For much of the world, whales and dolphins are treasures of the ocean, but in Japan they will be just be one more item on the menu if the government has its way, writes David McNeill
In Tokyo's oldest whale restaurant, Ganso Kujira, the cloying, oily smell of boiled and fried whale meat hangs in the air as customer Norimoto Tobayama explains its attractions.
"When I hear people say they don't eat whale, I feel sorry for them," he says, between mouthfuls of whale sashimi. "It's delicious. The problem is people are too sentimental about them. I think they're cute too, but so are cows and that doesn't stop Westerners eating beef." Cows are hardly nearing extinction, though. "Neither are minke whales," says his companion, Komi Morita. "Nobody in Japan wants to hunt whales to extinction. We understand the need for controls. But being told by the rest of the world that we can't eat them is odd. It's part of our culture."
Like many older Japanese, Morita remembers chunks of the fatty meat in her school lunchbox in the 1950s, when it was one of the few sources of cheap protein. At 4,000 yen (about €29), though, today's meal is simply a pricey trip down memory lane in a country where less than 1 per cent of the population now eats whale meat once a month.
According to Greenpeace Japan, the average Japanese now consumes 40 times more hamburger than whale which, since a 1996 moratorium on commercial hunting by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), has been expensive and hard to get.
Most young Japanese seem happy to wave sayonara to a custom that dates back centuries - a recent poll by Asahi newspaper found that more than half of Japan's 20-24 year-olds do not eat whale at all. But after years of declining interest, the hunting of whales and dolphins is again back on the political menu thanks to years of dedicated government lobbying and a small fishing village called Taiji, in Japan's far south.
For 400 years, Taiji fishermen have herded dolphins and small whales into inlets around the village and slaughtered them with spears and knives during the autumn and winter months. The cull is not pretty, as environmental group Sea Shepherd discovered last October when it filmed thousands of dead or dying animals lying on beaches and in water stained red with blood.
A BBC reporter who went to Taiji this year to follow up the story gagged on raw dolphin washed down with beer in a local bar, in a bid to determine whether the village is guilty of "mindless slaughter" or "symbolic of a cultural gulf". His report, which left little doubt where he stood in the debate, went around the world along with the Sea Shepherd pictures, enraging environmentalists and embarrassing the villagers who bitterly resent how they were portrayed.
"Look, if I was to take a camera into a slaughter house for cows or pigs, that would not be nice to look at either," says Hideki Moronuki, who represents the whaling division of Japan's ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, which supports the Taiji fishermen. "In Taiji, everything is done out in the open, so it looks bad, but the fishermen are simply doing what they need to survive. Every country has its own culture and traditions and these should be respected." Moronuki speaks passionately in fluent English and brandishes glossy pro-hunting pamphlets, evidence of the intense, well-funded government effort to prove the case for sustainable hunting. Amid growing frustration at its failure to prove this case, Japan has engaged since 1987 in what it calls "scientific" whaling to "monitor fish stocks and migration patterns", while Norway has continued to hunt commercially by simply entering an objection to the moratorium. Iceland has done a mixture of both.
The three countries together have killed more than 25,000 whales since the moratorium. Japan alone has hunted more than 5,000 minke whales, many of which have ended on the menus of upmarket restaurants such as Ganso Kujira. Some whale meat has even found its way into tins on the shelves of a Japanese Tesco subsidiary before a campaign forced them off again last month.
The pro-whaling stance has generated enormous flak from political allies and environmental groups and damaged Japan's image abroad, begging the question: why does Tokyo continue to wave a red flag to the rest of the world over what should be a relatively minor issue? "Because we have been doing this for generations and we believe that whales and dolphins are part of marine resources," explains an exasperated Moronuki.
"We think it is possible to use these resources in a sustainable way. We don't have much land, we have the sea. Japan has lost so much of its own culture already. The consumption of rice has decreased because we were forced to consume bread in school since the second World War in order to import huge amounts of flour from the US."
This tone of wounded national pride hints at one reason whaling is one of the few international issues - perhaps the only issue - on which Japan takes a hard line, despite the great yawn the debate provokes among much of the Japanese public.
After years living in the diplomatic and military shadow of the US, some Japanese nationalists feel this is one area where Japan can make some noise.
The public face of Japan's pro-whaling lobby, Masayuki Komatsu, is a colorful ultra-nationalist and career bureaucrat at the ministry of agriculture who contemptuously denounces the "culinary imperialism" of anti-whaling nations such as the US, Australia and Britain: "These countries can raise cows and sheep because they don't depend on the oceans for food," he said recently. "We don't have that luxury."
Komatsu revels in upsetting what he calls the "Save the Whalers" who dominate international debate on the issue by calling minke whales "the cockroaches of the ocean". He once advised the captains of whaling ships to "blow Greenpeace protest boats out of the water". Japan's whaling "research fleet" is supported by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which in turn is backed by a lobby of nationalist politicians within the ruling Liberal Democratic party. This lobby has spent billions of yen in a tireless diplomatic offensive to reverse the 1996 moratorium; they came very close to securing more than 50 per cent of the votes at the 2004 International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Italy. Critics such as Britain's Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society allege that Japan has stacked the IWC with votes from small nations heavily dependent on Japanese aid.
The ban, then, clings to life for another year, but the debate is not likely to end there. At its heart is the issue of sustainable fishing and whether it is possible to both protect and use whales and dolphins. Does the world believe Japan when it claims, as Moronuki does, that there are now "one million minke whales" and that they are actually eating depleted stocks of fish around the world? The answer, at least for the time being, is no.
Junko Sakurai of Greenpeace Japan says the government's estimates are "odd: They are always on the high side. Scientists in the IWC have been debating these figures since 2001, so how can the government have such a clear picture?" Tokyo, though, is unlikely to be convinced by the statements of people they describe as "environmental extremists" and will be back at the IWC again next year for another bruising fight with the culinary imperialists.
In the meantime, the fishermen of Taiji will continue to kill and eat dolphins this winter and Japan's dwindling band of whale meat eaters will still have to pay inflated prices at restaurants. "I just wish people wouldn't get so emotional about it," says Morita. "It's just food, after all."
