Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Dokdo, the UN Security Council and now the International Whaling Commission—Jesus, Japan can’t even buy a win. If it weren’t for the 2006 World Baseball Classic, I’d be downright despondent right now if I were Japanese.
Interestingly enough, or at least interestingly enough for a guy like me who comes from a former bastion of whaling, Korea is historically a whaling nation and one of the few nations in the world that have traditionally eaten whale meat. Korean have been hunting the big fellas going back to prehistory, as cliff drawing in Ulsan would suggest. In 1899, a Russian set up a whale processing station in Ulsan’s Jasaengpo Harbor, which from 1905 would become Korea’s whaling center. After liberation, whaling flourished in Korea, with Jasaengpo gaining a reputation as the wealthiest neighborhood in Ulsan (not surprising, considering how New Bedford, Massachusetts, was regarded as the wealthiest city in the United States during the height of the commercial whaling period). Alas, whaling was banned in 1986, although like Sag Harbor, the town now has a spiffy new Whaling Museum to testify to its past greatness. Unlike Sag Harbor, however, plans were afoot to build a whale carcass processing center there before Ulsan City Council caved before a Greenpeace campaign against the “whale meat factory.”
Now, that being said, the sale of whale meat is legal in Korea as long as the whales are already dead when they’re found (for instance, on May 16, some 13 dolphins were sold at a market in Yeongdeok after they got caught in some fixed-shore netting), and there are a fairly large number of whale meat restaurants in places like Ulsan and even Seoul. The problem is that the lucky fisherman can hit the jackpot is he comes across a dead whale in his nets, so ambitious crews occasionally help Fudgy the Whale along to an early date with the dinner plate. Last month, at the start of the May “whaling season,” police launched a crackdown against illegal whaling, which reportedly was taking place quite openly and systematically in and around Ulsan, where whaling was an integral part of the local culture as recently as 1986.
NOTE: Whaler patch shamelessly stolen from this site, which all you Whaler fans out there should click on over to immediately.
12 Comments
Ah yes, the IWC.. The biggest joke of ‘democracy’ in the history of time…
Let’s see, the US threatens Japan with an ultimatum to join the IWC or be faced with sanctions in an attempt to sway the world’s view of it’s own terrible environmental record while it says nothing to other whaling nations of the world. The IWC, one of the few examples I can think of where having the majority vote isn’t enough to win, you have to win by 3/4 vote..
And then this last line on the second page of the Reuters article..
>”Japan and other whaling nations like Norway and Iceland almost got a simple majority at the annual IWC meeting a year ago in South Korea, but some allies failed to pay their dues and could not vote and others did not turn up.”
Now that’s democracy at it’s finest!! ‘No, you’re not allowed to participate because you didn’t pay us enough money!!’
Putting all issues of whaling itself aside, the IWC needs burnt down to the ground along with Greenpeace who’s ‘environment efforts’ involve killing *human beings* who disagree with them by ramming a iceberg destroyer equipped ship into the whaling boats and then falsifying videos of getting shot at with harpoons.
I applied for permision to kill one whale “for cultural reasons” and was rejected.
Ah, yes, because buying votes so one can indiscriminately slaughter slow-breeding animals is the apotheosis of “democracy” …
Hilarious post title.
Curzon—glad you liked it. I was also going to point out that with Japan’s post-1942 track record, I’m starting to wonder whether we really want Tokyo as an ally. I mean, wasn’t the Free World’s team batting average brought down enough when France rejoined NATO command?
I have to admit that I was more than a little surprised to find a whale meat restaurant in Gyeongju, as well as it being sold from time to time on the back of trucks.
Of course, given the relative popularity of whale meat in Japan (they’re trying to unload it on schoolchildren — hook ‘em while they’re young, eh? http://www.underwatertimes.com.....8591023407) it doesn’t seem likely that even if Japan did succeed in convincing the IWC to declare open season on whales, there would be any sort of real market for whale products.
You can look at it that way too if you’d like, but it’s the IWC that makes it’s members pay to vote. Either way, the IWC is still fscked up, and that’s my point.
Yep… the IWC is pretty fucked up, since it makes its members pay to vote, unlike the United States, where deliberate failure to pay taxes totlly isn’t a felony and doesn’t result in a loss of voting priveliges in most states… I agree… it’s totally undemocratic to require countries to fulfill their obligations under the treaties they signed in order to have a vote in the IWC.
I don’t know much about whales around here, although the beluga skin (muktuk–not the blubber) that my grandfather used to send us from the whales that were caught in his fishing nets in the NWT (now Nunavut) was delicious–not unlike fresh cuttlefish here. I only wish I could still get some for my wife–she would love it, too.
The big problem in Korea is the lack of fish–they’re fishing progressively smaller salmon and pollack here on the East coast, and the fish population is pretty much imploding. The Korean fishery is destined to go the way of Newfoundland’s . . .
As I said before, the whole basis of Japan being in the IWC is flawed to begin with. When you put a gun to someone’s head and tell them, “sign the contract or die” the contract is void. That is what the US did to Japan. “Become part of the IWC and cover our ass, or we sanction you.” Japan shouldn’t be bound by the IWC in any way shape or form. Hence, the IWC is corrupt from the beginning, corrupt to the end. If the world really cared about saving the whales, it would have said something to other countries besides Japan when the IWC was formed. But no, Japan was the ONLY whaling country that was forced to sign because America knew it could do whatever it wanted to Japan and Japan could do nothing about it.
My stance on the whaling issue is simple: if there are enough whales to allow for whaling to resume, then whaling should be resumed. If not, then no whaling. All arguments about it being inhumane or cruel because whales are ‘cute’ or ’smart’ are irrelevant. It’s no different then any other form of meat humans eat.
Yep… that’s one of the ways the US gets stuff done around the world. It’s also the natural product of being the world’s largest consumer of foreign-made goods and having the trade deficit to back it up. But if the Japanese really think that catching a few more whales than the already generous amount they already do for ’scientific research’ is worth more than billions of dollars a year in US consumption of Japanese products, then they should grow a pair and leave the IWC altogether. The US has a pretty short memory, and I’m pretty sure that any sanctions that result would be dropped in a couple of years, anyhow.
You’re absolutely right, and the above has always been my argument for why we should stop outlawing cannibalism. (Kidding!)
To a certain extent, I agree with you… If the whale population is healthy enough to be hunted, then the IWC has pretty much achieved its original goals, and should be scrapped. That way, nations like Japan and Norway can stop bitching about being ‘bullied by America’ and stop claiming whaling as a part of their ‘vanishing cultural heritage’. The way the whale market is going in Japan, whale hunting would probably drop sharply once the pretense of a protest harvest was stripped and people found out that there really isn’t much of a market for the stuff anymore.
This is true, the market for whale meat is not so great in Japan anymore, nothing at all like it was post-WW2 because it was cheap and plentiful. The question this raises though is this a natural drifting away from eating whale meat, or is this a resultant of it being outlawed? Eating whale meat is kind of like the whale population I think. The US and other western nations are responsible for the decline in the whale population through traditional western “kill-’em all!” hunting strategies, and the US and other western are responsible for the decline in the market for whale in Japan too through traditional, “stfu or will kill you too!” diplomacy…