Hunting Dolphins | ZENOAQ [Nippon Zenyaku Kogyo Co., Ltd.]

The small seaside town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture has suddenly gained world fame with the opening of a new movie, "The Cove".
"The Cove" received the Audience Award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival this January. The film is about the dolphin drive hunts that take place in the aforementioned seaside town of Taiji. The Japanese fishing industry is reported to hunt about 20,000 dolphins every year but a great majority of them are killed by harpooning in open waters.
But in Taiji the dolphins are hunted in a very different way.
The fishermen of Taiji use Special equipment to create a sound barrier around dolphins swimming in the open sea. They use this "wall of sound" to drive the dolphins into a cove where they are killed. Taiji is the only place where the dolphins are herded to shore like this during the hunt.
The dolphins driven into the cove are speared by the fishermen, with the exception of a few creatures who are caught and sold to aquariums for over 100,000 dollars each.
The town of Taiji is and the cove where the hunt takes place is in an isolated location and very few outsiders have been able to observe the actual hunt.
The U.S.-made film, "The Cove" made use of divers and underwater cameras, aerial shooting, thermal cameras etc. to document the hunt undercover.
The release of this documentary has caused a large wave of "Japan bashing" throughout the world. The only people who do not know about this are the Japanese themselves. Most Japanese have never eaten dolphin meat and needless to say most Japanese living outside of Taiji have never heard of the "drive-hunts". This portrays a serious flaw in the Japanese media.
Since the release of "The cove" the Japanese media have taken up the Taiji issue in bits and pieces, mostly in the form of interviews with local residents and officials, who have all repeated the age old phrase "cultural practice" in defense of these hunts. Some local fishermen and even officials have stated that killing dolphins for meat consumption is like killing pigs and cows. But the media has yet to touch on the humane slaughter angle. The people of Taiji and the media interviewing them fail to see that the real issue lies in the brutality of herding and slaughtering methods. Needless to say, the humane treatment of food animals is now a large issue worldwide. "How" those cows and pigs are killed for meat is of interest to many consumers throughout the world. Thus, in the case of dolphins it should be the same if they are being equated to other food animals. The Japanese media, the people of Taiji, and government officials have completely "missed the point".
The media also does not report in detail the danger from mercury levels in dolphin meat.
Dr.T.Endo from the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido has conducted several studies looking into the mercury levels of Taiji residents.
He and fellow researchers found that the people of Taiji had average mercury levels that were approximately 10 times the national average. Such alarming figures have also never made the headlines in the Japanese media. The Taiji issue should first and foremost be attacked from the angle of "the people's right to know". The Japanese people should be the ones to decide whether or not the "cultural practices" of a handful of their fellow citizens is indeed harming the national identity and if so then they again should be the ones to decide what they should say and do about it. And to do so the makers of "The Cove" must find a distributor in Japan ... if not, well, there's always the Internet.

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