The real reason Japan hunts whales

Hunting whales is irrelevant to feeding Japan's population,
draws global condemnation and is certainly not economic.
So why does Japan still do it?
The answer from the Japanese government is that whaling
is an ancient part of Japanese culture, that fishermen have
caught whales for centuries, and that Japan will never
allow foreigners to tell its people what they can and cannot
eat.
One Japanese official once said to me: "Japanese people
never eat rabbits, but we don't tell British people that they
shouldn't". I pointed out that rabbits are not exactly an
endangered species.
Still, there is some merit to the government's argument.
A number of coastal communities in Japan have indeed
hunted whales for centuries, and continue to do so. Taiji in
Wakayama prefecture is well known, many would say
infamous, for its annual dolphin hunts. There are other
places, in Chiba Prefecture and in Ishinomaki in northern
Japan, that also do coastal whaling.
So, yes, coastal whaling is part of Japanese culture, like
Norway and Iceland and the Inuit of northern Canada. But
only Japan continues to sail a fleet of ships half way
across the globe to hunt whales in the Antarctic and
maintains a large factory ship that can process hundreds
of whales at sea.
Nothing about these Antarctic whaling expeditions is
historic. Japan's first whaling voyage to the Antarctic took
place in the mid-1930s but the really huge hunts didn't get
going until after World War Two.
Japan lay in ruins, its population starving. With the
encouragement of General Douglas MacArthur, Japan
converted two huge US Navy tankers into factory ships
and set sail for the Southern Ocean.
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s whale meat was
the single biggest source of meat in Japan. At its peak in
1964 Japan killed more than 24,000 whales in one year,
most of them enormous fin whales and sperm whales.
Today Japan can afford to import meat from Australia and
America. There is no deep-sea commercial whaling in
Japan. The fleet that is now hunting in Antarctic waters is
paid for by Japanese taxpayers to carry out what the
Japanese government describes as "scientific research".
Japan's other justification is that it needs to kill hundreds
of whales each year to study them. But the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) has systematically dismantled that
argument. In 2014 it ruled that there was no scientific case
for Japan's programme of "lethal research" in the Southern
Ocean, and ordered Tokyo to stop.
For a year Japan stopped. But last year it sent its fleet to
sea again insisting, to widespread disbelief, that its new,
smaller, Antarctic whaling programme satisfies the ICJ's
requirements.
Junko Sakuma used to work for Greenpeace in Japan. For
the last 10 years she has been researching Japan's
whaling industry.
"There is no benefit to Japan from whaling...but nobody
knows how to quit," she tells me at Tokyo's famously
chaotic Tsukiji fish market, the biggest in the world
renowned for its pre-dawn tuna auctions.
Of the thousands of fish wholesalers in Tsukiji only two
still deal in whale meat.
At one stand we find a few large hunks of minke whale
meat, deep red and oozing blood. At the next there are two
long slabs of lighter-coloured fin whale meat, an
endangered species its trading banned by CITES.
Business is bad, complains the stall owner. Last year
Japan caught no whales in the Antarctic, so there is less
minke whale meat available, he says.
If there is a whale meat shortage, the price should be
soaring. But according to Junko it is not.
"The fact is, most Japanese people do not eat whale
meat," she says. "Consumption has been falling for years,"
and adds that "even as the amount of whale meat
decreases, the price doesn't go up".
According to Junko's research, the average consumption
of whale meat by Japanese people in 2015 was just 30g
(one ounce) per person.
If eating whale is such an integral part of Japanese culture,
why are so few eating it?
I turn to my old friend Estuo Kato. Over the 20 years we
have known each other he has, on occasion, tried to
persuade me to eat whale meat with him. Kato-San grew
up in Kita-Kyushu in western Japan, close to the big
whaling port at Shimonoseki.
We are sitting in a cosy restaurant in Tokyo's notorious
red light district, Kabukicho. Above us hangs a very large,
and rather ancient, mummified whale penis. On the wall
are picture of whales.
The first plate to arrive is whale sashimi - it is raw. The
owner points to the different delicacies; steak, heart,
tongue and even raw whale skin.
My stomach turns, but I steel myself. Gingerly, I put a bit
of raw whale steak into my mouth. It has a strong gamey
flavour, chewy and fibrous. Next, I try the tongue. It is salty
and fishy. Kato-San points to the heart. I politely decline.
"When I was a child I ate this every day," he says. "Meat
meant whale meat. I didn't know what beef was, or pork.
Steak was whale steak, bacon meant whale bacon."
But if Japan stopped whale hunting you would be sad?
He looks at me smiling and gently shaking his head.
"I don't need whale hunting" he says. "Once you have eaten
beef there is no need to eat whale meat."
The other customers in the restaurant are all middle-aged
salary men. Eating a bit of whale meat is nostalgic,
remembering school meals 50 years ago.
So I come back again to my original question: why does
Japan still do it?
Recently I was at a private briefing with a high-ranking
member of the Japanese government. Japan had just
announced it was going to resuming whaling. I outlined to
him why I thought it made no sense, and asked him to
respond. His answer was astonishingly frank.
"I agree with you," he said. "Antarctic whaling is not part
of Japanese culture. It is terrible for our international
image and there is no commercial demand for the meat. I
think in another 10 years there will be no deep sea whaling
in Japan."
"So why not stop now?" asked another journalist.
"There are some important political reasons why it is
difficult to stop now." he said. He would say no more.
But Junko Sakuma thinks the answer lies in the fact that
Japan's whaling is government-run, a large bureaucracy
with research budgets, annual plans, promotions and
pensions.
"If the number of staff in a bureaucrat's office decreases
while they are in charge, they feel tremendous shame," she
says.
"Which means most of the bureaucrats will fight to keep
the whaling section in their ministry at all costs. And that
is true with the politicians as well. If the issue is closely
related to their constituency, they will promise to bring
back commercial whaling. It is a way of keeping their
seats."
It may seem incredibly banal. But Japan's determination
to continue whaling may come down to a handful of MPs
from whaling constituencies and a few hundred
bureaucrats who don't want to see their budgets cut.