 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
Whale Stories |
|||
|
‘These are highly intelligent, sociable creatures. Whaling is cruel, unnecessary and difficult to condone at any level.’ ‘[Minke whales are] the cockroaches of the sea.’ This year the International Whaling Commission, or IWC, is holding its annual meeting in Shimonoseki: a small city up the coast from Fukuoka. This area has several claims to fame, both ancient and modern, but its main feature this month has been its long history as one of Japan’s more important whaling ports. For decision-makers in Tokyo, Shimonoseki occupies the middle distance in the back of beyond; holding the IWC conference in such an out of the way spot is intended to be a provocation. And there is little doubt that the international community is provoked, as it always is when the IWC meets. This year’s conference will develop – but certainly will not resolve – an issue that has been at the top of the IWC agenda for several years: Japan’s proposal to resume limited commercial whaling under what it calls the ‘Revised Management Procedure’. The assumption behind this scheme is that whale stocks have now recovered enough to allow a revision to the IWC’s 1985 decision to ban commercial whaling. Japan has the support of Norway, which objected to the 1985 decision and has never stopped whaling, and faces formidable opposition led by most European countries and the United States. The positions of the anti-whaling and pro-whaling factions are clearly defined and irreconcilable. One side cannot imagine the killing of ‘highly intelligent, sociable creatures’: animals the other side brands ‘the cockroaches of the sea’. Both positions are rhetorical – pigs are intelligent, too, and we don’t eat cockroaches in Japan – but IWC debates tend toward absurdities of this sort. This dispute is one of the most viciously contested conflicts on the international stage. It is one of the few areas where the representatives of ordinarily amicable countries come together only to avoid finding common ground. Whatever one thinks about the relative merits or evils of hunting – or harvesting – whales, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how the sides in this dispute came to be so widely separated. There are several different forces at work here. One is the clear and stark difference in the food cultures of Japan and the anti-whaling countries. It is not possible to balance the views of a militant vegetarian with those of someone who sees nothing wrong with eating beef; the gulf separating the anti-whaling nations and Japan is similarly wide. It is also interesting to see how completely the notion of commercial whaling has vanished from Western cultures. Whaling as a source of a community’s self-image and subsistence is remote from the experience of most in the Western world, unless one happens to live in coastal Norway or Iceland. It is also remote from the experience of most people in Japan, the difference being that people are less easily stirred from indifference here than they are in the West. Among those Westerners who feel anything at all about whales, most seem to be easily moved to moral outrage at the thought of killing them, especially of killing them for profit. As one might expect, the IWC conference has been accompanied by a wave of events designed to shape public opinion here in western Japan. A whaling research ship opened to the public in Nagasaki; various displays went up along the coast to promote the region’s whaling history; one particularly daring whale speciality restaurant in Shimonoseki even offered a cut rate for foreign customers. Doomed to failure it may be, but the latter attempt at cross-cultural understanding reaches to the core of the difference in food cultures: people really do eat whales in Japan. There are regional differences: even before the ban, whale was a more common food in western Japan than in the east. That said, regional cuisines all over Japan make use of practically everything edible that one can find in the ocean, whales included. In the postwar years, whale was an inexpensive source of protein that replaced beef in curry and rice lunches for schoolchildren. It is more of an acquired taste today, but it is far from being uncommon: most weeks I can find whale bacon and sashimi in one of my local supermarkets, at a price most families could afford as a weekly treat. Thus the difference in kinds of voter inertia to be swayed: voters in anti-whaling countries grew up with whales bleeding to death on television; Japanese voters grew up with them in their school lunch, or in the supermarket. This has important implications for the political dimension of the IWC: one side has a domestic electorate completely dissociated from whaling that gained most of its knowledge about whales from anti-whaling groups; the other side has a domestic electorate where rural votes are disproportionately represented in parliament, and where most voters are indifferent to the issue of whaling and grew up eating whale. One side has a moral issue; the other side a social issue. Activists and political figures will attempt to work against inertia in their respective countries, and in each other’s countries; but the Japanese side is far more inert than the Western, and retains a politically significant whaling community. Whaling is also perceived as a flashpoint in nationalist circles; and nationalist politics has a wider share of the centre in Japan than it does in many Western countries. What appears to be a straightforward moral or commercial debate quickly sucks in a host of other concerns. These often start with the perception that Western countries unfairly dominate international regulatory institutions, and the suspicion that these institutions are not allowed to function outside the moral sphere of the West. These perceptions combine with the political and cultural issues involved to raise the stakes in the whaling dispute: it is a fairly safe place for Japan to draw its line in the sand with the Western countries. It is a safe place for both sides because the whaling dispute is unique: it is an occasion for very hot language without the danger of the conflict spilling over into something really important. Unfortunately, matters are coming to a head: it seems that one cannot pursue extreme language for ever, no matter how safe the issue may seem to be. Japan is convinced that the time has come to grant a fig leaf of respectability to the commercial whaling it has so far masked with scientific research. This should be possible within the structure of the IWC, which – in theory – first agreed with the ban on commercial whaling as an emergency measure to help whales recover from overhunting. The problem now is that the anti-whaling position has hardened into a fact of life in most Western countries: the contemporary environmental movement was born in the anti-whaling trenches, and enjoys enormous prestige in Western politics. Putting anything between a rock and a hard place tends to do damage, and in this case the broken party could turn out to be the IWC itself. Among Western-based environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) last year acknowledged this disturbing possibility. In response to last year’s IWC meeting in London, the WWF’s Gordon Shepherd commented to the BBC that ‘if the IWC can’t stop whaling, it has to control it.’ This pragmatism led the WWF to agree in principle to the resumption of tightly controlled commercial whaling under the auspices of the IWC. Greenpeace, on the other hand, holds out hope for its ability to change public opinion in Japan. Unable to overcome the difference in food cultures, they maintain that it is acceptable to eat whales, but not to hunt them. Speaking in the Japan Times on 15 May, Sakurai Junko of Greenpeace Japan acknowledged that this position ‘is hard to explain to people’. The current meetings in Shimonoseki will see Japan propose a motion to resume commercial whaling under its proposed management plan. While this motion is almost sure to fail – to approve it would require a two-thirds majority of delegates – it will set the tone and define the issues for next year’s meetings. We can be sure that the political and cultural differences at the IWC will remain as long as the IWC itself continues to exist. 2002/05/25 |
||||
 |
||||
         |
||||
|
||||
|
|
||||
Date posted: 2003-09-15