As the Save the Whales campaigns gradually reduced the number of nations committed to continued whaling, those that refused to sign on became more and more noticeable — and obviously intransigent. The standouts seemed to be the Soviet Union, Norway, and Japan. Although Russia remains pro-whaling, it has not returned to the hunt after the Soviet Union mothballed its whaling fleet in the late 80s. Whaling was not economic. The Soviet Union could subsidize money-sucks, until it couldn’t. Japan still can. Whaling does not pay its way in Japan; there is not much of an internal market and there is no international market. According to Rebecca Griggs in her book Fathoms: the world in the whale, great quantities of surplus whale meat is sitting in gigantic freezers in Japan. Yet every year Japan sends its whaling fleet to drag more bodies out of the drink.
I was always curious about what made Japan so adamant about continuing to hunt whales. I remember some sort of vague story about how whaling was traditional in Japan and the Japanese were not about to let outsiders dictate what traditions they could maintain. Griggs visits an expert on Japan who tells the author the “tradition” doesn’t really go back very far:
Toward the tail end of World War II and into the 1960s, Japan experienced a food crisis born of the wartime decimation of supply chains and the Japanese agricultural sector. … US overseer general Douglas MacArthur urged recommencing Antarctic whaling, not only for nutritional reasons but also to retrofit and repurpose Japanese naval vessels, decommissioned as per terms of surrender. The Japanese people were starving and crippled by vitamin deficiencies, whale meat served in elementary and middle schools helped bring young people back to health. Though, in time, the Japanese turned away from this substitute meat, its association with the ideals of self-reliance, and restored pride, have never entirely been dropped.
Whale meat may still bring a warm feeling to those born in the middle of the 20th century — “Why, I remember when I was fed whale meat in my school lunch; boy, did that keep me from starving!” — but few people actually buy it when it shows up in the market.
Norway’s whaling “traditions” may go back to the Vikings, but so what? All sorts of bad things can be justified by saying we’ve been doing them for a long time. Is the whaling industry paying for itself? Considering that whale meat is increasingly contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons, human made pollution which accumulates in the animals at the top of the food chain, fewer and fewer people want to risk eating it. For some reason ending the hunt is politically toxic in Norway. So it likely doesn’t matter whether there’s a market.
source:
Fathoms: the world in the whale
by Rebecca Giggs
2020. Simon & Schuster, New York
