[LINK] "The Japanese Barely Eat Whale. So Why Do They Keep Whaling?"
Wired's Sarah Zhang notes why the Japanese continue to hunt whales, in the face of international criticism and their own disinterest in actually eating the meat.
When Japan this week resumed hunting minke whales in defiance of an international moratorium, the country found itself now on the other side of the Americans-and Australians, and New Zealanders, and most of the world, really. The International Whaling Commission has banned commercial whale hunting since 1986, making an exception for scientific research. Japan obeys the letter, if not exactly spirit, of the ban by saying the 333 whales it plans to kill each year are purely for research.
(Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, object to the moratorium and continue to hunt whales commercially without using science as an excuse.)
Given how Japan has twisted itself into knots to justify its whaling and how much international flack it’s getting, you might conclude whale meat is a hugely important part of Japanese cuisine. Nope. Small-scale whaling is traditional in some parts of Japan, but whale meat was only ever popular in the postwar period. So for older Japanese, “this is like nostalgia food,” says Katarzyna Cwiertka, a Japanese studies professor and author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity.
For everyone else, though, whale meat is more of a curiosity. “I am among the kids who benefited from the cheap meat from the whales. My children have, however, no such experiences at all,” says Kazuhiko Kobayashi, an agronomy professor and the co-author of Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts. “This means that whale has lost its position among the animal meats, and will belong more to the category of curious foods for the predominant majority of Japanese.”
Good numbers are hard to come by but A 2006 poll commissioned by Greenpeace and conducted by the independent Nippon Research Centre found that 95 percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat. And the amount of uneaten frozen whale meat stockpiled in Japan has doubled to 4,600 tons between 2002 and 2012.
Even Japan’s former top whaling negotiator, Komatsu Masayuki, told me he had never tried whale meat before the whaling job. “I was kind of forcing myself to eat whales because I don’t know the taste,” he says. “And it was delicious. But I’m not crazy about eating whales.” Masayuki, who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries until 2007, still condemns members of the International Whaling Commission for “imposing their wrong emotional view upon Japanese conduct.”
When Japan this week resumed hunting minke whales in defiance of an international moratorium, the country found itself now on the other side of the Americans-and Australians, and New Zealanders, and most of the world, really. The International Whaling Commission has banned commercial whale hunting since 1986, making an exception for scientific research. Japan obeys the letter, if not exactly spirit, of the ban by saying the 333 whales it plans to kill each year are purely for research.
(Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, object to the moratorium and continue to hunt whales commercially without using science as an excuse.)
Given how Japan has twisted itself into knots to justify its whaling and how much international flack it’s getting, you might conclude whale meat is a hugely important part of Japanese cuisine. Nope. Small-scale whaling is traditional in some parts of Japan, but whale meat was only ever popular in the postwar period. So for older Japanese, “this is like nostalgia food,” says Katarzyna Cwiertka, a Japanese studies professor and author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity.
For everyone else, though, whale meat is more of a curiosity. “I am among the kids who benefited from the cheap meat from the whales. My children have, however, no such experiences at all,” says Kazuhiko Kobayashi, an agronomy professor and the co-author of Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts. “This means that whale has lost its position among the animal meats, and will belong more to the category of curious foods for the predominant majority of Japanese.”
Good numbers are hard to come by but A 2006 poll commissioned by Greenpeace and conducted by the independent Nippon Research Centre found that 95 percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat. And the amount of uneaten frozen whale meat stockpiled in Japan has doubled to 4,600 tons between 2002 and 2012.
Even Japan’s former top whaling negotiator, Komatsu Masayuki, told me he had never tried whale meat before the whaling job. “I was kind of forcing myself to eat whales because I don’t know the taste,” he says. “And it was delicious. But I’m not crazy about eating whales.” Masayuki, who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries until 2007, still condemns members of the International Whaling Commission for “imposing their wrong emotional view upon Japanese conduct.”