falsified" was the word an IWC official used.

Rarely did supposedly "scientific" papers undergo peer review. Asked about this lack of academic integrity, a Japanese commissioner claimed the international scientific community was biased against pro-whaling nations.

Even while killing for scientific research, reports from the Humane Society confirmed that almost two-thirds of the whales killed over two years were pregnant.

Footage of whalers hooking and dragging living whales is readily available. Images recorded by animal activists show whales dying slow, agonizing deaths as calves are pushed away.

President Abe, and his pro-whaling flotilla, have achieved little apart from propping up an obsolete industry and tarnishing Japan's international image.

His argument that killing whales is integral to Japanese culture is, at best, invented, at worst deceitful. Rather than a step toward a modern understanding of the oceanic eco-system, it is a step backward toward isolationism and a time when Japanese leaders refused to back down.

It is a message from Japanese politicians, misrepresenting Japanese citizens, effectively saying, "We are Japanese, and we will do what we want."

Amanda Price (amanda-price@bigpond.com) is the former Director of Hillcrest College's International Student Department. She has a background in science, history and literature and has been consulting on Asian affairs for more than 10 years. Her special interest is world history and she is the founder of Griffith University's History Readers. She writes full time.

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