01:00:00:00

Izumi harpooning

On a winter’s afternoon on the northern coast – Junko Izumi looks out to sea and remembers when he was a top gun – in the world of whaling.

As a harpoonist he slaughtered hundreds

of the giant mammals

But then the ban came

These days whaling is limited to what Japan calls “scientific research”

But now some like Izumi see a chance of a return – to the good old days

00:52 - V/O

IZUMI AT ALTAR

Izumi prays for the whales he has killed - and also for a return to commercial whaling

01:07 - Izumi

“I am a whaler and a seaman.”

“If I am not allowed to hunt whales, then I might as well die.”

01:30 – V/O

Japan once caught around 2000 whales a year.

But that came to an end in 1986 when the world banned commercial whaling.

The decision crippled Japan’s whaling industry, but did not kill it.

Junko Izumi can still hunt whales, but in much smaller numbers than he did before.

Each Year Japan kills 600 whales – in the name of science. Izumi and the Japanese government claim it should be more – that the ban should be lifted.

02:12 - Izumi

“Now there are plenty of whales. Ships have to get out of their way, Otherwise they would sink like the American submarine sank the Japanese fishing boat.”

02:28 – V/O

GREENPEACE

Environmental groups claim that even the so called scientific whaling is unacceptable – let alone a return to commercial whaling.

02:38 - DENISE BOYD

OCEANS CAMPAIGNER, GREENPEACE

“Whales are an integral part of our world’s oceans and it’s important to put that into perspective. The world’s whales are the world’s whales, they belong to everybody and belong to no one. They have an intrinsic right to exist in the oceans. We as a species do not have the right to drive them to extinction.”

03:01 – V/O

The Japanese claim that an attack on their whaling is an attack on the very culture of Japan. They dismiss the environmentalists as trouble makers with a vested self interest

03:13 - MASAYUKI KOMATSU

DIRECTOR,

FISHERIES AGENCY

“The image of Japan is of us as villains or bad guys, actually that is not the case … and if you combine the image of the cute, adorable animal – bad guys killing a good guy – it helps them generate money.”

03:43 – V/O

BOAT COMING OUT OF MIST

It’s 6 a.m. and the northern port of Ishinomaki is preparing to welcome home the whaling mother ship Nisshin Maru.

She’s been at sea for six months and is now carrying a precious cargo.

On board are 440 whales caught and killed in the Antarctic oceans - for research purposes.

04:13 – V/O

CELEBRATIONS ON DECK

04:20 - SHIRO YUGE

FISHERIES AGENCY

High ranking officials have come from Tokyo to praise the crews efforts

“Because of your work, our country can learn how to manage the oceans based on science, and therefore move towards the early resumption of commercial whaling”

04:41 – V/O

LABORATORY

04:51 – Lab Guide i/v

05:05 – V/O

CRAMPED LABORATORY

We’re taken on a tour – the first time the foreign media has been allowed to see the inner workings of Japanese whaling.

We’re shown below to the ship’s laboratory

“This is the biological research room. We do various biological research and study here.”

For a research vessel the space seemed rather small

Go downstairs

To factory space

05:17 - Lab i/v

Further below in the bowels of the ship a much bigger room with a very different purpose.

“Here is a factory space for products … whale meat products.”

05:24 – V/O

FACTORY SPACE

Unloading whale meat

loading onto trucks

At sea one hundred people work in this room carving up the whale meat that will be sold for human consumption.

2,000 tonnes of whale meat is transferred from the ship’s freezer.

The meat will go to market and from there to restaurants across the country. But the government denies it is a commercial operation in disguise.

05:56 - KOMATSU

“We do not consider we are killing many whales. If it was a disguised commercial whaling (operation), we should kill more than 10,000.”

06:09 – V/O

Nonetheless the Government’s top fisheries official Masayuki Komatsu says commercial whaling is a cultural right

06:18 - Komatsu sync

“Japan nurtured a fish eating culture (for) more than 1,000 years. So I strongly believe our body is constituted with a DNA which is more receptive to fish than livestock and others.”

“Although whale is not fish, it’s a mammal…”

“yeah, but it is in the ocean, and many parts of Japanese culture have been developed by eating whale.”

07:03 – V/O

It’s difficult to know just how important whaling is to Japanese culture.

It is true that some whale has been eaten here for hundreds – perhaps thousands of years – but most Japanese had their first contact with it in the dark days after world war two, when food was scarce.

General Macarthur ordered Japan’s fleet to the southern oceans, to hunt for whale.

The meat became so common, it was used in school lunches.

07:44 – V/O

NIGHT STREET SCENE SHINJUKU

Simkin into restaurant

diners fish tank

kitchen

08:13 - TAKASHI SATO

RESTAURANT OWNER

These days, there aren’t many places where you can eat whale.

It’s in restaurants like this that the whale eating tradition is kept alive.

You can eat whale cooked in all manner of styles… battered, baked, crumbed, fried… or not cooked at all.

And you can get everything from its tail to its testicles.

“It is foreigners who say whales are a beautiful creature. It is traditional in Japan to eat whale. As far as I’m concerned, it is cruel to eat calf.”

“It’s the same as asking the British to drink Japanese tea instead of English tea. We must stop this way of thinking, it is nonsense.”

08:45 – V/O

In small fishing villages like Ayukawa it’s not just a cultural argument - but an economic one.

Ayukawa was totally dependent on whaling. Since the ban they say the town’s population has halved.

09:02 – i/v

09:13 – V/O

09:24 - YUKITAKA CHIJIMATSU

“Our population declined, our workforce declined. We became a ghost town.”

Almost all the locals relied on the industry in some way or other

Yukitaka Chijimatsu has been carving whale bone for more than 60 years

“If commercial whaling is not allowed, I cannot make a living, I cannot obtain the raw materials.”

09:37 – V/O

In a nearby restaurant some local businessmen discuss the virtue of whale meat.

09:45 - Irokawa

“I think whale meat is the only food I could never get sick of eating. I have it for breakfast for lunch and for dinner.

“Our religion taught us not to eat animals with four legs. It was our tradition.”

“Instead we ate whales because they have not got four legs. That is why we eat it.”

10:20 – V/O

fishing boats/hauling nets

Just out to sea from Ayukowa we found yet another reason the Japanese want a return to commercial whaling

Many of these men used to hunt whales. Now they catch something a lot smaller – prawns.

But they want a resumption of commercial whaling – not just because they want their old jobs back, but because they say the whales are eating all the fish.

The Japanese government agrees and says killing whales will actually help the environment by protecting the fish.

10:53 - MASAYUKI KOMATSU

DIRECTOR, FISHERIES AGE

“They are very much eating a tremendous amount of fish.
The preliminary conclusion made by our scientists is that three to five times the fish are consumed by the caetacians, whales.”

11:16 - DENISE BOYD

OCEANS CAMPAIGNER, GREENPEACE

“There’s absolutely no scientific evidence to support claims that whales are eating all the fish and we need to cull them in order to control the balance of the world’s oceans.”

“I mean simply on a linear exercise if fish are being removed then whale numbers would drop, accordingly. That’s not the situation, It’s a far more complex ecosystem than that.”

11:40 – V/O

BOAT COMING IN TAPE 3

DOWN MARKET AYUKUWA

SIMKIN INTO FREEZER

12:07 – Question

12:09 - Answer

12:15 – V/O

But the Japanese claim they have all the scientific evidence they need to support a return to commercial whaling …

and it’s right here in Ayukawa

For this is where they bring samples from every whale Japan catches in international waters.

How many samples are here

About 600

It is this research programme that makes Japan’s whaling legal under international treaty.

12:28 – V/O

SKELETONS WITH SAMPLES

This is Japan’s biggest whale research laboratory - but only three scientists work here

12:36 – V/O

IN LAB

Nationwide there are just 25 scientists involved in the research effort.

But then the samples they analyse are remarkably small - Twenty metres of whale comes down to this.

The scientists main job is to analyse DNA samples obtaining information on breeding and migration patterns.

They insist that they need to kill the whales to get the data they need

13:08 - MUTSUO GOTO

WHALE RESEARCHER

13:14 – V/O

13:21 – Mutsuo Goto

“To determine a whale’s age, we need to examine the ear plug.”

And the major finding of the research? Whale numbers have increased dramatically.

“Based on this data, we might be able to return to commercial whaling in the future.”

13:41 – V/O

It seems a somewhat self-fulfilling argument… Japan needs to kill whales to discover whether it can kill more whales.

But the government claims the research is both necessary and genuine.

13:56 - MASAYUKI KOMATSU

DIRECTOR, FISHERIES AGE

14:08 – Question

14:12 - Matsayuki

“I have never seen any other research that contributes so much information on what is going on under the surface of the ocean.”

Have there been genuine scientific findings from the research

“Yes yes many aspects are coming up from this research activity. We incorporated more than a hundred items to be collected by scientific hunting. Most important finding … the competition between the whale eating fish and the fishery itself.”

14:37 - DENISE BOYD

OCEANS CAMPAIGNER, GREENPEACE0

“This is not scientific whaling this is not a necessary programme it was never requested by the IWC indeed Japan has been requested to stop and yet they continue to do so and they continue to do so because they want to maintain a sector of their industry that is able to and has the skills to continue commercial whaling”

15:00 – V/O

Aquarium sea tube people surrounded by fish

It’s true that the Japanese have a unique relationship with sea creatures.

Japan represents one fiftieth of the world’s population but it eats one third of the world’s fish.

Fish market

It only takes an early morning trip to the Tskiji fish markets to see the evidence

What makes this debate so difficult is that it’s not just a clash of wills, it’s a clash of cultures.

It seems no amount of international pressure will force Japan to back down. As far as Tokyo is concerned, it’s a matter of national pride, and no-one has any right to tell Japan what it can and can’t eat.

15:47 – V/O

And the Japanese it seems like to eat everything. Give up on the right to eat one species and who knows what could be next

16:02 – V/O

BLUE FIN TUNA - auction/loading on fork lifts

There’s one particular species the Japanese regard as to die for. Blue fin tuna - eaten raw as sushi. Recently a single fish sold for three hundred thousand (Australian) dollars

But like the whales before it the tuna’s numbers are declining rapidly - the result of over-fishing. The fear here is: lose the whale battle and sushi could be next.

16:35 - KOMATSU

“This is a matter of principle.”

“Once we give up this good war, how can we fight in any other area as justifiably as this level of the war in the whaling industry?”

17:01 – V/O

GREENPEACE

blood pouring out of whaling boats

It now appears that despite international condemnation - despite even the threat of sanctions Japan is determined to have its way.

At last year’s annual IWC meeting in Adelaide six Caribbean countries with no apparent interest in whaling voted with Japan on virtually every motion.

They even overturned a proposed South Pacific whale sanctuary.

It was suspected that Japan had bought those votes by offering overseas development aid or ODAs. Those suspicions have now for the first time been confirmed.

17:38 - MASAYUKI KOMATSU

DIRECTOR, FISHERIES AGENCY

“Japan does not have military powers … Japanese means is simply diplomatic communication and ODAs.”

“So in order to get appreciation of Japan’s position, of course it is natural that we must resort to those two major tools, so I think there is nothing wrong.”

18:12 – V/O

Japan, with the support of the countries it has bought will once again push for a resumption of commercial whaling,

It’s unlikely that Japan has recruited enough countries to overturn the ban but its block is building. And it appears that in the end it will come down to a matter of money.