"The Japanese Barely Eat Whale. So Why Do They Keep Whaling?" Topic

"After World War II shattered Japan's economy, food was scarce and meat especially so. So General Douglas MacArthur, who effectively ruled Japan during the post-war Allied occupation, decided the Japanese should get protein from the sea. In 1946, he authorized two military tankers to become giant whaling ships and helped usher in a new era of industrial whaling in Japan. A generation of Japanese children grew up eating whale meat in school lunches.

Ah, how the times have changed.

When Japan this week resumed hunting minke whales in defiance of an international moratorium, the country found itself now on the other side of the Americans—and Australians, and New Zealanders, and most of the world, really. The International Whaling Commission has banned commercial whale hunting since 1986, making an exception for scientific research. Japan obeys the letter, if not exactly spirit, of the ban by saying the 333 whales it plans to kill each year are purely for research.

(Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, object to the moratorium and continue to hunt whales commercially without using science as an excuse.)

Given how Japan has twisted itself into knots to justify its whaling and how much international flack it's getting, you might conclude whale meat is a hugely important part of Japanese cuisine. Nope. Small-scale whaling is traditional in some parts of Japan, but whale meat was only ever popular in the postwar period. So for older Japanese, "this is like nostalgia food," says Katarzyna Cwiertka, a Japanese studies professor and author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

Don't forget the Inuit who get an exemption due to the fact that whaling is part of their 'culture.'

If it wasn't such a modern practice, the Japanese apparently make the same claim.

Because they want to?

"Tastes Like Chicken"!

Charlie

whale oil has tons of uses and ambergries is quite valuable

I don't agree with hunting wales… it's not neccesary in modern days…

Amicalement
Armand

I think they're using the whale meat in pet food.

Japan is critically dependent on food imports. They have far too many people for their own farmland and fisheries to feed.

They have a number of laws designed to keep food production in the home islands as high as possible, even though it's inefficient to farm in Japan. They seem to want to keep direct control of as many food resources as possible, even though it's costly to do so.

I suspect that the Japanese government wants to keep whaling open as an option, just in case food imports ever fail.

How many wales do you need for feed dogs??? (smile)

I don't think Japan have such amount of dogs!! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

ambergries comes only from sperm whales japan dosn't hunt sperm whales.

It's totaly unecesary to hunt whales. the meat isn't that good, I have big doubts there is any way of humanly kill a whale. And there are reports of whales beeing alive when they start to cut them apart. There is also the problem that whales are very smart(baleen whales less so then toothed whales but still smart)

Totally agree my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

"Very smart". That doesn't stop us killing each other, though, does it!

To rate animals on a comparative intelligence scale, and then make it "okay" to kill and eat the ones below the "line" (where it becomes "murder" of an intelligent creature), is something only humans would even think of. Stoopid humans….