In an bitter twist of fate, Japan’s tsunami may have accomplished something conservationists have been fervently attempting for years: Driving a final nail into the nation's pro-active whaling communities.
The first outsiders have recently reached the small town of Ayukawahama, which was crushed by 30-foot waves. Four hundred of its 1,400 residents are missing, assumed dead. The peninsula town is described as having been reduced to “an expanse of splintered wood and twisted cars.”
The waves rushed 600 feet inland, wiping out 80 percent of the town’s 700 homes, along with the headquarters of the biggest business in town, Ayukawa Whaling, one of the country’s most prodigious hunters of big whales.
Ayukawa lives off whaling. It is one of just four Japan communities that are home to small fleets that twice a year hunt whales in waters close to Japan, differentiating them from the fleet that heads to the Southern Ocean each November.
“There is no Ayukawa without whaling,” said a 27-year-old whaler.
The four boats of Ayukawa Whaling were sucked out to sea by the retreating tsunami waves and thrown back onto shore a mile down the coastline. The company’s 28 employees ran for the hills. All survived, but have now all been laid off.
The company’s chairman told the New York Times that he hoped to rebuild the factory (his whale-meat processing plant was reduced to splinters), refloat the company’s boats and get back to hunting whales, but it wouldn’t be any time soon.
Nearby the daughter of a 54-year-old woman scavenging for food found a tin of whale meat among the debris. “I wish we could eat whale meat every day,” said the 17-year-old. “But the whalers are so old, I think they’ll just quit or retire after what has happened.
“I think whaling is dead here.”
During the height of the Southern Ocean campaign, which usually runs from November to March, news stories make it seem that whale meat is a passion for all Japanese. The reality is that increasingly fewer companies are engaged in whale hunting.
Despite the success of the Sea Shepherd’s this past season—its harassment forced an early end to the Japanese season and reduced its take by some 75 percent, to less than 200 whales—the tsunami may ultimately be what stops the hunt.
Sea Shepherd's Captain Paul Watson's public reaction has been appropriately muted:
“Nature does not play favorites. Just as the earthquake struck New Zealand recently, the fires ravaged Australia two years ago, and the tsunami struck India and Thailand not so very long ago, the message is clear—we all share the dangers of living on the water planet called earth,” he wrote. “In the face of such peril from the forces of nature, we are all equal.
"I have heard many people say that Japan's tragedy is karma. People who say such things do not understand the concept of karma. This earthquake struck Japan purely on the basis of geography and geology.”
In another twist, the Japanese factory processing ship Nisshin Maru, which the Shepherds had hounded back to port a month early, is being used by the Japanese government to deliver aid supplies (charcoal, 100,000 noodle cups, kerosene, cranes) to the hard-hit north.
“Sea Shepherd believes that the Nisshin Maru should be permanently converted into a humanitarian aid vessel,” suggested the conservation society's website.
The Japanese have rebuilt from the dust before, with great success.
One Ayukawa whaler was quoted two days after the tsunami: “As long as there are people who will carry on whaling in the absence of vessels or facilities, whaling could be revived … eventually.”
A six-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council, Jon Bowermaster has spent the past two decades circling the world’s ocean, studying both its health and the lives of the people who depend on it. He is the author of 11 books (his most recent, OCEANS, Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide, was published by Participant Media) and producer of a dozen documentary films. His blog—Notes From Sea Level—reports daily on issues impacting the ocean and us. Follow Jon on Facebook.
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