Fish! A Japanese obsession
An alternative viewpoint on commercial fishing.
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We've given plenty of coverage to groups like the Sea Shepherd organisation and environmental issues with regards the ocean and its inhabitants. So perhaps the view from the other side of the coin is worth a gander as well?
Fish! A Japanese Obsession and Whale Hunters aired on BBC4 this week, are still available on iPlayer (UK-only I'm afraid), and one is a lengthy documentary charting a 6 week voyage round the islands looking at an object central to all our palettes. The other is a closer look at the pro and con movements for commercial whaling in Japan, albeit somewhat dated.
Wild fish stocks are being decimated and we tend to see Japan as one of countries least bothered about this alarming trend, so it is fascinating to see this intriguing culture from inside out. Blue fin tuna are a big focus, partly because they're so surprisingly big and also because they are an increasingly rare and expensive commodity.
Over-fished they may be, but the Japanese are finding ways to farm the tuna economically with some success, believing this will enable wild tuna to thrive again. Unfortunately the amount of mackerel required to keep the farms going rather defeats the point, but it's still a work in progress.
The over-riding message is that there is a ancient fishing culture, with children being brought up on whale meat to 70-year-olds still diving for their income. In as much as trawlermen off the northern coasts of Britain rely on their catch, the Japanese do the same but have a less squeamish approach to fish than the average western consumer. To them a whale is just a fish.
Whale Hunters makes the point that since the official commercial whaling ban, a whole generation are growing up with no understanding for the whaling tradition, causing a generational fight for the hearts and minds within the country. Unsurprisingly young people in Japan are mostly against whaling, due to the increasing influence of western culture and the activities of anti-whaling organisations like Greenpeace.
Understanding Japanese culture is perhaps the only way to hopefully adapting it to a modern world in need of shake-up itself on many levels. Catch the documentaries if you can, they offer a good understanding of the whole issue. The longer the ban is in place, the more unlikely it will ever get overturned.
Killing whales 'in the name of science' will continue however, and this shady process must not go unchecked.
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Fish! A Japanese obsession (text) by Steph Pomphrey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (6)
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Whaling is wrong and banned, the sooner countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland recognise that, the better.
I still don't agree with whaling or feeding tonnes of perfectly good mackerel to farmed blue-fin tuna, but it's good to hear both sides of the story for a change.