Documentary On Dolphin Cull Puts Tiny Taiji On The Defensive

Over the past few months, Taiji has become an international byword for animal cruelty. This picturesque Wakayama Prefecture fishing town, scene of an annual dolphin hunt documented in a new award-winning film, has similarly unhappy connotations for Tokyo journalists who have made the long trip west to cover the cull and the fallout from the movie.

To the familiar list of hindrances to reporting in Japan – financial costs, PR blather and official obfuscation – Taiji has added an unholy trinity of misinformation, secrecy and intimidation.

The explosive backdrop is the release this summer of The Cove, a documentary that records the slaughter in all its gory detail. The documentary has fomented an acrimonious battle of wills between its targets – Taiji’s fishermen – and those hoping to write about them.

I went to Taiji in early September, a week after this year’s hunt began, and just days after the fishermen’s nemesis, the dolphin trainer-turned conservationist Ric O’Barry, escorted a group of foreign and Japanese journalists on a tour of the town. By all accounts, they had not been extended a particularly warm welcome.

Having been commissioned to write what I expected to be a piece on local reaction to Taiji’s new-found, and entirely unwanted, place in the global media firmament, photographer Rob Gilhooly and I decided to adopt a low-key approach.

Traveling independently and armed with as much goodwill as we could muster would, we believed, afford us the access and trust denied to O’Barry and his band of reporters and activists.

In the event that our would-be interviewees resisted our advances, I had prepared a letter in Japanese explaining who we were and why we were there, complete with reassurances that we would leave it to our readers to arrive at moral judgments on how they choose to earn a living.

It turned out to be one of my least successful attempts at grassroots diplomacy.

NO ROOM AT THE INN
Perhaps I should have heeded the alarm bells that began pealing before I had even bought my train ticket for the six-hour journey. I had asked my wife to reserve a room at Hakugei (White Whale), a publicly run hostel in Taiji, figuring that as soon as the receptionist heard my non-native Japanese, she would declare the rooms fully booked. She duly confirmed there were rooms available, but on hearing my name, asked what Rob and I would be doing during our stay.

My wife offered an ambiguous response that included a reference to “sightseeing,” but not before asking why she needed to explain at all. “It’s just that the town office has asked us to avoid taking reservations from foreign reporters, what with all the trouble recently,” came the reply.

Still, we were feeling supremely confident as we drove our rented car past the two giant model whales that greet visitors to Taiji.

A visit to the whale museum promised a gentle introduction to the town’s 400-year history of slaughtering cetaceans. It also gave us access to a dolphin show, a dolphinarium and an enclosed natural pool where visitors are invited to board plastic rowboats and “play with the dolphins.”

It soon became clear that Taiji’s self-proclaimed status as Japan’s dolphin paradise was an imaginative piece of PR. True, the town is covered with cetacean iconography, on everything from the pavements and bridge balustrades to road tunnels and bus stops, even the key-activated power point in our hostel room.

Yet this is perhaps the only place in the world where you can watch dolphins leap in unison and take trips on a pleasure boat shaped like a cute bottlenose, then walk a few yards to a souvenir shop that sells hunks of dolphin meat and packets of dolphin jerky – the fruits of a slaughter that begins as soon as the tourists have left.

A FRIENDLY POLICEMAN
We walked along the coast, photographed the pine-carpeted cliffs bathed in afternoon sunshine, and watched a lone fisherman perched on the end of a seawall. And then our assignment took an ominous turn.

The museum staff, it appeared, had registered our presence and alerted the local constabulary to a potential threat to public order, albeit one posed by two exhausted journalists armed with little more than a camera and notebook.

The plainclothes policeman who greeted us as we returned to our car was friendly enough, and we reciprocated by producing photo ID and patiently answering his questions. The grilling was a mere formality necessitated, he said, by the ever-present threat of eco-terrorism.

Our interrogator explained that tensions had been rising in Taiji since 2003 when two members of the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd released several dolphins that had been herded into a bay just off the main road ready to be slaughtered the following morning.

We exchanged business cards and were asked if we would like a police escort to the scene of the crime.

We had timed our visit to perfection, albeit inadvertently. The shallow water of the bay was teeming with dolphins – about 100 bottlenoses and 50 pilot whales – all penned in by nets to prevent their escape.

“This is the cove that appears in the film,” the officer said, inviting us to produce his business card as security should any of the fishermen take exception to our presence. And then he was gone, his surveillance duties silently bequeathed to a younger colleague seated 50 meters away in an unmarked vehicle. We quickly nicknamed him White Van Man.

The officer’s brief tour was a thoughtful gesture, marred only by his deliberate attempt to throw us off the scent – the “killer cove,” as we would soon discover, was a few dozen meters away, hidden from view by thick foliage and steep cliffs.

The hostel had clearly fallen for our inquisitive backpackers tale. Our room, we were amazed to discover, overlooked the bay. Minutes after our alarm sounded at 5 a.m. the following day, the hum of outboard motors echoed across the water as groups of fishermen made for the cove.

We spent the next few hours simultaneously attempting to interview fishermen and inquisitive residents, and evade White Van Man and his colleagues. Spotters, usually young fishermen not involved in the cull itself, could be seen speaking in hushed tones on their mobile phones as soon as we arrived at a promising photo location.

WHAT ABOUT FLIPPER?
On the clifftop overlooking the cove, accessible only via a path leading from the grounds of our hostel, a young woman who introduced herself only as a “dolphin trainer” attempted to distract Rob with a volley of questions while, several hundred yards below, the hunters were waist deep in bloody water.

Only Rob’s ingenuity and bravery made possible the graphic images that adorn these pages. As I noted down our escort’s rambling defense of dolphin hunting in the face of Western cultural chauvinism, Rob was edging himself down perilous cliff sides for a session of long-lens photography.

“The media treat dolphins as cute animals and nothing else,” she told me. “But what happened to the dolphins in Flipper? They were discarded as soon as they had outlived their usefulness. You know why we say ‘itadakimasu’? We are thanking the animal we are about to eat. I don’t think foreigners understand that.”

She peddled an argument we were to hear several times in Taiji: that dolphin culls are a legitimate form of pest control directed at ravenous mammals that decimate the squid and tuna on which many families depend for a living.

But most of her rant was directed at Western journalists: “They’re not interested in fair reporting. As for the film, I’d like to see it, although it is probably full of lies. I think we are the victims of a form of racism. Westerners slaughter cattle and other animals in the most inhumane ways imaginable, but no one says a word. Why is it that only Japan gets this kind of treatment?"

Our minders were an almost constant presence throughout our 24-hour stay in Taiji. And when we weren’t being followed, mesh barriers and “Keep Out” signs blocking paths that are supposed to be part of a national park hampered our search for decent vantage points.

By the time we returned to the town to photograph the butchery that follows the cull, the shutters had come down in Taiji’s purpose-built quayside warehouse.

Outside, though, we encountered a surprising degree of openness. In the supermarket to which O’Barry and his entourage had been refused entry a few days earlier, the fishmonger readily recommended cuts of dolphin meat (we bought a ¥1,000 hunk of bottlenose, later photographed but never consumed).

A group of fisheries workers, nursing cigarettes and canned coffees in the shade of the warehouse, talked at length about the importance of dolphin hunting and selling to the local community, an argument I found unconvincing given that they involve only 26 of the town’s 500 fishermen. A couple were disappointed they would probably never get to see The Cove.

But when asked how many dolphins they had processed, they all claimed to know nothing about the slaughter that had taken place just a few hours earlier. Their denials were followed by an awkward silence as my eyes were drawn to glistening hunks of dolphin meat that had been trodden into the warehouse’s concrete forecourt.

Still, one of the workers, who had been recruited from the neighboring town of Kii Katsuura, had some advice for his Taiji colleagues. “The people here should talk more about their work,” he said. “They don’t have to shy away from publicity. They should have more pride in what they do. In that sense, they come across as weak.”

An elderly fishermen walked past, immediately guessed who we were and warned us not to believe the “propaganda” regarding the dangerously high levels of mercury found in dolphins and pilot whales. The idea that he would willfully poison himself and his family was preposterous, he said. "I have been eating whale and dolphin for years and I'm perfectly healthy. The people around here live well into old age.”

SYMPATHY AND EVASIVENESS
It was hard not to sympathize with the fishermen. Taiji has little agriculture to speak of and, like countless other coastal communities in Japan, has been given little encouragement by the central government in its quest to find an economically viable solution to overfishing, the main cause of depleted stocks.

There is also some truth to claims that Taiji’s dolphin hunters have been unfairly singled out. Of the 13,067 dolphins caught in Japan in 2007, only 1,623 came from Wakayama Prefecture. Hunters in Iwate prefecture were much busier, killing more than 10,000 dolphins, according to the Fisheries Research Agency.

Hunting dolphins and other small cetaceans, they point out, is not banned by the 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling; nor have dolphins been listed as endangered, despite concerns about dwindling numbers in other parts of the country.

Yet the media focus will remain on Taiji. It is, after all, the only place that still uses oikomi, the practice of herding dolphins into shallow water and entrapping them in vast nets before killing them with knives and harpoons. And all set against the evocative physical backdrop – always a bonus for writers – of the town’s pristine Pacific waters.

But has the recent media coverage had any effect? It would seem so. According to conservationists, 70 of the bottlenoses we saw in early September were released, as promised, after an uncomfortable few days in captivity. Only the pilot whales (which despite their name are the largest members of the dolphin family) met a violent end.

Days before The Cove was given its first screening in Japan at the FCCJ, the organizing committee of the Tokyo international Film Festival bowed to pressure and agreed to screen the movie, although the volte-face was probably inspired less by media coverage than by an 11th-hour intervention by Ben Stiller and other indignant Hollywood actors.

Italian journalist Pio D’Emilia, who has made a more recent trip to Taiji, reported that pilot whale and dolphin meat had been removed from store shelves and was now only available, on special demand and unmarked, from a local warehouse.

At the time of writing, in mid-October, at least some of the bottlenose dolphins of Taiji appear to have been spared - for now – by a self-imposed moratorium on their slaughter.

It is impossible to tell how long it will last. O’Barry hopes the arrangement will be permanent, a move he says would be “a major victory for the people of Japan who risk eating mercury-laced dolphin meat.”

For now, all the indications are of a community under siege. That much was clear at our final stop of the day at Taiji town hall. I had unsuccessfully attempted to contact the local government’s spokesman, Hironobu Ryono, before leaving Tokyo. Door-stepping him proved just as futile. Several pairs of eyes followed us as we walked across the open-plan office to the general-affairs section, only to be told that Ryono was “in a meeting” for the rest of the day.

I left my business card and letter of introduction, hoping it would ease open the door, even just a little. Follow-up calls the next day were met with the same response: “He is in a meeting.”

We left Taiji with mixed feelings – emboldened by our success in witnessing the slaughter, but embittered by the litany of half-truths we had been fed and the suspicion with which we had been regarded by the police.

Silence should remain an individual prerogative in any democracy, but as a civic entity, Taiji does itself no favors by shunning the media or attempting to mislead them. Prevarication only fuels the suspicion that the town has something to hide, although that ceased to be the case long before the makers of The Cove hatched their project.

And for journalists, the official silence begs the question: How can we write fair – by which I do not mean objective – articles when one side in the dispute refuses to defend itself?

Japan correspondents approach certain stories in the full knowledge they will encounter resistance, official or otherwise. But whatever your view of the dolphin slaughter – and opinion is divided among FCCJ members – one can only hope that Taiji’s media tactic of silence and speciousness is as aberrant as its appetite for dolphin meat.