This article is written by one of my friends who is an academic, and also does freelance journalism It is a draft but we would appreciate your comments and opinions before he submits it to Asahi News Paper. Thank you! X What’s Needed for a Philosophically Grounded Debate on Whaling Shaun O’Dwyer (School of Global Japanese Studies, Meiji University) In spite of the International Court of Justice’s recent ruling against Japan’s scientific whaling program, scientific whaling is likely to continue in some form, and coastal whaling operations are unaffected by it. The “Whale Wars” are therefore also likely to continue, pitting environmental and animal rights organizations and anti-whaling governments against Japan’s whaling lobby. As for the quality of arguments put by both sides, we can expect more of the same. A confusion of appeals to culture, environmental values, science and morality which work well at rallying home front support, but which are ineffective at changing minds, let alone fostering mutual understanding or respect. Asahi News reporter Akira Ozeki’s call for a more philosophical approach to the whaling debate should therefore be welcomed. On both sides, there is a need for some house keeping to tidy up the muddled common-sense beliefs and concepts informing their arguments. With better organized thoughts all parties can, as Ozeki says, “fight each other with reason” and come to a compromise or make concessions. And as Ozeki rightly suggests, largely western, humanitarian opponents of whaling like me do have to tidy up their thinking. Less thoughtful carnivores protesting the cruelty of whaling need to look closely at factory farming methods in the west (and in Japan) which deliver cheap animal protein to their dinner plates, at often appalling costs to animal welfare. Pointing to data on cognitive and emotional capacities in cetaceans as evidence of their moral personhood may or may not be justified, but then the question arises of how to address growing evidence of cognitive and emotional capacities in other animals, including livestock animals. If anti-whaling advocates find this evidence compelling, they need to align their dietary preferences and moral judgements to match their beliefs about animal (and not just cetacean) consciousness and personhood. How they align their preferences and judgements can depend on how much they think cetaceans and livestock animals meet those emotional and cognitive criteria which they associate with personhood or (quasi-personhood). They could then do as philosophers like Peter Singer recommend, become humanitarian vegetarians, and campaign against both livestock meat farming and whaling. Or they could become ethical meat eaters, oppose factory farming, and adjust their criticisms of whaling accordingly, for instance by campaigning for humane cetacean slaughtering methods. Either way, they can dodge accusations of hypocrisy leveled at them by whaling advocates. Finally, environmental arguments against whaling need to be disentangled from humanitarian arguments, and measured against objective data on the populations of different cetacean species and the environmental impacts of hunting. Assuming strong IWC regulatory oversight, an environmentally sound hunting of certain species could be envisaged. Yet Japan’s whaling advocates also need to do some housekeeping, and it goes beyond Ozeki’s recommendation that they abandon rhetorical appeals to scientific rationality. There is also a problem with notions of a national “whaling culture” and “Japanese culinary culture of eating whale” which people like Ozeki use rather uncritically. The general problem, first faced by theorists of a national “Japanese culture” like Kunio Yanagita a century ago, is how convincingly to reimagine diverse local folk-cultures as parts of a national whole. In the present case the problem is how to unify older, regional coastal whaling traditions in some Japanese fishing towns, with their hunting practices, cuisines, folklore and spiritual practices together with modern coastal and pelagic whaling, such that we can speak of a distinctly Japanese whaling tradition and a national whale cuisine stretching back hundreds of years. Foreign and domestic critics remain unconvinced by such talk. Some like Jun Morikawa have noted that dissenting Buddhist doctrines and regional Ebisu cults forbidding whaling have been erased from memory of this “national” tradition. Another problem is that there is little that is culturally distinct about Japan’s 20th century coastal and pelagic whaling industries. For like their western and Soviet counterparts they hunted cetaceans with rationalized efficiency, harvested their oils and fats for domestic and export markets, and contributed to the devastation of many cetacean species by the 1960’s. The only difference is that Japan’s modernized whaling operations also produced meat for human consumption. Lastly, whale meat has been a regional, minority cuisine for much of the history of Japanese whaling. Whale meat was only eaten on a national scale for a few decades following World War Two, and consumption declined steeply as more palatable alternatives such as chicken and pork became more available. There is no custom of nationwide participation in whale meat consumption as there is, say, for seasonal foods like unagi (eel); and unlike sushi or sashimi, whale meat has little visibility as a “national” Japanese food, since very few consume it regularly today. There is little to justify regarding it as a significant part of national cuisine. So for western and domestic critics, the cultural justifications for whaling ring hollow and smack of defensive nationalism. It also strikes them as incongruous when whaling advocates from the world’s third largest economy complain of “cultural imperialism” from the “west”. Even worse, those critics argue that both cultural and scientific justifications for whaling are just rhetorical cover for a sordid reality-the reality of the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s propping up an economically unviable whaling industry to maintain its influence and funding, and the reality of pork-barrelling politicians dispensing subsidies and other patronage to their whaling and fisheries constituencies. Such subsidies are, of course, the focus of controversy over their contribution to global overfishing, much as subsidized whaling in the past arguably contributed to the decimation of cetacean populations. So whaling advocates should also recalibrate their beliefs. I wonder if it would be best for them to retreat from talk of a national whaling tradition, and to focus on protecting traditional, sustainable cetacean hunting and fisheries in towns like Taiji and Ayukawa. Considering the declining economic and demographic fortunes of those towns, however, and the diminishing revenues from coastal whaling, some hard decisions may yet have to be made about its future.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 05:32:10 +0000
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