Ark's Ark

As you know, Japan’s whaling fleet has put to sea with plans to kill up to a thousand whales, including for the first time in years, the endangered Humpback Whale. For “Science”. Japanese scientists must be pretty damn useless if they need that many whale corpses.

Of course, it’s not about science at all. It’s about culture. The god-given right for a people to eat whatever intelligent beings they want. But the thing is, whale meat is, well, an acquired taste. Very few people in Japan much like it, so in order for the Japanese government to be able to demonstrate a demand, they’re creating it themselves out of whole cloth.

From 2005:

Schoolchildren in the western coastal district of Wakayama are now being offered an unusual addition to their lunch menus. Whale.

The Wakayama education board is supplying whale meat to around 280 schools, to try to promote awareness of the region’s whaling traditions.

For all of Japan’s success in winning support from other countries for its campaign to ease the restrictions on whaling – especially smaller countries which receive Japanese aid – the Japanese people are losing interest.

Whale meat is only served in a few specialist restaurants, and occasionally appears on supermarket shelves. Younger people almost never eat it.
The official line is that whaling is an integral part of Japanese culture, a practice dating back hundreds of years.

That isn’t quite true. A few coastal communities, like Wakayama, have been hunting whales for centuries, traditionally with hand-held harpoons.

But the rest of Japan only became familiar with eating whale during the 20th Century, as modern ships with harpoon-guns became available.

Whale meat was especially widespread in the difficult years after the Second World War, when it was seen as a cheap source of protein.

But as incomes rose, people switched to imported beef, or fish like tuna and salmon. With such an abundance of high-quality protein available these days, few Japanese see the point in eating whale, which doesn’t taste that special.

They’re forcing whale meat down the throats of their children to recreate the demand that dried up when folks had the option of eating something that tasted better. This isn’t about science. It’s not even about culture any more, really. This is about Japan not wanting to be told what to do.