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Hello from Singapore,
In a seminar room at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University last month, about 100 students and guests milled around makeshift tables adorned with tubs of deep-fried whale meat. They swapped views on the commercial whaling industry as they dipped nuggets of the crispy dark flesh into mayonnaise.
On whiteboards set up around the room, they shared their thoughts, including whether they found it tasty. Most did, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
An audience member tries fried whale after watching the pro-whaling documentary Whale Restaurant: Inconvenient Food at Waseda University in Tokyo.Credit: Christopher Jue
“It was my first time eating whale! Whale is delicious!” one person wrote.
Another suggested that “whale should be served in school lunches across the country, maintaining whale-fishing culture.”
“I want it to become cheaper so it is readily available for everyone!” another wrote.
The entree to this tasting session had been the screening of an unabashedly pro-whaling documentary, Whale Restaurant: Inconvenient Food, followed by a Q&A session with the director, Keiko Yagi.
In total, it was a two-hour-long evangelising effort dressed up as a documentary. The whale-tasting exercise functioned as a social experiment of sorts, measuring the audience’s receptiveness to Yagi’s agenda by offering them a bite of the product she was promoting, supplied by the very restaurant featured in her film.
Samplers rate whether they found the meat delicious, with blue dots for yes and red dots for no, at an event at Waseda University in Tokyo.Credit: Christopher Jue
Yagi wants more people to eat whale. She’d like a renaissance of Japan’s whaling industry, which has withered as appetites for the seafaring mammal have dwindled. Her passion for whale consumption is rivalled perhaps only by her disdain for Greenpeace and vegans and, at a distant second, the Japanese government, which she believes is not doing enough to boost hunting.
“This is a culture that didn’t diminish on its own; it was forced to diminish, but it can continue growing,” she told me.
“If the whales were endangered, I would be against it, but there are many whales out there, and they are wrecking the [environmental] balance with how much fish they eat.”
The evening was billed as an opportunity to “broaden your perspective” and re-examine whaling as an environmentally sustainable practice. After spotting an ad online for the event, I signed up with my colleagues Stella Perry, a translator, and photographer Christopher Jue, hoping to observe how such a film might be received in contemporary Japan.
Our registration clearly tapped a nerve. We immediately hit resistance from the university administration, and though we were allowed to attend, we were prohibited from interviewing any students about the documentary.
This is not Yagi’s first foray into documentary-making. In 2015, she produced a controversial film billed as Japan’s response to the Oscar-winning 2009 anti-dolphin-hunting documentary The Cove. It was heavily panned by some Western critics.
Her latest self-funded exercise falls into a broader phenomenon of pro-whaling advocates’ efforts to breathe life back into a struggling industry propped up by large government subsidies. Japan’s biggest whaling company, Kyodo Senpaku, caused a stir last year when it launched vending machines selling whale meat in Tokyo, and it has recruited foreign social media influencers to help promote whale eating to international audiences.
Japan has expanded its whaling program to include the massive fin whale.Credit: Shutterstock
Last month, the company released footage showing its massive new whaling “mother ship” had caught Japan’s first fin whale in 50 years. The fin is the second-largest whale after the blue whale and is considered “vulnerable” to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Against this backdrop, Japan is still fighting an old foe – Sea Shepherd founder and controversial anti-whaling activist Paul Watson. He is in jail in Greenland, fighting extradition to Japan, where he faces up to 15 years’ imprisonment if convicted of charges relating to damaging a whaling ship in the Antarctic in 2010 and injuring a whaler.
These days most Japanese people have either never eaten or rarely eat whale meat. Annual consumption has fallen to 2000 tonnes – less than 1 per cent of the 233,000 tonnes consumed in 1962 at the peak of its popularity, according to Japan’s Fisheries Agency data.
The country has never abandoned its quest to hunt whales – a practice rooted in emotive appeals to centuries of cultural heritage and food security claims.
After the 1986 ban on whale hunting imposed by the International Whaling Commission, it continued hunting for “scientific research” purposes in the Antarctic until ordered to stop by the International Court of Justice in 2014 in a case brought by Australia. It quit the International Whaling Commission and resumed commercial whaling in its territorial waters and exclusive economic zones in 2019.
As for Whale Restaurant, the film is clearly the work of an amateur director on a shoestring budget. It features no genuine critique of its core claims, including that “sustainable whaling” should be embraced as an environmental priority. Whales, not humans, are the ultimate over-fishers, so the messaging goes, with their voracious appetite putting them in competition with humans for this finite resource – a view that goes completely unchallenged by scientific experts.
For her part, Yagi rejects the characterisation of her documentary as pro-whaling propaganda, arguing it is a rebuttal to anti-whaling documentaries promoted by animal rights organisations. It has had limited screenings in New York and Los Angeles, and now Yagi wants to bring it to Australia.
As for what whale tastes like, I couldn’t tell you. Whatever curiosity I started out with had dissipated by the film’s end. For me at least, the tasting was propositioned as a judgment on the documentary’s integrity, and I voted accordingly.
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