Bloodbath: Japan's dolphin cull gets underway

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2129954.ece

 

Bloodbath: Japan's dolphin cull gets underway

 

The nation's annual hunting season is underway, a

tradition stretching back centuries. Now, though,

protesters from abroad are trying to end this way of

life. David McNeill reports from Taiji

 

Published: 06 January 2007

 

In Taiji, the fishermen say that dolphin tastes like

venison or beef. But eaten raw with a dab of ginger

and soy sauce, the glistening dark flesh resembles

liver, with a coppery aftertaste that lingers on the

roof of the mouth long after you've chewed it past

your protesting taste buds. The ripe, tangy smell

stays longer.

 

" I hate cutting up dolphin, " says Toshihiro Motohata,

who runs a nearby whalemeat shop. " The stink stays on

you for days, even after several baths. "

 

Dolphin-hunting season has arrived again in this

sleepy harbour town. Perhaps 2,000 small whales and

striped, bottlenose, spotted and Risso's dolphins have

been slaughtered for meat that ends up on the tables

of local homes and restaurants, and in vacuum-packed

bags in supermarkets. By the end of March, many more

will go the same way, part of what is probably the

largest annual cull of cetaceans - about 26,000 around

coastal Japan, according to environmentalists - in the

world.

 

Six hours from Tokyo and accessible only via a coastal

road that snakes through tunnels hewn from dense,

pine-carpeted mountains, Taiji for years escaped the

prying eyes of animal rights activists, but the

isolation has been abruptly ended by the internet and

the cheap rail pass. A steady trickle of foreign

protesters - most Japanese people know little about

the tradition - now arrive in the rusting town square

to cross swords with the local bureaucrats and the 26

fishermen who run the hunt.

 

Taiji's notoriety has grown, fuelled by gruesome

videos of the dolphin kill posted on YouTube, and by

criticism from celebrities such as the American actors

Joaquin Phoenix and Ted Danson and from high-profile

environmentalists, and tensions have sharpened.

Protesters have repeatedly clashed with the fishermen.

Nets and boats have been sabotaged, activists arrested

and several environmental groups have been effectively

banned from the town.

 

Foreigners now almost inevitably mean trouble,

especially when they come with cameras; local people

speak with special venom of a BBC documentary that

they say depicted them as barbarians. " One fisherman

told me if the whalers could kill me, they would, "

says the best-known protester, Ric O'Barry, who

trained dolphins for the 1960s television series

Flipper. " But I always try to stay on the right side

of the law. If I get arrested, I'm out of this fight. "

 

Around Taiji and in the nearby towns of Kii-Katsura

and Shingu, whale meat has been eaten for hundreds of

years, claim local officials. Restaurants and shops

offer dolphin and whale sashimi and humpback bacon,

along with tuna and shark fin soup. A canteen next to

the Taiji Whale Museum, where dolphins and small

whales are trained to perform tricks for tourists,

sells minke steak, sashimi and whale cutlets in curry

sauce, in a room decorated with posters of the 80 or

so " cetaceans of the world " - whales, dolphins and

porpoises.

 

According to Ikuo Mizutani, a local wholesaler,

dolphin meat sells for about 2,000 yen (£9) a kilo,

cheaper than beef or whale.

 

Unlike most Japanese children, who have no idea of

what whale tastes like, children in Taiji know their

cetaceans. " I don't like the taste of dolphin because

it smells, " says nine-year-old Rui Utani. " I prefer

whale. "

 

In the museum, out-of-towners are often stunned to

learn of the local specialities. " I'm shocked, " says

Keiko Shibuya, from Osaka. " I couldn't imagine eating

dolphin. They're too cute. "

 

The hunts are notoriously brutal, and blue tarpaulin

sheets block the main viewing spots overlooking the

cove where the killings take place, to prevent

photographs being taken. Beyond the cove, small boats

surround a pod of migrating dolphins, lower metal

poles into the sea and bang them to frighten the

animals and disrupt their sonar. Once the panicking,

thrashing dolphins are herded into the narrow cove,

the fishermen attack them with knives, turning the sea

red before dragging them to a harbourside warehouse

for slaughter.

 

The fishermen, who consider dolphins just big fish,

like tuna, are bewildered that anyone would find this

cruel, and describe the protesters as extremists. " If

you walked into an American slaughterhouse for cows,

it wouldn't look very pretty either, " says one, who

identifies himself only as Kawasaki. " The killing is

done in the open here, so it looks worse than it is. "

Most of the fishermen are descended from families that

have been killing and eating the contents of the sea

around Taiji for generations, and reject arguments

that dolphins are " special " . Says Kawasaki: " They're

food, like dogs for the Chinese and Koreans. "

 

Mr O'Barry claims, however, he was told in private by

town officials that tradition is not the real reason

for the hunts. " It's pest control, " he says. " They

want to kill the competition for the fish. That's

unacceptable. These animals don't have Japanese

passports, they belong to the world. They're just

trying to get around this town and these 26 guys. "

 

He calls the town " schizophrenic " . " It's as pretty as

a 1950s postcard, and the people are so friendly, but

this secret genocide takes place every year. "

 

The schizophrenia is sharpest, say activists, in the

Taiji Whale Museum, where tickets for whale-watching

trips in dolphin-shaped boats are sold, while the

non-performing animals bump up against each other in a

tiny concrete pool. The trainers here help sort the

" best-looking " dolphins from the kill, and train them

for use in circuses and aquariums across Asia and

Europe.

 

The museum recently made the world's science pages

when fishermen handed over a dolphin with an extra set

of fins, possibly proving that they once had legs and

lived on land. But Mr O'Barry says the story had a

dark side. " The Japanese media didn't report that this

particular dolphin was taken away from her mother. The

mother's throat was slit and she was butchered in the

Taiji slaughter house along with more than 200 other

bottlenose dolphins. "

 

The bitter controversy over what fishermen in Taiji

and other Japanese ports take from the sea is salted

with nationalism, one reason why they are backed to

the hilt by the Tokyo government. In a country that

produces just 40 per cent of its own food, fisheries

bureaucrats bristle at " emotional " lectures from

Western environmentalists, and amid an intensifying

fight for marine resources, they are determined not to

yield. For some, cetaceans are a line in the sand. " If

we lose on whales, what will happen next? " asks Akira

Nakamae, deputy director general of Japan's fisheries

agency.

 

Next, it seems, is tuna, a staple of the Japanese diet

in contrast to whale, which is a minor delicacy now

eaten by a tiny proportion of the population. Japan's

voracious appetite for tuna shows no sign of abating:

a report last December claimed that Japanese fishermen

poached a staggering 100,000 tons of the coveted

southern bluefin tuna above quota between 1996 and

2005.

 

The Taiji fishermen deny they are taking too much from

the sea. " We would be cutting our own throats, " says

Kazutoyo Shimetani, sales manager of the dolphin

hunters' cooperative in Taiji. The cooperative -

essentially a closed guild - says it rigidly controls

fishing, limiting dolphin hunting to just 26 of the

town's approximately 500 fishermen.

 

Taiji's growing notoriety has widened the cultural

gulf between the town and the rest of the world, and

most senior officials will no longer talk to Western

journalists. But the head of the local board of

education, Yoji Kita, who lectures on whaling to

schools and colleges, agrees to a brief, testy

meeting.

 

Like many in the town hall, he is defensive, accusing

Westerners of failing to understand or explain Japan's

culture to their readers, and of inciting protesters,

but he is guardedly polite - until a question about

the dangerously high mercury levels detected in whales

and dolphins. " Why pick on those as reasons to stop

eating them? " he asks, voice rising. " The whole

environment is poisoned. There is no point in talking

to you, because you don't want to listen. That's just

racism, " he says, standing to terminate the interview.

 

" It's very difficult, " sighs a clerk in the museum.

" The town leaders are just so tired of having to deal

with this. They want it to go away. "

 

There seems little chance they will get their wish,

despite an offer to fund the retirement of the dolphin

hunters from a US environmental group. Few in the town

took the offer seriously, and the fishermen say they

would in any case reject it. " Why should we give up

our tradition on the orders of somebody else? " asks Mr

Shimetani.

 

In a world racked by wars, greed and environmental

destruction, the fate of a few thousand animals might

seem small fry, but activists say the plight of the

dolphins is connected to all three. " The dolphin hunt

is a symbol of our utilitarian view of nature, " says

Mr O'Barry. " That we can use and abuse the sea. I

honestly believe when the world finds out about this,

it will be abolished. It can't possibly survive the

light of day. "

 

One man's campaign

 

Ric O' Barry is one of the world's best known

environmentalists. A former US Navy diver, he later

trained the five dolphins that played Flipper in the

Sixties television series before turning against

dolphin captivity in 1970. He has spent his life since

as an animal rights campaigner and much of the past

decade fighting what he calls the " secret genocide " of

dolphins in Taiji, where thousands of the animals are

killed between October and March every year. Mr O'

Barry travels to the small port town several times a

year to film the annual dolphin hunt for a coalition

of environmental groups (at

www.SaveJapanDolphins.org). He claims he is despised

by officials at the town hall, trailed by goons, and

harassed and threatened by whalers. " One fisherman

down there told me if the whalers could kill me, they

would, " he says. " I was kind of flattered. They call

me 'Samurai dolphin man', which shows that, at least,

they respect me. " Oddly, the first time the

67-year-old visited Taiji in 1975, he met the mayor

and was given the keys to the town after leading a

campaign against a US boycott of Japanese products led

by anti-whalers whom he considered " racist " . He still

believes boycotts will not stop whaling. " Boycotts are

completely useless because the Japanese people don't

even know about this. They are a blanket condemnation

of the Japanese people, and the dolphin hunt is led by

just 26 fishermen. "