New York Times editorial 4/1/07: Japan's Whaling Obsession

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01sun2.html?_r=1 & oref=slogin

Editorial

Japan's Whaling Obsession

 

Published: April 1, 2007

 

 

Humans should be careful when criticizing other humans about the

industrial slaughter of animal species. It is hard to find moral

ground.

 

There was one small, bright spot of global consensus: whales. It took

a very long time, but most of the world agreed that these wonderful,

sociable mammals, at least, should be granted a stay of extinction.

Most of the world, but not all. A few outlying countries continue

commercial or dubiously scientific whale hunts, notably Japan, which

clings to its whaling ways long past the expiration of any defensible

reasons for doing so.

 

Japanese officials defend the slaughter as a matter of tradition and

science. But as Norimitsu Onishi explained recently in The Times, the

everyday consumption of whale meat became a national habit in Japan

only in the lean years after World War II, when officials of the

American occupation promoted it as cheap protein. Japan's appetite

for whale plummeted after the 1960s and never returned, Mr. Onishi

reported.

 

As for the research that Japan insists can be performed only on dead

whales, which are then butchered and sold for meat, biologists around

the globe dismiss that as a sham.

 

Still, nationalism seems hard-wired into Japan's insistence on

maintaining the right to exploit any and all ocean resources; its

continual efforts to end the international moratorium on commercial

whaling; and its reluctance to bow to what many Japanese see as the

late-blooming sanctimony of nations like the United States.

 

Revulsion at whaling may take hold in Japan someday, but it will have

to spring from the Japanese, perhaps among the many tourists who go

to Hawaii this time of year, when the gentle humpbacks breach and

calve under the gaze of people who can no longer imagine slaughtering

them.

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