Resentments sustain a moribund meat trade

[Bonobo]

Yet another case of US bullying, hypocrisy and arrogance having the opposite of the desired effect. Sound like Iraq? Sound like US diplomace in general? There's a good reason.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070211x4.html

For nationalists, the whaling controversy and the loss of the industry are forever linked with the hypocrisy of the West and the perceived humiliation of having to enter the modern world under pressure from U.S. gunboats. This original sin has since been compounded by Japan's forced withdrawal from the industry in the 1980s.

It is surely no accident, then, that prowhaling sentiment grew in Japan as its economic and political crisis worsened in the 1990s.

Despite the fact that the whaling issue was, in the words of former FA senior official and leader of the IWC Japanese delegation, Masayuki Komatsu, "dead in the water" in the late 1980s, and that the government was rumored to be about to "euthanize" the industry, it has since been brought juddering back to life by Japan's growing soft nationalism.

This whaling narrative even intersects with one of Japan's key historical nexuses: the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when, under threat from the West, the country began the transformation from a closed, feudal society to a modern, trading nation.

Prowhalers seldom fail to point out that the agent of this change, Cmdr. Matthew Perry, whose heavily armed "Black Ships" are credited with opening Japanese ports to trade, was on a mission in large part for the U.S. whaling industry, which needed safe ports and coaling stations for its crews and vessels hunting the whale-rich northwest Pacific and Sea of Japan.

"The credit for opening Japan went to the United States, and the common belief is that the U.S. was a kind of benefactor to Japan -- but I don't support that Japan's development as a modern nation came from an acceptance of U.S. demands," said Mayor Nakata recently.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070211x7.html

'There are a number of factors, both biological and economic, which led the industry to destroy one whale species after another, even though the industry was dependent on their survival. Thus, the commercial whaling ban should be kept and not mixed up with the idea of preserving tradition and/or culture. More than 70 percent of the Japanese public don't support whaling in the Southern Ocean, but the Japanese government keeps sending its whaling fleet to do 'research.' This should stop." -- Junichi Sato, Greenpeace Japan Ocean Campaign Project Manager

[Bonobo]

1. kick. If you are intersted in the whaling issue... Well, reading is good for learning.