Part II - Destroying the Cetosphere, 1850–2019

5 The Whaling Empire

After all, we owe it to whales that Commodore Perry from the United States came to Japan and broke our dream of isolation and opened up the country. Therefore, we should not only acknowledge Perry as the benefactor of Japan’s opening to the world, but also honour the virtue of whales as the progenitors our civilization.¹

With these words, Ōashi Bō opened his congratulatory address to the new whaling station of Tōyō Hogei in Same-ura on 11 June 1911. In his speech, Ōashi, a representative of the regional newspaper Ōnan Shimpō, further praised the benefits that the whaling station would bring not only for the nation but also for the local fishing community:

The fact that this national power expanding historic project [the Same-ura whaling station] has occurred in our region is indeed a good omen for the promotion of the region. We cannot celebrate this enough. We have long been advocating the need for the construction of a fishing port along our coast, and we believe that the start of whaling in this area attests our urgent need for a fishing port. Even from this point of view, the people in provincial areas like us have good reason to welcome the station and celebrate it greatly.²

Little did Ōashi know that the newly christened whaling station would by the end of the year be reduced to ash by the very same fishermen he believed should congratulate the construction of such stations. But how did it come so far? As we can see in this speech, by the late Meiji period whales had been inextricably linked to the founding myth of the emerging Japanese empire and were seen as a key component of enhancing the power of the nation, while also proclaiming that whaling would help industrialise local fisheries.

As we will explore in this chapter, the rise of industrial whaling altered the interaction between humans and cetaceans forever, leading to the anthropogenic destruction of the cetosphere. During the Meiji period, new ideas of how to make use of nature, inspired by European and American industrialisation, emerged in Japan. Stakeholders in the bureaucracy and among capitalists often believed in a sharp dichotomy between humans and nature, indicating that industrial processes – and in extension humans making use of these processes – were inherently removed from nature. Once a natural resource was swallowed by the industrial complex it was converted into a commodity that was no longer part of the natural world. This dualism was further expanded on knowledge systems where objective scientific methodology was juxtaposed with a pre-industrial knowledge system that was allegedly based on irrational superstitions. However, as Japanese historians have shown, the reality was much more complicated than these simple bifurcated lines indicate.³ Similarly, the building of a Japanese whaling empire was far from smooth sailing. In this chapter, we will trace how whales became an industrial commodity that was detached from coastal ecosystems and how groups of fishermen around the country began to counter this narrative.

Opening the Country

The nineteenth century was a period of great change in the ocean around the Japanese Archipelago. American and British whaling ships had since the 1820s hunted thousands of sperm whales in the so-called Japan Grounds, while Japanese whalers with the net whaling method effectively emptied the near-coastal regions of right whales and other species. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy arrived in Edo Bay with a fleet of warships, putting pressure on the Tokugawa government to open a number of ports to foreign trade.⁴ As suggested by Ōashi, whales did indeed play a role, as one of Perry’s goals was to allow American whalers to refuel water and coal at Japanese harbours. American politicians had especially been annoyed by the poor treatment shipwrecked sailors experienced in Japan but by the 1850s, American whaling already showed first signs of decline due to poorer catches. Probably more important was the recent annexation of California, which had brought the ‘Pacific frontier’ into the minds of US expansionists and Japan as a way station where the new steamships could refuel their coal reserves.⁵ Perry’s visit and the subsequent rise of contact with foreign nations caused widespread political turmoil in Japan. Eventually, samurai from the western domains of Satsuma, Tosa, and Chōshū joined forces to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate and ‘restore’ the emperor in the ‘Meiji Restoration’ of 1868.

The introduction of new whaling technology following the opening of the treaty ports Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohama, and Hakodate seemed like a chance for revival of the struggling whaling proto-industry. Nakahama Manjirō (aka John Manjirō, 1827–1898) was a Japanese fisherman who was cast away in 1841 and rescued by an American whaler. From this experience, Manjirō learned not only English and western navigation techniques but also the fundamentals of American whaling. After his return to Japan, he became crucial in the negotiation between the Tokugawa Shogunate and Commodore Perry. Manjirō was a strong advocate for the introduction of American whaling techniques. He wrote:

If we start whaling in our near coastal waters, we will be able to kill two birds with one stone: [Hunting] whales will not only be of great benefit (rieki) for our country, but it will also allow us to learn the art of sailing.⁶

For Manjirō the advantage of western-style whaling lay in the ships themselves as the American sailing ships were able to leave the near-coastal area and hunt the whales on the open sea. As early as 1858, he would spearhead an expedition to the Ogasawara Islands to experiment with the American bomb lance technique, which had only recently been developed in 1846. While his first attempt was of limited success it nevertheless marked the first Japanese push into offshore whaling.⁷ In the long run, these efforts proved insufficient to stop the rapid decline of whaling in the northern Pacific. After a series of poor catches, the Masutomi whaling group of Ikitsukishima, the largest whaling group of western Japan, was forced out of business in 1860.⁸ Similarly, many American whalers ceased their operations in the Japan Grounds after the discovery of crude oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 and due to the hostilities of the American Civil War.⁹

While the decline of American whaling progressed, Japanese officials imagined a revival of whaling in the Meiji empire. Fujikawa Sankei (1817–1889), a major advocate for offshore fisheries and whaling, promoted the usage of American bomb lance whaling in the 1870s on the Ogasawara Islands and in Katsuyama on the Bōsō Peninsula.¹⁰ Fujikawa made the case that through the harvest of marine resources the Japanese empire should expand from its coastal waters into the open ocean.¹¹ The hunting of whales in the offshore region played a key role in this scheme. In the preface of his 1889 published book Hogei Zushiki (Illustrated Whaling), the politician Nagaoka Moriyoshi (1843–1906) claimed similarly that the ‘knowledge of the use of whales drives the wealth and power of the nation’.¹²

Following the example of Fujikawa, a group of bureaucrats formed the semi-official Fisheries Society of Japan (Dai-Nihon Suisan Kai) in 1882. As stated in the editorial of the first issue of its monthly magazine, the goal of this organisation was the active promotion of fisheries knowledge and science in the whole empire, thus enhancing through maritime activities the government policy of ‘wealth and power’.¹³ In their eyes, there was an ‘excess of marine products in our near coastal places such as whales, otters, and seals’.¹⁴ In the following issues, writers for the magazine advocated strongly for the establishment of American-style whaling:

Whaling is for a maritime nation indispensable to guarantee its coastal defense … It helps to expand the navy and to detect the influence of other countries [in our waters]. Securing the inexhaustible marine resources is of great benefit for the nations interest and people’s welfare. The whaling industries in the United States and Europe are extremely prosperous and they are always in close contact with their navies. Together they are an essential part of coastal defense, just as the two wings of a bird or the two wheels of a carriage.¹⁵

While Manjirō had in the 1850s emphasised the importance of offshore whaling for gaining sailing knowledge, now whalers were imagined as an extended arm of the navy, echoing the argumentation of Ōtsuki Heisen and Gentaku in the 1800s. This pro-whaling propaganda campaign, however, did not target common fishermen and whalers, but other members of the Meiji government.¹⁶ The discussions surrounding the Fisheries Society of Japan were thus an elite discourse with little regard towards the opinion of the actual fishermen.

The Castle of Sperm Whales

The bomb lance whaling technique was eventually adopted by some of the traditional whaling groups in Tateyama, the Gotō Islands, and in Hirado domain. However, the results of the methods remained underwhelming. In the 1880s, the western Japanese whaling groups hunted altogether only around 150 whales a year.¹⁷ Unlike American whalers, Japanese whaling groups mainly hunted for whale meat, which was often destroyed when using the bomb lance. Some modifications of the lance mitigated the problem to a certain degree, but overall, the bomb lance was mainly used for hunting sperm whales, while other cetaceans were still targeted with the classical net whaling methods.¹⁸

Therefore, members of the Fisheries Society of Japan became involved in spreading American-style whaling to new whaling grounds, where no traditional whaling groups had operated before. One such place was the northern island Hokkaido (formerly Ezo), where the Meiji government was undertaking large-scale colonisation efforts on land and water.¹⁹ However, the local fishing population met attempts to introduce American-style whaling with fierce resistance. For example, in 1885, a whaling ship appeared in the town of Iwanai during the herring season. After they successfully harpooned a whale, the local fishermen went into uproar and demanded that the whale was freed immediately. The whalers had no other choice than to comply.²⁰ Such reports were deeply worrying for Sekizawa Akekiyo (1843–1897), an engineer working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and later a professor at the Tokyo School of Agricultural and Forestry. Sekizawa had promoted whaling in Hokkaido and had, therefore, a keen interest in countering the anti-whaling protests on the northern island. He wrote in 1887 in the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan: ‘So far, when whales come close to the shore of Hokkaido, they gather herring and other fishes. This is why they are called Ebisu-sama. If [whales] are hunted, [people] thought that this would cause a poor catch of herring and other fishes.’²¹ According to Sekizawa’s description, the fishermen hunting in Hokkaido during the 1880s regarded the world in the same ecological framework as fishermen at the Sanriku Coast. Whales were called Ebisu and believed to be responsible for herring and other fish to come close to the shore. Indeed, as already discussed in the previous chapter, many fishermen working in Hokkaido were actually dekasegi (migrant workers) from the Sanriku Coast, who only came north during the herring runs. It is, therefore, not surprising that these fishermen would also bring their local knowledge when travelling north, explaining their anti-whaling stance. But Sekizawa did not believe that whaling was directly related to poor fish catches. He explained in the same article:

Because the whaling industry has a lot to do with local fishing industry, they should not start an operation without considering the possible [harmful] effects. I did a survey on this. Already in western countries a few years prior there were some people who mistakenly argued that the whaling industry is harmful. However, Dr. Sars conducted research in the local area, and he has made it clear that catching whales will not hinder local fisheries.²²

Sekizawa refers here to the Norwegian zoologist Georg Ossian Sars (1837–1927). As explained by Sekizawa in the following issue of the magazine, the province Finnmark in northern Norway had one of the highest abundances of marine products and also a proliferating whaling industry. However, according to the ecological knowledge of the Finnmark fishing communities, whales would drive herring and other fish towards the shore. Because of the pressure of the fishermen, the Norwegian assembly (Storting) had enforced limitations on whaling, but the relationship between whaling and fishing was still poorly understood. Sars was therefore tasked in conducting an impartial field study. After some studies at a whaling station in Finnmark, Sars came to the conclusion that the influence of whaling on the fishing industry was negligible, arguing that fish like capelin swam towards the shore by instinct to lay eggs and whales as well as predatory fish species like cod would simply follow capelin to the shore. Therefore, hunting whales would not influence the behaviour of other fish species.²³

As the Japanese fishing historian Ishida Yoshikazu has argued, Sekizawa introduced his audience in the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan to Sars’s research with the goal to discredit the ecological knowledge of the Japanese fishermen as mere ‘superstitions’ that were based on misguided religious beliefs.²⁴ To make the connection between the Norwegian and the Japanese case even stronger, Sekizawa claimed that the Norwegian fishermen believed that the whales were ‘messengers from heaven’ (ten no shisha). My own research into the Norwegian primary sources could, however, not find any mention of this term and I suspect that Sekizawa invented it to draw a parallel to the Ebisu belief of the Japanese fishermen.

Sekizawa asserted that impartial western sciences, as represented by the study of Sars, had allegedly shown that whaling and fishing were not connected and, consequently, the anti-whaling protests in Hokkaido had to stop. Using the Norwegian internal colonisation of Finnmark as an example, Sekizawa further suggested that industrial whaling would help create a ‘rich country with a strong army’ (fukoku kyōhei), as the popular Meiji period slogan went, by protecting the northern border against Russia and bringing new industrial technologies and capitalistic practices to the coastal periphery. Following the example of industrial whaling, Sekizawa was convinced that other fisheries would also ‘modernise’ and subsequently elevate the lives of the poor fishing communities.²⁵ Nevertheless, American-style whaling in Hokkaido never lived up to its promise and came to an inglorious end in the 1890s.

Unperturbed, Sekizawa would next set his gaze on the Sea of Kinkazan, which had for a long time been discussed as a possible whaling site. Only recently, in 1887, had a local entrepreneur caught a sperm whale off Kinkazan in the region the locals called ‘the castle of sperm whales’.²⁶ However, a lack of funding, as well as inadequate equipment and fishing boats had made further expeditions unfeasible so far.²⁷ In July 1893, the schooner Sekikōmaru set out from Tokyo to the Sea of Kinkazan for investigating the prospect of whaling in the region. As a western-style sailing ship that also used steam power, the Sekikōmaru was able to penetrate the Sea of Kinkazan much deeper than any of the small fishing vessels before. The researchers on the Sekikōmaru were astounded when they found in the perturbed region not only an abundance of schools of sardines, mackerel, and bonito, but also of sei, fin, and right whales. Completely unexpected for the crew was also the presence of Baird’s beaked whales. The expedition successfully caught two sperm whales in the Sea of Kinkazan using the American-style bomb lance whaling techniques.²⁸

The search for a coastal base at the Sanriku Coast, where ships could anchor during the frequent storms and from where sperm whale hunts could be started, was one of the primary goals of the expedition. The researcher on the ship believed the Sea of Kinkazan to be one of the most promising candidates for offshore sperm whale hunting, as the mixing of ocean currents and the high sea temperature attracted countless groups of whales during the summer months. Furthermore, they had heard that the region had been visited by foreign whaling ships fifty years ago.²⁹ In their preliminary report about the expedition, published in the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan, they concluded: ‘There is great potential in the future here. It was only regrettable that because of our limited time here we have seen sperm whales only once.’³⁰ Despite these promising results, Sekizawa did not manage to establish a whaling operation in the region prior to his death in 1897.

By 1900, it had become apparent that the transition from net whaling to American-style whaling had failed. While western sailing techniques allowed Japanese whalers for the first time to leave the near coastal ground and to deeper penetrate the offshore regions, they struggled with the implementation of the bomb lance technique, which was not suitable for securing whale meat. Furthermore, the American whaling technique was limited to a set range of whale species, which did not differ much from the species already hunted with the net whaling technique. Japanese coastal whaling and American pelagic whaling had together caused the deaths of hundred of thousands of sperm, grey, right, and humpback whales in the North Pacific. Other cetacean species were less targeted, either because the available technology was not reliable enough to catch them or their economic value was too low. Therefore, blue, fin, and sei whales as well as many smaller cetaceans could probably expand their sphere of influence. On the other hand, species that were overhunted were scattered across the ocean and recovered only slowly. Confronted by local opposition and without a way to access the so-far untapped whale stocks of rorquals, Japanese whaling seemed to be at an ecological and economic deadlock and would likely have disappeared from history.

Then, something unexpected happened. In 1890, the markets in Nagasaki suddenly experienced a surge in fin and blue whale meat, even though regional Japanese whaling groups were further reducing their hunting activities. As it turned out, the meat came not from Japan but from Korea, where Russian whalers had recently adopted a new whaling method from Norway, which allowed the efficient hunting of rorquals. The introduction of the Norwegian-style whaling method to Japan would change the industry forever and facilitate the killing of millions of cetaceans in the twentieth century.

The Rise of Industrial Whaling

When Sekizawa introduced the research of Georg Ossian Sars to a Japanese audience, he acknowledged that the Norwegians were using steamboats for hunting whales, but he completely missed the deeper significance of the new technology for whaling. The new whaling techniques that were developed in Norway in the 1860s were nothing short of a revolution, radically altering not only how whaling was conducted but also fundamentally changing the relationship between cetaceans and humans.

Since the sixteenth century Basque, British, German, French, and Dutch whalers travelled around the northern coasts of Norway and as far as Spitsbergen to hunt for right whales and sperm whales. However, these operations had little relevance to the local population, and it was not until the 1860s that Norwegian entrepreneurs started their own whaling operations. One of the first was the former seal hunter Svend Foyn (1809–1884). In 1863, Foyn commissioned the world’s first steamship built for catching whales and established the first modern whaling station in Vadsø, an all-year ice-free harbour in a fjord in eastern Finnmark near the Russian border. Foyn used his coastal whaling station to experiment with new uses for all parts of the whale carcasses to minimise the enormous waste. In addition to the traditional processing of whale blubber into oil, Foyn developed products such as whale fertiliser, margarine, cattle feed, tinned whale meat, and glue from whale bones. This allowed him to reduce the industry’s dependence on the commodity of whale oil, which had become less competitive due to the rise of crude oil and find new economic markets for whale products.³¹

Finally, Foyn and his engineers perfected a new design for killing whales efficiently. The so-called harpoon cannon was mounted at the ship’s bow and shot steel harpoons into the flesh of the whales where black powder would explode, killing the cetacean instantly, if aimed correctly. The combination of these three new technologies – steamship, harpoon cannon and whaling station – were the fundaments of industrial whaling in the emerging marine anthroposphere. It was now possible to hunt every whale species, regardless of size and speed and process the carcass efficiently for all its parts.

However, Foyn’s inventions also had some major drawbacks, leading to rising protests in the local population. For one, the coastal whaling stations caused widespread environmental pollution, as unprocessed grease, oil, and blood of the whale carcasses were let into the bay, hurting the coastal ecosystem. The firing of the harpoon cannon was also noisy, and locals feared that it would drive away fish. Moreover, as discussed above, local fishermen believed that whales would drive capelin and other fish species closer to the shore. While Sars’ research was not able to confirm this, later investigations showed that some whales, such as fin whales, did indeed have an at least indirect effect on coastal fishing.³²

Over the course of the next three decades, thousands of whales were killed in the waters around northern Norway, making use of Foyn’s new technologies and even whaling supporters had to acknowledge that the whale stocks were declining at an alarming rate. At the turn of the century, a series of bad fish catches further worsened the relationship between whalers and fishermen. A drastic increase in seals from the Russian Coast, which competed with the fishermen for the same fish resources, was believed to be the result of the dwindling whale stocks. Finally, on 1 June 1903, over 1,000 frustrated fishermen gathered in Mehamn, a small fishing town in Finnmark, and went after an argument with the local whalers on a rampage, burning down the local whaling station. Shocked by this outburst of violence, the Norwegian assembly decided soon after on a ban of coastal whaling starting in 1904.³³

The emergence and eventual demise of industrial whaling in northern Norway had also consequences for whaling in East Asia. Otto Lindholm (1832–1914) and Akim G. Dydymov (?–1891) were the first Russians to conduct whaling in the Russian Far East. Lindholm started as early as 1864, working with indigenous people from all around the Pacific.³⁴ In 1885, Lindholm not only faced bankruptcy, but he was also heavily attacked by Akim G. Dydymov, a former Naval Lieutenant, who apparently detested Lindholm for having Finnish ancestry. In 1886, Dydymov left the navy and travelled to St. Petersburg to prevent Lindholm from receiving a monopoly on whaling using his political contacts. Dydymov acquired capital for his own whaling enterprise, where he was introduced to the Norwegian-style whaling method. In 1889, Dydymov hired Capitan Foyn, a relative of Svend Foyn, and several Norwegian whalers, who should instruct the Russian crew on the new whaling techniques. In their first season in 1890, the Russian whalers captured seventy-three whales in the Korean sea. The whale carcasses were brought on land at the Korean port of Wonsan (today part of North Korea), where Dydymov had built a land whaling station after the model of Foyn’s stations in Finnmark. Originally, Dydymov had intended to discard the whale meat or donate it to the locals. However, learning from Lindholm’s experience, he instead brought seven tons of whale meat to Nagasaki to sell it there. His ship disappeared with its whole crew in 1891 in the Korean Sea.³⁵

After the tragic end of Dydymov, other Russian entrepreneurs started their own industrial whaling operations. The most successful was Count Heinrich Hugovistsj Kejzerling (1866–1944), who founded the Pacific Whaling Company in 1894. Kejzerling not only took over the land whaling station from Dydymov in Wonsan, but also bought two Norwegian whaling steamers, the Nikolaj and Georgij, and hired Norwegian gunners. Like his predecessors, Kejzerling sold the whale meat to Nagasaki and even moved to Nagasaki, where he hired Japanese experts to perform the salting process of the whale meat. Kejzerling’s biggest coup was the purchase of a 3,643 metric ton factory ship that was remodelled in Danzig to become the world’s first whaling factory ship under the name of Michail in 1903. The Michail could not only dismantle whales on board but could also process the blubber into whale oil, making a land-based whaling station redundant and increasing the quality of the oil. As it was a prototype, however, not everything worked as planned and only the oil of one whale per day could be processed instead of the planned six. With his whaling fleet, Kejzerling could now follow the whaling migration route in the Sea of Japan between Kamchatka and the Korean Peninsula all year long. This maximised his profits but put further pressure on the already struggling blue whale stocks.³⁶

Norwegian-Style Whaling in Japan

The sudden appearance of the Russian whale meat in 1890 in the markets of Nagasaki caused concern among Japanese whalers. Plans to work with the Russians were dissuaded by the Meiji government, which saw Russian whaling as a threat to Japanese maritime interests. The establishment of land whaling stations and the hunting of whales off the Korean coast was seen as a way for the Russian empire to intensify their colonisation efforts on the Korean Peninsula. It was also feared that the Russians would hunt whales near Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands and thus undermine the still volatile colonial Japanese presence there, bringing Heisen’s fear into fruition almost one hundred years later. To counter these Russian advances, Japanese politicians encouraged private investors to start their own Japanese whaling operations in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).³⁷

Among the first Japanese entrepreneurs to pursue industrial whaling was Oka Jūrō (1870–1923) from Hagi in Yamaguchi Prefecture (formerly Chōshū domain). Oka had studied at Keio University under Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), one of the most prominent Meiji period intellectuals, and became a local politician in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1896. To raise funding for his whaling enterprise, Oka went to Tokyo and received support from politicians, many of whom were also of Yamaguchi descent. In May 1899, when the necessary funding was finally secured, Oka left as a temporary employee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to learn more about Norwegian-style whaling in Europe. In Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925), he bought whaling equipment and placed an order for a steam whaling ship. Next, he went to the north to witness Norwegian-style whaling in Finnmark firsthand at the Mehamn whaling station (the same station that would be burned down four years later). Back in Japan, Oka’s founded a whaling company, Nihon Enyō Gyogyō, in 1899. He hired the Norwegian gunner Morten Petersen, who had worked on a Russian whaling ship. Oka paid him the extraordinary wage of 200 yen per month plus 30 yen for each whale caught and gave him a three-year contract. As ordering a whaling ship from Norway would take too long, Oka commissioned a steam whaling ship from a Japanese shipyard, which would be called Chōshūmaru and began operating in 1900. However, the ship was stranded in December of the same year on a sandbank during a storm and could no longer be used.³⁸

Oka had also leased the Olga from an English-Russian whaling group and, after the shipwreck of the Chōshūmaru, chartered the Norwegian ships Rex and Regina. These ships were under the command of two experienced Norwegian gunners: Frederik Olsen and Carl Amundsen. The Norwegians received the high sum of 5,000 yen a month for the charter, but they were not allowed to open their own whaling stations on Japanese soil and were contractually obligated to sell only to the Japanese. This system was intended to exclude foreign competitors from the Japanese whale stocks, while still making use of the foreign expertise. Indeed, Norwegian gunners were instructed to teach Japanese sailors how to use the harpoon cannon, leading to the (justified) fear in Norway that Norwegian gunners would make themselves obsolete in time.³⁹ However, it was not until the early 1930s that all Norwegian gunners had been replaced by Japanese.⁴⁰

With these three ships, the company captured over sixty whales in their first three seasons. Despite being made out of steel, these early types of whalers, weighing between 100 and 130 metric tons, were nimble and reached up to ten nautical miles per hour. They had an operation range of up to 100 nautical miles. The crews consisted of a Norwegian gunner, a Japanese captain, an engineer, firefighter, and around ten sailors, some of them being poorly paid Korean workers. The whaling cannon was mounted on the bow of the ship. On a hunting day, the ship set out at 5 o’clock in the morning and travelled to the whaling ground. A lookout on a watchtower would report any whale sightings and the ship would close to around forty metres when the gunner fired the cannon. If hit, the head of the cannon exploded inside the body of the whale, and an attached wire cord with a winch tied the injured animal to the ship, preventing it from escaping or sinking to the bottom of the sea when killed. The carcasses were towed to the boat and brought to the coastal flensing stations.⁴¹

The introduction of Norwegian-style whaling transformed cetaceans into industrial commodities. While the hunt itself was fairly similar to its Norwegian counterpart, Oka saw industrial whaling as a continuation of net whaling and aimed for similar markets, most notably the selling of whale meat. Initially, the flensing process, as well as the drying and salting of whale meat at the whaling coastal stations resembled more the traditional Japanese flensing styles than the new Norwegian methods, even though some innovations, like the usage of a winch, were transferred from Norway and adapted to fit the Japanese working conditions.⁴²

The Rise of the Japanese Whaling Empire

Most of the early East Asian industrial whaling activities were concentrated on the Korean Sea, where Japanese and Russian whalers fought over territorial dominance and access to marine resources. In February 1904, rising hostilities between the two empires eventually escalated to the Russo-Japanese War. During the war, the Japanese Imperial Navy confiscated four of Kejzerling’s whaling ships, among them was the factory ship Michail. One reason for the confiscation was the suspicion of the Japanese navy that Russian whaling ships were used for spying.⁴³ Kejzerling vehemently denied this allegation and demanded to have his ships returned to him, but to no avail.⁴⁴ After the Japanese victory in 1905, Oka pressured the Korean government to nullify Kejzerling’s leasing contract on his whaling stations under the pretext that Kejzerling had not paid rent during the war. Oka then took over the three former Russian whaling stations in Korea and bought the confiscated Russian whaling ships from the navy. Japanese whalers not only possessed most of the Russian whaling assets in East Asia, but they had now also exclusive access to the Korean whale stocks.

In this way, the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 marked the beginning of the Japanese whaling empire. During the war, the Japanese army had discovered canned whale meat as a cheap and effective alternative to beef, thus stimulating demand for whale products.⁴⁵ After 1905, twelve whaling companies were quickly established and among these, Oka Jūrō’s newly founded Tōyō Gyogyō was the uncrowned king. He commanded a whaling fleet based on the four whalers Rex, Regina, Olga, and Nikolaj and the factory ship Michail. The latter, however, seems never to have been used by the Japanese to produce whale oil, as had been originally intended. Instead, the Michail was used as a transport ship.⁴⁶

Already in 1906, the competition in the Korean Sea between the newly established industrial whaling companies was fierce. With most of the former net whaling groups gone or in deep decline, the Japanese whaling grounds were unattended. Again, Tōyō Gyogyō was the most assertive company. From March to July 1906, they followed the traditional pilgrimage route of the whales from the old whaling places in Nagato, Kii Peninsula, and Tateyama to new places along the Sanriku Coast. The catch of a total of 111 whales along this route can be considered very successful for the whalers as many places did not have a whaling station yet and many whales had to be flensed on board.⁴⁷ In the following years, provisional whaling stations were established along the coast every seventy to eighty nautical miles. In western Japan, the industrial whaling companies focused on places where whaling had already been conducted during the Edo period. Farther north, however, new places for whaling had to be found. Tōyō Gyogyō established their stations in Tateyama, Chōshi, Ayukawa, and Ryōishi while competing companies located their stations in the same or nearby villages.⁴⁸ Before the widespread introduction of the factory ships in the 1920s and 1930s, of which the Michail can be seen as the first prototype, whaling stations functioned as bridgeheads to the offshore whaling grounds. Their introduction together with the power of the steamships encouraged people to rethink the boundaries of the coast. For the fishermen, the coastal sea had previously ended where they lost sight of land, but now the limit was the distance a steamship could travel from a land station.⁴⁹

This sudden burst of whaling activities in the Korean and Japanese waters put a lot of stress on the slowly recovering whale stocks. The Norwegian Embassy, keeping an eye on the Norwegian gunners in Japan, had a special interest in documenting the development of the Japanese whaling industry. In 1907, the embassy concluded that the whaling industry had created an economic bubble and would soon be in financial trouble.⁵⁰ The report for the next year was similarly dramatic: ‘Whaling, which has been conducted in the Japanese and Korean waters for the past five years, has risen to great importance. It is, however, to be expected that it will not be of long duration, as the hunting is done too violently, and the animals will have gone extinct in the near future, if the hunt is not regulated.’⁵¹ That regulation was needed also became apparent to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, which had jurisdiction over fisheries and whaling. In the 1908–1909 season, the whaling companies captured together 1,312 whales on a total of 28 ships.⁵² According to one report, during the winter months, thirteen whaling ships were hunting in southern Shikoku and ten off the coast of the Kii Peninsula, but in summer they all moved to the Sea of Kinkazan and twenty-two ships were here during the high peak of the season, overexploiting the whaling grounds.⁵³ Because of the migration patterns of the slower-moving cetaceans, net whaling groups had mainly hunted during the winter in western Japan. The new steamship could hunt faster whale species and follow them to their spring and summer grounds in the Sea of Kinkazan and Hokkaido. Prices for whale carcasses in the summer months were, however, much lower than in winter, as whale meat could not be stored efficiently without refrigeration technology and so most whale carcasses were processed into less valuable fertiliser. To make the situation worse, this method was extremely inefficient and large parts of the carcass were thrown into the ocean, unused.

The ministry, therefore, proposed a whaling ban during the summer months, modelled after the Norwegian example, to protect whale stocks and the price of whale meat. On 2 September 1907, a delegation of most whaling companies was invited to the ministry’s office to debate the new law. Unsurprisingly, the whalers criticised these plans arguing that a ban would only affect Japanese whalers and foreign vessels could conduct whaling at their leisure.⁵⁴ At this point, foreign whaling activities had almost completely ceased around Japan, nevertheless, the ministry gave in to the pressure of the whaling lobby and retracted its proposal. Instead, the ministry urged the whalers to consolidate in order to reduce the competition between them. Oka Jūrō immediately jumped at the chance and used his contacts in the government and his influence to bring most of his competitors together under a new company called Tōyō Hogei on 1 May 1909. Oka Jūrō had again secured the position as president and his company controlled twenty of the twenty-eight whaling boats, making him the undisputed king of the Japanese whaling industry.⁵⁵

The consolidation, did, however, little to release the pressure on the whaling stocks. Oka, himself did not believe that overhunting was a problem. At an investor conference in Osaka in January 1910, he explained that two theories existed regarding the sustainability of whaling. The first theory was that continued whaling over time would kill all reproductive females, leading to the extinction of a whale species. The second theory argued that the size of the ocean would allow whale populations to recover in offshore regions. As long as there was food near the coast, new groups of whales would keep coming and whaling could continue indefinitely. According to this logic, whaling would even lead to an overall increase in the number of whales in the ocean. Unsurprisingly, Oka himself was a supporter of the second theory.⁵⁶ The decoupling of nature and humans allowed whalers to imagine whales as a limitless resource in the vast oceans that could fuel the Japanese whaling empire for eternity. In this way, the whaling industry absolved itself from any criticism regarding overhunting.

Rising Opposition Against Industrial Whaling

The rapid expansion of industrial whaling and the construction of whaling stations all over the Japanese Archipelago provoked a backlash among the local fishing communities. In 1910, Akashi Kiichi, a leading employee of Tōyō Hogei, wrote:

At that time, coastal fishermen in the area were not aware of the real nature of the whaling industry, and when this type of business was first attempted in the vicinity, they felt that it would be greatly disrupting their own fishing industry due to the large scale of the operation. In particular, the bonito and sardine fishermen have a kind of superstition (meishin) about whales, and they do not understand that whales are devouring bonito and sardines, which are the basis of their fisheries. They have been insisting … that whaling is harmful because … blood from dissecting whale bodies causes the death of sardines … Any negotiations are futile due to their stubborn resistance.⁵⁷

As we can see Akashi asserts that the ecological knowledge of local fishermen was nothing more than ‘superstition’ and that the local fishermen did not understand how industrial whaling worked nor were the locals interested in any form of compromise. Akashi remains, however, vague on how widespread these anti-whaling resistances were. We find some clues to this in a 1910 published article in the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan. Its author, Ayabe Kazuo, a bureaucrat working for the Fisheries Bureau, reports that there were protesters against industrial whaling in Kii-Katsuura (Wakayama Prefecture) and Totoro (Miyazaki Prefecture). Moreover, in Ushitsu City on the Noto Peninsula (Ishikawa Prefecture), all fishermen had gathered in a large movement which aimed to stop whaling at all costs. Ayabe further noted that the pollution issue caused by Norwegian-style whaling was not new and referred to the Mehamn Incident of 1903.⁵⁸

Matsuzaki Masahiro, a leading employee of Tōyō Hogei, insisted in the following issue of the journal that the anti-whaling protests were not as frequent as suggested by Ayabe, rather some technical and legal issues were responsible in the mentioned places for the delay of whaling. While he acknowledged that there were some small conflicts between whalers and fishermen, he argued that these were not specifically against whaling. Such disputes could be seen every time new fishing methods – for example purse seines or drag nets – are introduced and local fishermen perceived their traditional ways of living as being threatened. Matsuzaki reassured the readers of the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan that over time such prejudices would disappear, and fishermen would recognise that whaling was not hurting fisheries.⁵⁹

In most cases, primary sources about the introduction of industrial whaling are few and far between, but at least in the case of Ushitsu City, Matsuzaki’s claims that technical or legal issues were responsible for a delay in whaling do not withhold closer scrutiny. A series of reports from the Hokuriku Times in the years 1909 and 1910 show that fishermen of over thirty villages came together to intervene directly with the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce as well as with the Governor of Ishikawa Prefecture to stop whaling.⁶⁰ We also have a rare eye-witness account from the protests surrounding the whaling operations in Chōshi (Chiba Prefecture). Ōno Shishiku, a writer for the magazine Bungei kurabu (Literature Club), travelled in 1907, like he did every year, to Chōshi to escape the Tokyo summer heat. In this year, however, the whole town was in uproar because of the whaling activities by Tōyō Gyogyō. Ōno heard from the locals that the whalers had unexpectedly arrived in March of the previous year with two whaling ships: the Olga and the Nikolaj. Even though there was no flensing station in Chōshi, the whalers brought three to four whales a day onshore:

The truth is it was prosperous circumstances. … However, the local fishermen driven by their envy, their own interests, and their feelings for their district (chihōteki kanjō), made a fierce commotion. … Corresponding to this resolution, some wanted to negotiate [with the whalers], but others cried to destroy the whaling place. … Every evening, a crowd of fishermen was meeting before the station, and the situation has become unbearable.⁶¹

Ōno showed little empathy for the problems of the fishermen, which he regarded as petty. Nevertheless, from his report it becomes clear that the protests were not small-scale but consumed the whole town. He further reported that the main concern of the locals was that sardines would no longer come to the coast. Furthermore, they feared that the coastal pollution caused by the whale blood in the water would scare away fish from the coastal waters.⁶² On the Sanriku Coast, the situation was similarly tense as in Chōshi. In Iwate Prefecture (formerly Morioka domain), the local government actively tried to attract whaling companies, but opposition from all large ports, including Miyako, Yamada, and Kamaishi, made the search for a suitable whaling place difficult. After many discussions with the local fishing unions, the station was eventually built in the little fishing port of Ryōishi.⁶³

Conclusion

Since the arrival of the American ‘black ships’ under the command of Commodore Perry in 1853, Japanese policymakers pushed forward the idea of pelagic whaling as a way to rekindle the struggling net whaling proto-industry and expand the influence of the emerging Japanese empire into the offshore regions of the Japanese Archipelago. Pioneers like Nakahama Manjirō introduced American whaling techniques in order to close the technological gap between Japan and its western competitors. However, bureaucrats such as Fujikawa Sankei and Sekizawa Akekiyo saw the building of a whaling empire as a matter of national security, as it pushed the borders of the Japanese empire farther into the ocean and secured valuable marine resources. However, while American whaling expanded the physical range of whaling operations into the open sea it did not allow to hunt for new species that had not already been decimated by Japanese and American whalers in the past decades. Coupled with the anti-whaling protests in Hokkaido and the inability to adapt the new technique to harvest whale meat, the most important commodity for the Japanese whalers, it had to be given up.

The arrival of Norwegian-style whaling techniques through Russian whalers changed the situation completely. Now, industrial whaling became a tool of competition and expansion against the Russian Empire over the control of the Korean Peninsula and its marine resources. This conflict eventually ended in the total dominance of the Japanese whalers over the Korean waters and it functioned as an important steppingstone to bring industrial whaling back to the Japanese main islands. As industrial whaling allowed for the first time to hunt whales also during the summer months, more potential whaling ground became available for the emerging industry, at the forefront being the ‘castle of sperm whales’ in the Sea of Kinkazan. But without the ability to properly store whale meat in the summer heat, environmental pollution also increased, while many fishing communities had in the past centuries learned to depend on the summer migrations of whales for their own fishing. In the following three chapters, we will take an in-depth look at how the introduction of industrial whaling was negotiated at a local level and eventually, after fierce debates and the burning of a whaling station, accepted and embraced by the local population.

6 The First Whaling Town

In the summer of 1910, the American explorer and naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960) arrived on the Oshika Peninsula to visit the newly opened Tōyō Hogei whaling station in Ayukawa. Andrews was on a three-year-long journey to East Asia, where he hoped to not only study cetaceans but also obtain whale skeletons he could bring back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. During his four-month stay in Ayukawa he studied and photographed sixty-five whale carcasses while also befriending the Norwegian gunners in the town and documenting the life on and around the whaling station.¹ His first impressions of Ayukawa were quite idyllic, as he writes in his 1916 published travel monologue:

After spending a delightful month at [Kii-]Oshima, where three fine whale skeletons were secured, I returned to Shimonoseki to send them to New York, and then traveled northwards to Aikawa (Ayukawa), three hundred miles from Tokyo. Aikawa is a typical little fishing village, situated at the end of a beautiful bay which sometimes harbors as many as fourteen whale ships from the four neighboring stations.²

In Andrews’s report we encounter Ayukawa as a buzzling whaling port full of hope and opportunity (Figure 6.1). However, always looming in the background of the village is the gigantic factory ship Michail, a machine turning life into death, separating the bodies of whales into consumer goods: meat, oil and fertiliser. Too massive to dock at the small pier of Ayukawa, the Michail must stay outside the coastal boundaries of the village, while at the same time extending the anthroposphere far into the open sea. The whaling station itself is featured prominently in Andrews’s account; people are working hard but seem to be always content to quickly interrupt their bloody work to smile into the camera. In some pictures we see how dozens of townspeople gather at the pier of the local whaling station, watching with interest how whale bodies are dissected (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.1 Scene of Ayukawa with whaling station on the right side and the factory ship Michail in the open sea.

Photo taken by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1910. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

Figure 6.2 Flensing a whale with onlookers at the new Tōyō Hogei whaling station in Ayukawa.

Photo taken by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1910. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

This chapter traces the development of the backwater fishing hamlet of Ayukawa into the first modern Japanese whaling town over the course of only four years. As I will argue, whaling towns like Ayukawa functioned as an industrial bridgehead to harvest the riches of the cetosphere and transform them into terrestrial commodities. In this way, not only the station itself, but the whole village became part of an industrial complex that devoured whales in ever faster quantities. Looking closer at Andrews’s pictures, we get an idea of how much the ecological foundation of the town has changed in only four years. The hills are barren, all the trees have been cut to feed every hungry whaling station. Everywhere in the town, fertiliser plants have sprung up and instead of planting rice or barley, the fields surrounding Ayukawa have been stockpiled with whale meat, which is drying in the sun before being processed. While Ayukawa’s transition into a whaling town was swift, it was not less disruptive and divisive for the community. The external ecological cost of industrial whaling threatened the cohesiveness of the community and the price for securing social stability paid was the destruction of the cetosphere, which was replaced by a less resilient and less diverse coastal anthroposphere.

The Decline of Coastal Fishing

Even before the Michail entered the bay for the first time in spring 1906, an ecological crisis was brewing in Ayukawa that threatened the socio-economic survival of the community. The elite of the town had been worried for some time about the community’s economic dependence on proto-industrial fisheries and tourism. While fishing had always been the main income for the community, tourism had also been important for Ayukawa’s economy. For centuries, pilgrims had stopped on their way to the sacred island of Kinkazan in Ayukawa, providing the town with a modest secondary revenue. As we have seen in Chapter 1, when Ōtsuki Gentaku made his pilgrimage to Kinkazan in 1812, he also visited Ayukawa before reaching Kinkazan. However, in 1897, only one year after a tsunami had partly destroyed the town, a fire broke out in Kinkazan. Due to the rough sea, firefighters from Ayukawa could not cross to the island and had to watch how the flames destroyed most of the newly renovated temple buildings.³ This setback showed how fragile the local tourism industry was.

Even more concerning, however, was the development of proto-industrial fisheries. As elsewhere on the Oshika Peninsula, sardine and bonito fishing were originally developed in Ayukawa by Kii fishermen, some of which moved permanently to the village in the late seventeenth century, building also the local Kumano Shrine.⁴ More than half of the population of Ayukawa in 1905, 294 people to be precise, were engaged in fishing, while many were also working as farmers during the offseason on the few millet and vegetable fields around the town.⁵

Due to its proximity to the fish-rich waters around Kinkazan, Ayukawa had an advantage over the other fishing communities on the peninsula, which the Oshika communities harvested as commons (iriai). However, in 1875, the Meiji government abolished the iriai system and nationalised all Japanese coastal waters, and fishing licences were sold to individuals. Following this change, more people than ever before engaged in fishing in the Japanese waters, leading to a tripling of the fish catches but also to increased conflicts between the communities as well as forced a collapse of coastal fish stocks.⁶

After several attempts to reform the fishing system, the Meiji government eventually enacted in 1901 the Fisheries Law that standardised many practices. This law gave exclusive fishing rights to fishing unions (gyogyō kumiai). In order to continue fishing, each community had to reorganise itself into a union. The role of the union was to fairly distribute fishing rights inside the community, while also preventing disputes with outside fishermen, by controlling the access to coastal and offshore waters. The unions were controlled by the most influential and wealthy individuals of the communities, often the descendants of the net owner families from the Edo period. The leaders of the fishing unions had an interest in developing offshore fisheries, as they were often the only ones in the communities with the necessary capital to buy and operate mechanised fishing vessels. In this way, while the fishing unions greatly reduced disputes among fishing communities, they did little to conserve coastal marine resources, and even encouraged the expansion into the offshore regions, thus accelerating the decline of the coastal ecosystems.⁷

The former common fishing grounds around Kinkazan became part of Ayukawa exclusive fishing zone, excluding the other communities. Unsurprisingly, this decision was fiercely challenged by the other fishing villages. The conflict between Ayukawa and the other fishing communities was only solved in 1910 and probably accelerated the decline of the local fishing grounds as the unclear jurisdiction led to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation.⁸ Under the 1901 fishing law, the coastal ecosystem could not withstand the uncontrolled and increased fishing activities and sea bream, sardine, bonito, and tuna catches declined drastically in the Sea of Kinkazan.⁹ The regional newspaper Kahoku Shimpō lamented in 1906:

It is not difficult to imagine that the complete depletion of the coastal fish stocks is not far off. From now on, the only possible development of this place left is long-distance fishing … Fisheries in our district is in decline, and the peninsula will probably fall more and more into misery with every day and month passing by.¹⁰

Offshore fishing was still largely undeveloped, as it relied on motorised fishing vessels. Of these, only three were in operation on the Oshika Peninsula, while all other boats were still coastal bound and continued to harvest the overfished coastal stocks.¹¹

The Arrival of the Whalers

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ayukawa’s ecological and economic future was thus in serious jeopardy. Without additional outside capital, it seemed uncertain that the town could survive for long on the dwindling coastal fish stocks, while new investments were needed to repair the town after the devastating 1896 tsunami, the fire in Kinkazan in 1897, and a crop failure in 1905.¹² The local elite, who monopolised most of the village’s political capital through the political institutions, such as the mayor’s office, the town’s council, and the local fishing union, was heavily involved in attracting whaling companies from western Japan that were in search of a suitable place for a whaling station near the ‘castle of sperm whales’ at the Sea of Kinkazan.¹³ As discussed in the previous chapter, after the Russo-Japanese War, whaling companies were expanding their operations along the Japanese Coast, following whales on their migration on the Kuroshio Current.

In early 1906, the whaling company Tōyō Gyogyō announced its plans to buy around 734 m² of former rice fields near the border of the village. As the planned station was close to the river and the town’s primary school, concerns regarding public health were raised by the locals. According to the Kahoku Shimpō, locals feared that ‘when whales are caught, sardines will disappear and sea grass will wither’.¹⁴ A representative of the whaling company found these concerns completely unfounded: ‘We have seen the reverse situation in the Korean area: the catching of whales attracts sardines.’¹⁵ Fearing for their health and livelihood, local fishermen continued to protest and began disrupting town and fishing union meetings. To resolve the situation, the mayor and other members of the elite presented themselves as mediators between the anxious population and the whaling company. After some negotiations, Tōyō Gyogyō agreed to pay the town’s office a tax of 300 yen per year. This money was used to build a new primary school higher up the hill, away from the potentially dangerous station.¹⁶ The town elite propagated this compromise as a major breakthrough and construction for the whaling station began soon thereafter.

However, not everything was going smoothly. A major obstacle during the construction was the inadequate infrastructure in Ayukawa as the next sawmill was in Ishinomaki and timber had to be transported by boat to the village and then assembled by hand. This delayed the construction of the station till June 1906, when the whaling season was supposed to start. The whaling company therefore brought the factory ship Michail to Ayukawa, where the captured whales could also be flensed.¹⁷ In the end, the construction of the station was finished on 9 June, just when the catcher boat Nikolaj arrived. The subsequent flensing of the captured whales was, therefore, conducted at the station and not on board the Michail.

The industrial whaling stations had first been conceived as seasonal outposts of whalers from southern Norway coming to Finnmark. These stations were situated at the edge of a town and were often physically separated from the rest of the population through walls and brick buildings. The only way inside the station was through a gate which was only opened for the workers. While the locals could not enter the station without permission, the station released polluted air and water back into the village. Norwegian historian Einar Niemi has thus argued that these stations were often regarded as colonial outposts from the empire’s core region.¹⁸

This first whaling station in Ayukawa consisted of only five buildings: a salting factory; a storage room; a whale meat packing house; a sleeping place for the workers; and a whale oil factory.¹⁹ Other parts of the local environment had also to be adjusted: the local river was partly diverted through a pipe to the new station to obtain water for storage, cooking, and operating the boiler.²⁰ Moreover, a new pier was constructed directly adjunct to the station and the mouth of the river, allowing harbour for whaling ships during storms, which had in the past been a major obstacle for making Ayukawa a whaling base.²¹ According to the Kahoku Shimpō, the new pier was equipped with an electrical winch, which could tow the fluke of whale carcass into the air. Workers standing on a small boat near the pier then began flensing the whale from top to bottom using flensing knives.²²

The new pier was one of the main points of dispute between the pro- and anti-whaling factions in the town. To get permission to build the pier, which was only around fifty metres away from the town’s border and directly at the mouth of the river, the whaling company had to convince the town’s council that its construction would not pose ‘harm to the public waters’. The council argued that the pier would be beneficial for Ayukawa as other fishing boats could use the pier during storms as a safe anchor point and unilaterally passed the whaling company’s request. This decision enraged many locals who feared that the flensing of the whales at the pier would destroy the local flora and fauna, such as small fish, shells, and seaweed on whose collection many of the fishermen relied.²³ Indeed, take the following description of Andrews of a similar pier in Kii-Ōshima:

Sometimes a kimona-clad, bare-footed girl slipped on the oily boards or treacherous, sliding, blubber cakes and sprawled into a great pool of blood, rising amid roars of laughter to shake herself, wipe the red blotches from her little snub nose and go on as merrily as before … The spirit of the place was infectious, and as I splashed about in the blood and grease, I talked and joked with the cutters in bad Japanese²⁴

Considering the negative connotation blood and pollution had in Shinto religious practices, Andrews’s joyful and positive portrayal of the blood-covered pier is quite striking. It illustrates, however, that whale waste did lay around on the pier and presumably ended up in the ocean. Indeed, when the whalers began operating the provisional whaling station, rotting whale intestines, bones, grease, and whale blood were dumped into the ocean, leading to widespread pollution and the withering of seaweed and shellfish in the bay. The worst fears of the locals had become a reality.²⁵

Nevertheless, the commercial success of this first provisional whaling station encouraged the competitors of Tōyō Gyogyō to open their own stations in the surrounding bays, leading to similar environmental problems. Meanwhile, the communities themselves were overwhelmed by an influx of immigrants. In the first season of 1906, Ayukawa and the neighbouring villages had to accommodate over a hundred foreign whalers during the summer season.²⁶ Ayukawa’s population grew from around 500 at the beginning of the century to 1,135 in 1915, with many people from the inland moving to the booming town.²⁷

As in many other industrial whaling places, however, the companies hired mainly skilled whalers from western Japan, while non-skilled locals and immigrants were relegated to mundane and poorly paid jobs in the periphery of the whaling industry. For example, in nearby Onagawa, one of the first new jobs created for the locals was the collection of rotten whale meat on the seafront as it had become a serious health hazard.²⁸ Other new job opportunities included supplying the whalers with water and coal, the transportation of whale products, or entertainment services for the employees such as restaurants and inns (later even a red-light district).²⁹ Whaling was conducted between May and October and after the season ended, the whalers would move to other whaling places while the locals were laid off.

Initially, ‘the castle of sperm whales’ did hold up to its name and hundreds of whales were caught every year. The provisional whaling station in Ayukawa soon proved to be too small in size to cope with the amount of whale meat that had to be processed, which was not only unsatisfactory from a business standpoint but also further accelerated the problem of environmental pollution and thus increased the risk of social unrest.

After the merger of several whaling companies to the new industry juggernaut Tōyō Hogei in 1909, plans for two improved and larger stations were made in Oginohama and Ayukawa. The remaining competitors followed suit and submitted similar plans to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. When Andrews visited Ayukawa in May 1910, the new station had just been opened. The new Tōyō Hogei station was now situated around two hundred metres outside the town and had a total of thirty-one buildings, making it much bigger than its predecessor. For a more efficient workflow, the buildings were not only bigger but also had duplicates, for example, two storage rooms, two worker barns, and so on. Whales were hauled to the station with steam-powered winches, either at the pier where the animal was lifted on the fluke into the air or at an almost horizontal concrete slipway that reached into the water. The slipway greatly reduced the amount of blood and grease that flowed back into the water, making the whole process of flensing cleaner.³⁰ A further addition was two rooms near the pier to cool the whale meat with ocean water. The whale oil production and the salting of whale meat were also further expanded, and a new whale cannery was also included.³¹ All said, the new generation of stations was much more efficient and allowed for a much faster and streamlined process of flensing and processing the whale carcasses. This also contributed to fewer waste products going into the ocean.

The Problem with the Whale Meat

Soon the whalers in Ayukawa were faced with another challenge: the local demand for whale meat was dismal. The expansion of the industrial whaling operations after the Russo-Japanese War to the Sanriku Coast was facilitated by the search for whale meat, while whale oil was considered a by-product. In the early days of Japanese industrial whaling, the process to win whale oil from blubber was crude and highly inefficient, despite the expanded possibilities to use whale oil not only to produce illumination and insecticide, as during the Edo period, but also to transform it through industrial processes into wax, soap, perfume, and machine oil.³² The Norwegian Embassy in Japan, for example, noted in 1907: “The principal object of [the whaling] companies is to procure whale meat, which is considered a great luxury by the Japanese and realises high prices during the winter months. Owing to the primitive methods of treating the blubber, large quantities of oil are lost and what is produced is far below the quality of the home article.”³³

More positive was Andrews’s assessment, who praised in an article in the Metropolitan in 1911 the Japanese for their use of whale meat:

Few people realize how important the capture of whales is to the Japanese because of the wonderful food supply which these animals furnish. When one stops to think that a single large blue whale will yield over forty tons (eighty thousand pounds) of red-meat, and that every ounce is used for food, it can perhaps be understood why the Japanese to-day have the largest whaling company in the world.³⁴

According to Andrews, the Japanese had not only studied the European whaling methods but had tweaked them to fit their own needs, thus surpassing the Western whaling industry: ‘until to-day there is no nation in the world which has progressed so far in this great industry as our friends in the Island Empire across the wide Pacific.’³⁵ In 1916, Andrews highlighted the advantages of whale meat to the European and American readers, trying to establish it as a new commodity: “It is most unfortunate that prejudice prevents whale meat from being eaten in Europe and America. It could not, of course be sent fresh to the large cities, but canned in the Japanese fashion it is vastly superior to much of the beef and other tinned foods now on sale in our markets.”³⁶ Although Andrews’s attempt to introduce whale meat to the Western world was not successful,³⁷ his comments helped to cement the image of Japan as a ‘whale-eating culture’ for a long time.³⁸ Historical research in recent years has painted a more nuanced picture, however. While whale meat was the most important commodity for the industrial whaling companies, its consumption before the Second World War had mostly been concentrated in the traditional whaling regions in western Japan and it was not part of the cuisine in most other regions.³⁹ In the Edo period, most inland communities probably never ate whale meat and it is only from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards that we have reports of whale meat being sold at markets in Osaka, where it was restricted to the merchant and urban samurai classes.⁴⁰

Therefore, the industrial whaling companies had first to create a market for their new commodity of canned whale meat. In their first sales report released in 1906 the Tokyo Branch of Tōyō Gyogyō noted that ‘from Tokyo to the Northeast it is believed that whale meat is fatty and smelly’.⁴¹ To counter these prejudices, the company organised test samplings of whale meat in a park in Tokyo which was, according to their report, a huge success. They also started a large campaign of advertisements in over ten newspapers located in eastern Japan. Simmered whale meat in soy sauce proved especially popular and thousands of cans were sent all over the country, but the container proved to be faulty, leading to the spoilage of the product before it reached its destination. With this, many would-be consumers lost their appetite for whale meat.

As this publicity nightmare demonstrates, the conservation of whale meat turned out to be the biggest problem for the whaling companies. Traditionally, mainly white meat (blubber and connective tissues) had been eaten in western Japan, while red meat (muscle) had become popular only recently. However, the latter was also much harder to conserve during the summer months. Early attempts at salting or boiling red meat were imperfect and accounted only for a small fraction of the company’s revenue.

Economic historian Pieter de Ganon has argued that the Meiji government heavily promoted the consumption of beef and other forms of meat, something rarely eaten during the Edo period, in order to ‘nurturing a strong and healthy populace that could defend Japan against Western colonial power’.⁴² During the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), officials identified whale meat as a cheap alternative to beef.⁴³ This allowed the whaling companies to open up sales channels directly to public institutions, such as prisons, schools, and the military to sell them fresh red whale meat. However, due to delays at the Chōshi and Ayukawa plants, the meat deteriorated, and many of the contracts were cancelled.⁴⁴ Unsurprisingly, the trouble of transporting whale meat during the summer months had a profound effect on the market prices. In the 1910 winter season, Tōyō Hogei caught 324 whales, which could be sold in western Japan for as much as 4,000 yen each. This price fell to 2,200 yen by early spring, however, and by the summer, when the company caught 444 whales on the Sanriku Coast, it fell to about 600 yen per animal.⁴⁵

Despite an abundance of whales in the Sea of Kinkazan, its economic value was significantly diminished, which was compensated for by catching even more whales. As this large amount of whale carcasses could not be processed fast enough in the hot summer temperatures, even more whale waste was thrown into the ocean, further destroying local wildlife and threatening the near-coastal fishing industry. After the first few seasons of industrial whaling, Ayukawa was on the verge of an ecological disaster, and it became urgent to find a more sustainable solution.

Turning Whales into Fertiliser

In 1907, a year after the beginning of industrial whaling at the Sanriku Coast, a local entrepreneur from Ishinomaki found a new way to deal with the unattended and harmful whale waste products: he turned them into fertiliser. For centuries, bonito fertiliser production had been one of the main pillars of the Oshika fisheries proto-industry. With the bonito and sardine coastal stocks declining in the late nineteenth century, however, it had seemed that marine fertiliser production would soon have to be given up. The sudden influx of whale waste provided the struggling fertiliser factories with new and cheap raw material and soon fertiliser producers began buying whale waste directly from the whaling station. However, the emergence of whale fertiliser brought the local elite even closer to the whaling companies and instead of creating a diversified economy like they had promised, they invested mostly in whale fertiliser plants.⁴⁶

When the first provisional whaling station in Ayukawa was closed in 1909 in favour of the larger Tōyō Hogei station, the local entrepreneur Okada Gentarō bought the old station and turned it into one of the first whale fertiliser factories. Following this example, Nishimura Sōshirō built a second factory just outside the new Tōyō Hogei station and other members of the elite soon followed with new fertiliser plants being established all over the Oshika Peninsula. Even the mayor of Ayukawa, Izumi Kōtarō, who had been instrumental in mediating a deal between the anti-whaling faction and the whalers, resigned in 1907 and established his own fertiliser plant in the following year.⁴⁷ Records show that these fertiliser plants not only processed whale fertiliser but also began buying fish scraps from other fishing places, thus revitalising the fish fertiliser industry that had been given up since the disappearance of the sardines a few years earlier. For example, the Miyamoto fertiliser plant opened in Watanoha in 1908 processed sharks, bonito, and tuna from Miyagi, Iwate, and Aomori Prefectures as well as whales. Additionally, herring was imported from Hokkaido to turn it into fertiliser.⁴⁸

These fertiliser plants proved to be an effective way of mitigating the coastal pollution problem. When submitting their requests to build the second generation of whaling stations in 1909 and 1910, the whaling companies had not only improved the processing technique to reduce waste but also promised to uphold new regulations: “All whale meat waste from the flensing has to be brought to a fertiliser plant. Other waste products like whale oil that swims on the water are two hours after the end of the production let out into the open sea away from the station.”⁴⁹

These new regulations ensured that the fertiliser plants would not run out of raw material as long as whaling continued. Because of the low market prices during the summer, it was often more profitable to sell even high-quality meat to the fertiliser plants. In the eyes of the bureaucracy, this development was, however, not desirable. In 1909, the Miyagi Fisheries Agency complained:

The amount of whale meat eaten in our prefecture [Miyagi] is at the moment negligible, and only one or two of the whaling companies are producing a small number of whale meat cans. Instead, most of the meat is used in Watanoha and Ishinomaki as raw material for the production of fertiliser which is then sold. It is regrettable that whale meat is misused for the production [of fertiliser]. Therefore, it is necessary to encourage producers in Watanoha and Ishinomaki and other areas to make more canned whale meat.⁵⁰

As discussed, officials saw whale meat consumption as a critical component in building a healthy populace for the empire and therefore regarded the production of whale fertiliser as wasteful. This problem affected marine resources in general: over the course of the Meiji period, the population on the Japanese islands had grown from thirty to fifty million and the consumption of fish, such as sardines and herrings had increased manifold. At the same time, however, the increased population also led to a higher demand in agricultural products and thus of marine fertiliser made from these fish.⁵¹ In the case of Hokkaido fisheries, new fishing technologies were developed that allowed a short-term increase of herring extraction at the cost of the long-term sustainability of the underlying stock, marking the decline of the herring fertiliser business.⁵²

To ease the dependence on fish fertiliser, the Japanese government saw the production and import of commercial fertiliser as a national priority. Soybean cakes and phosphate rocks were imported from Qing Manchuria (later the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo) and European nations, respectively, and it was aimed to expand the Japanese empire to the Pacific islands to secure nutrient-rich guano.⁵³ By the 1910s, most major European powers had switched from guano and animal fertiliser to mined ammonium nitrate and only 2 per cent of their commercial fertiliser was still of organic origin. The Japanese empire, on the other hand, still relied on organic fertiliser and this peculiarity led Toshihiro Higuchi to call Japan an ‘organic empire’.⁵⁴

The Japanese dependence on imported fertiliser was perceived by the military as a serious problem.⁵⁵ In 1911, the Japanese economy produced fertiliser with a net value of forty million yen, but they still had to import fertiliser worth fifty-two million yen, ten per cent of the total imports.⁵⁶ According to my estimations, around 12,000 metric tons of whale fertiliser could have been produced in 1911.⁵⁷ This is more than the 8,000 metric tons of fish fertiliser that was imported in the same year, but a small number compared to the around 500,000 metric tons of herring fertiliser produced in Hokkaido in 1911.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, it was a huge boost to the local economy and over fifty private entrepreneurs on the Oshika Peninsula and around Ishinomaki started their own, mostly small-scale fertiliser businesses. High-quality fertiliser was exported as far as Fukushima, Shizuoka, and Hyōgo Prefectures, while lower-quality fertiliser remained in the region. The low-quality whale broth was only sold around Ishinomaki.⁵⁹

Even the invention of cold storage units, which partly solved the problem of rotting whale meat, did not hinder the success of the new Oshika fertiliser industry. Cold storage units were first used for transporting whale meat in Shimonoseki and Osaka in 1911 and ice storage tests were carried out in Ayukawa and Same-ura for the first time in 1913. Ice transportation did not work the whole year round, however. Steamships with ice storage could be used in the colder spring and autumn months to transport fresh whale meat to the markets in Tokyo and Osaka, but during the summer months, the high temperatures did not allow for the usage of this method and the whaling companies continued to sell the meat to the fertiliser producers.⁶⁰ Over time, local consumption of whale meat increased, and ice storage and whale oil production technologies improved, bringing greater profit to the whaling companies from products other than whale fertiliser.

Reaching into the Cetosphere

Over the course of only four years, Ayukawa became Japan’s first modern whaling town. This newfound wealth and fame were solely based on abundance of the whales foraging the Sea of Kinkazan during the summer season. Industrial whaling did indeed save the local fisheries on the Sanriku Coast, at least for a time. The Kahoku Shimpō had noted in 1906 that the only way to escape the collapse of the coastal fish stocks was to invest in motorised fishing vessels that could search for new fish stocks farther offshore. The recently arrived motorised whaling vessel from the whaling companies brought this necessary technological innovation to the region.⁶¹ Declining sardine stocks could be compensated for by the production of whale and imported fish fertiliser and as pointed out by the pro-whaling faction, industrial whaling helped to industrialise local fishing. With motorised boats and more efficient harvesting methods, fishing became less coastal bound and new fish stocks closer to the perturbed region became available.

Motorised fishing and whaling ships expanded the anthropogenic influence into the offshore region, changing the volatile ecological balance between humans and cetaceans. For centuries, humans had benefited from whales bringing fish to the shore, while making passive use of stranded or injured whales. Now, they ventured into the offshore regions of the Sea of Kinkazan to hunt fish and whales directly. In the first season, the whalers had mainly been interested in large whale species they knew from the Korean Sea and western Japan, like blue, fin, and sperm whales. While sperm whales remained important until the 1940s, fin whales were hunted excessively in the first few years, which led to a partial collapse of the stock as early as in the late 1910s.⁶² To compensate, the whalers started hunting a species that had so far been mostly unknown in western Japan: sei whales.⁶³

During the Edo period, one major reason fishermen protested against western Japanese whaling was that they believed that sei whales, locally known as ‘sardine whales’ or ‘bonito whales’, were responsible for driving sardines and bonito towards the coast. That sei whales were foraging for sardines in the Sea of Kinkazan is also confirmed by Andrews. He reports that in early spring mostly fin and blue whales could be found in the Sea of Kinkazan, but in June and July, sei and sperm whales arrived in great numbers. These two species, therefore, were not only the backbone of the cetosphere in the Sea of Kinkazan but also became the species Japanese summer whaling relied on the most.⁶⁴ On several occasions, Andrews watched on the whaling ship Hogeimaru No. 5 how sei whales were hunting sardines, with sea birds hovering about the whales, looking for easy pickings.⁶⁵ However, when examining the carcass of four sei whales, Andrews found only shrimp in their stomachs.⁶⁶

We would expect that the Ayukawa fishermen were like their ancestors concerned with the ecological and economic consequences of hunting sei whales. However, the few contemporary sources we have, do not reveal a particular concern for the species the whalers targeted. The reason for this is simple: sardines and bonito fishing no longer played a significant economic role for the town. In 1862, bonito fishing and katsuobushi production had contributed to 38 per cent of the town’s income from coastal fishing, while sardine fertiliser contributed 4 per cent.⁶⁷ In 1911, coastal bonito fishing brought a profit of only 1,460 yen, which was 2 per cent of all near-coastal fishing in Ayukawa. At the same time, however, the new offshore bonito fishing had grown to 15,200 yen in just a few years.⁶⁸ Bonito was now hunted up to sixty kilometres off Kinkazan, a distance the older, non-motorised boats could not have reached.⁶⁹ The transfer from coastal to offshore bonito fishing happened around the same time industrial whaling was introduced. I, therefore, suggest that for offshore fishing, sei whales were no longer needed to bring fish closer to the shore, meaning the locals were only concerned with the pollution whaling caused and not with the role sei whales played in the local ecosystem.

But how did the whales themselves react towards the sudden appearance of the humans? Again, our sources are quite limited. Andrews reports that during one of their sei whale hunts, an animal injured by a harpoon suddenly swung around and took up speed coming directly towards the whaling ship:

The whale was coming at tremendous speed, half buried in white foam, lashing right and left with his enormous flukes. In an instant he hit us. We had half swung about and he struck a glancing bow directly amidships, keeling the little vessel far over and making her tremble as though she had gone on the rocks; then bumped along the side, running his nose squarely into the propeller. The whirling blades tore great strips of blubber from his snout and jaws and he backed off astern.⁷⁰

If the whale had hit squarely, Andrews surmised, the ship would have sunk. As Andrews writes later in his book, almost every whaler had stories of injured whales attacking whaling vessels. However, Andrews was convinced that such ramming was not intentional by the whale but had been the result of his death flurry and purely accidental. Only sperm whales, so Andrews believed, were able to deliberately attack a whaling ship.⁷¹ To this day it remains unclear if baleen whales were intentionally attacking whaling ships. However, the many stories of whales protecting their calves and becoming aggressive towards humans indicate that this was at least sometimes the case.⁷²

Conclusion

Seen from a short-term economic standpoint, the introduction of industrial whaling was a blessing for Ayukawa and the town’s population tripled in only a few years with new businesses like whale fertiliser production thriving. With over fifty local entrepreneurs starting their own businesses, the demand for unskilled workers was great and as records show, up to 40 per cent of the employees were women.⁷³ The fertiliser producers bought not only whale waste, but also fish scraps from the whole of the Sanriku Coast and even herring from Hokkaido, thus revitalising the old fertiliser proto-industry. This time, however, most of the fertiliser was not produced for export but for farmers living in northern Japan, making the industry more locally oriented.

A closer inspection reveals that the benefits of whaling were unevenly distributed, however. The whaling companies were clearly benefitting the most and by establishing secondary industries, such as fertiliser and canned whale meat production, the local elite were using their political and economic capital to become junior partners of the large companies. On the losing side were not only the whales but also the less well-off fishermen, who had been against whaling from the start. Although they had predicted that the whaling operation would cause pollution and endanger their fishing operation, the decline of near-coastal fisheries due to overfishing had started much earlier, forcing a reorientation towards offshore fishing. Locals without the necessary capital found new ephemeral jobs such as working in the fertiliser plants or cleaning the beaches of whale carcasses.

By becoming a whaling town Ayukawa also lost many traditional side activities and seasonal work like collecting firewood or shells as well as cultivating fields. The rampant growth of the town’s population and industry left many of the surrounding hills barren as former fields were either swallowed by the town or transformed into fertiliser plants. The remaining fields were consolidated and tilled by full-time farmers, a job category that had not existed before. The sharp increase in shipping activities also led to the construction of a stone harbour to protect against tsunamis and storms, resulting in former abalone and seaweed gathering places being lost.⁷⁴

Given the precarious situation for the subaltern class, it may be surprising that the local anti-whaling faction disappeared completely from the contemporary sources after 1906. Why there was no larger resistance against these social and ecological changes? Initially, the opposing fishermen were overruled by the small but firmly established local elite. As these families held all the capital in the town, most of the poorer fishermen were either working for them or had to pay back debts, making it difficult to oppose them. The local fishermen could not expect help from other communities as Ayukawa was in dispute over the fishing rights of the Sea of Kinkazan with its neighbouring villages. Moreover, the coastal pollution was mostly limited to the respective cove where the whaling station was situated and the limited exchange between the villages hindered the establishment of a region-wide anti-whaling movement. Also, with the decline of the coastal sardine and bonito fisheries, whales lost their importance to the fishermen as they were no longer needed to find and bring these fish species to the shore.

Large-scale immigration was, however, the main reason the opposition disappeared so quickly from the sources. In the first years after the introduction of industrial whaling, hundreds of immigrants moved from the surrounding villages, districts, and prefectures to Ayukawa, Oginohama, and Onagawa in search of work in the periphery of the whaling industry, changing the social structure of the towns. Although these people were also living on the fringes of society, unlike the locals, they felt no moral obligation to preserve the local environment. On the contrary, they had migrated to the Oshika Peninsula to be part of the change. Many were unable to find a job in the whaling industry itself, but they could find work in secondary industries like construction, public services, or in fertiliser factories. This migration also explains why the anti-whaling faction is no longer present in the collective memory of the town today as most of the ancestors of the current population moved to Ayukawa after 1906. Therefore, I argue that the reason the opposition against whaling was not able to organise itself in Ayukawa was simply that the local fishermen became a small minority in their own town in just a few years, while everyone else profited from their loss.

7 Burning Down the Whaling Station

The raid on the Same-ura whaling station near Hachinohe on 1 November 1911, was a turning point for the Japanese whaling history. Unlike the fishermen in Ayukawa, the fishing communities around Hachinohe did not give up the cetosphere without a fight. The battle, as described in the Introduction, was bloody and laid open all the social rifts and injustices that had been brewing in the communities for decades. At the same time, however, the raid also stands symbolically for the end of the Ebisu whale culture and the integration of Japan’s Northeast into the Japanese whaling empire.

The Same-ura Incident has been widely discussed in the Japanese literature, but so far only one chapter, written by Watanabe Hiroyuki, has been published in English about the topic. While Watanabe’s discussion of the socio-economic background of the rioting fishermen was instrumental for this research, my own contribution is to include the larger ecological circumstances of the conflict and show how the riot would become the last stand of Japanese fishermen to defend the cetosphere. The outbreak of violence in Hachinohe represented the failure of the elite to engage with the economic, social, and ecological concerns raised by the local population. As I will argue in this chapter, the elite used scientific knowledge to discredit the ecological knowledge of the coastal communities, thereby, inadvertently, also showing the limitations and uncertainties of the scientific method. In the end, it was the whaling industry itself that provided a compromise with the rioters, offering jobs and relative prosperity in turn for giving up the cetosphere.

While we have relatively little knowledge of anti-whaling protests in other regions, the dispute in Hachinohe is well documented. One reason for this is that the major political factions in Hachinohe were drawn into the conflict. On the pro-whaling side stood the Doyōkai faction, which represented former samurai families and farmers. The Ōnanha faction, which was supported by merchants and the working class, took initially an anti-whaling position. Disputes were not only held in local parliaments and town offices but also in two regional newspapers: Hachinohe, which was associated with the Doyōkai and its rival the Ōnan Shimpō. For this chapter, I analysed over eighty newspaper articles regarding the anti-whaling protests in Same-ura published in the Ōnan Shimpō between April 1909 and October 1912, while also looking at the rival Hachinohe and the more neutral Tōō Shimpō newspapers. Local historians have also collected additional primary sources and conducted interviews with survivors, which will also be taken into account.¹

Hard Times in Hachinohe

Even though the whaling issue was discussed among all social groups, most people who actively participated in the riot were part of the fishing industry in one way or another. The anti-whaling protests were concentrated in the four fishing communities Minato, Shirogane, Konakano, and Same-ura, all situated east of the Hachinohe city centre and today part of the city (Figure 7.1). After the Meiji Restoration, Hachinohe had lost its status as an independent domain and became part of the newly founded Aomori Prefecture. Over 16,000 people lived in Hachinohe city in 1908, which was centred around sardine fishing and fertiliser production. Many fishermen living in Hachinohe and the surrounding villages were part-time farmers and worked either in a small-scale fishing family enterprise or as wage labourers for fish fertiliser producers around Hachinohe. Until the decline in the 1920s, around 2,000 to 4,000 local farmers and fishermen travelled to Hokkaido, Karafuto (Sakhalin), and Russia every year during the summer months as dekasegi to participate in the herring runs, earning around thirty to forty yen per season.²

Figure 7.1 Map of the Hachinohe region (ca. 1912)

Similar to Ayukawa, coastal fishing was in deep decline, when industrial whaling appeared on the scene. In 1880, half of the revenue generated from fishing in Aomori Prefecture came from sardine fishing, but ten years later, this percentage had declined to only 16 per cent. This massive drop can be explained by the disappearance of the sardine stocks, probably caused by a mixture of overfishing and natural regime change. The northern parts of Aomori Prefecture could compensate for the loss of sardines with herring fishing as the catch increased threefold after the introduction of new fishing nets in 1876. Herring was, however, uncommon around Hachinohe and the fishing communities remained dependent on sardines. Despite having the highest concentration of fishermen, the Hachinohe region contributed only 9 per cent of the prefecture’s fish catches in 1900, whereas ten years prior it had been 18 per cent.³

In order to combat the declining fish catches, the local governments encouraged the introduction of more efficient fishing techniques. Furthermore, in 1894, a new train line was opened that connected the port of Hachinohe with the rest of Japan, allowing fishery products to be transported as far as Tokyo. Before this, fish had been sold locally or transported on horses or ships to nearby provinces, which made the selling of fresh marine products during the summer months difficult. The new railway raised the prices of fresh fish products by about 20 per cent.⁴

Even more important than government-funded schemes, however, were private initiatives that tackled the problem of declining fish stocks. In the first decades of the Meiji period, small-scale fishing was conducted with the beach seine (jibikiami) or fixed shore nets (teichiami), both techniques relied on sardines and other small fish coming close to the shore. The entrepreneur Hasegawa Tōjirō (1855–1933) set out to change this situation. Noticing the increasing demand for fish fertiliser in his home prefecture of Mie, he migrated to Hachinohe in 1886 to open his own fish fertiliser business. He was integral in developing a round haul net (aguriami), which entrapped schools of sardines in a bag-like net between two fishing boats. This new fishing technique, which was, after 1897, used across Japan and made Hasegawa a wealthy man, allowed not only to catch hundreds of sardines in a single haul but also shifted fishing operations farther offshore.⁵

Hasegawa’s round haul net further accelerated the social division among fishermen. While industrial fishing companies invested in the new technology and expanded their activities to new fishing grounds offshore, self-employed fishermen still relied on the old techniques. For them, the drop in sardine catches was even more dramatic as the sardines were now fished offshore before they could reach the coast. Facing rising protests from locals, Hasegawa had to withdraw his round haul net operation from Kushiro in Hokkaido, while also being exposed to threats and physical attacks from fishermen in the Hachinohe region. Another problem Hasegawa faced was the price erosion of sardine fertiliser in Tokyo and other places. Especially as after the Sino-Japanese War, cheap soybean fertiliser from Manchuria poured into Japan.⁶ Hasegawa therefore looked into alternatives to fish fertilisers and in 1908 became involved in a scheme to introduce industrial whaling to the region.

Hasegawa’s Whale Fertiliser Scheme

The exact circumstances of how industrial whaling came to the Hachinohe region remain somewhat obscure. Since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, building a whaling station near Hachinohe had been of great strategic interest to the whaling industry. As the Norwegian-style whaling ships had a range of around 100 nautical miles, the industrial whaling companies strived to establish a whaling station every seventy to eighty miles to cover the whole Sanriku Coast. From Ayukawa, the next whaling station was in Ryōishi near Kamaishi, but from there was a gap if the whalers wanted to connect Hokkaido to the rest of the coastal network. The Hachinohe region was the logical spot for this last whaling station.

In April 1909, the Ōnan Shimpō reported of secret meetings between Hasegawa and a representative of the whaling company Dai-Nihon Hogei. According to the newspaper, Hasegawa urged the whaling company to build their next whaling station in Same-ura, where Hasegawa possessed land. After some negotiations, Hasegawa invited the four union heads of Shirogane, Minato, Konakano, and Same-ura to Ishida Tako’s guesthouse, who was a close friend of Hasegawa and a supporter of whaling. The newspaper alleged that the union heads were ‘bribed’ (kōhaku) with a large feast and promised exclusive deals with the whalers if they wrote a recommendation letter to the governor. For the Ōnan Shimpō, these secret dealings made Hasegawa a ‘bitter enemy of the fishermen’.⁷ A few days later, Dai-Nihon Hogei officially announced its plans to build a whaling station in Same-ura at Ebisu Beach near the famous Kabushima Shrine, a small island dedicated to the Goddess Benzaiten. Shortly after this news broke, over 200 fishermen from Minato marched to the mayor office to submit an official petition against these plans. The Ōnan Shimpō immediately took the side of the fishermen, writing that a permission for a whaling station would ‘completely wipe out coastal seaweed and shells in the surrounding area’.⁸ This would drive ‘thousands of fishermen into famine’.⁹

While the whalers did not need the approval of the fishing unions to conduct whaling, as such a permission was granted by the prefectural government, it was common to arrange an agreement with all interested stakeholders beforehand to promote group harmony and prevent strife. This process, which the Ōnan Shimpō branded as ‘bribery’ of the union heads, is called nemawashi, a form of interpersonal consensus building conducted prior to formal decisions, which is an integral part of the Japanese political process.¹⁰ The problem in this case was that as the fishing unions’ heads were promised personal benefits from the whaling company, such as exclusive deals for receiving fertiliser from the station, their interests did not align with the subaltern fishermen, which they allegedly represented. Indeed, during a crisis meeting of the Minato fishing union, its head Kanda Shigeo was accused of having illegally given the consent for the establishment of the whaling station in the name of the union without the approval of its members. Kanda had to resign and his successor, Yoshida Keizō (1877–1968), a young fertiliser producer and rival of Hasegawa took a decisive stance against whaling. Only a short while later, the fishing unions of Shirogane and Same-ura also gave in to the pressure and supported the anti-whaling protests. On April 12, the prefectural government declined the request of Dai-Nihon Hogei to build a whaling station in Same-ura.¹¹

The ‘Superstition’ of the Fishermen

The initial failure to establish a whaling station was a bitter setback for the pro-whaling faction in Hachinohe. In their eyes, the fears and worries of the opposition were completely unfounded and irrational. For example, Hasegawa considered the arguments of the anti-whaling faction to be based on the ‘superstitions of fishermen’.¹² But how did the locals justify their anti-whaling position? Unlike in Ayukawa and at other sites of anti-whaling protests, many newspaper articles written by fishermen have survived in Hachinohe, giving us the rare opportunity to better understand their concerns. For example, one fisherman, who opposed the planned whaling station, wrote in the Ōnan Shimpō:

I am but a simple and mostly illiterate fisherman and even without any scientific knowledge on how whaling works, I have some opinions [in regard to the whaling question] which are based on what my father has told me and what I have experienced myself. … To begin with, because whales chase sardines to eat them, sardines fear whales just as a sparrow fears the falcon. When sardines see a whale on the open sea they crowd together and try to escape the whale by swimming towards the shore. In this way, it becomes easy for us fishermen to catch [the sardines]. If no whales are around, sardines disperse throughout the open sea, which makes it extremely inconvenient to catch them; it is a lot of work with little reward, so we have to give up.¹³

As we can see, the arguments presented here are strikingly similar to the concerns expressed two centuries earlier during the 1677 whaling dispute on the Oshika Peninsula. The author of the article reiterated the old belief that whales were instrumental to the success of coastal fishing as they brought sardines towards the shore. He further explained that conducting whaling would result in damaging the livelihoods of hundreds of fishermen, while only a handful of outside whalers would profit from the new industry.¹⁴

The second theme discussed in these newspaper articles was the fear of environmental pollution caused by whaling, a topic that had also come up during the 1677 petition and only a few years earlier in Ayukawa. Interestingly, the whale pollution was discussed as a religious, ecological and scientific problem all at once, as the following newspaper article shows:

According to an ancient saying, a whale coming to shore brings seven years of bad fish catch. Moreover, both from a scientific and experimental standpoint, it is a fact that whale oil and blood have an effect on sardine and bonito catches. It will also hinder the growth of seaweed and konbu and nori will become extinct. If seaweed withers, abalone, sea urchin and other seafood will likewise die.¹⁵

The ancient saying cited here is an inversion of the popular Edo period saying, ‘one whale brings fortune to seven villages’. However, in this version, the arrival of the whale brings seven years of bad catch. The wording makes it unclear if the saying refers to beached or hunted whales. Local folktales, such as the Sameuratarō story discussed in previous chapters, would indicate that the latter is meant. This ancient wisdom is, according to the fishermen, backed up by scientific and experimental (i.e., observational) evidence, thus indicating that the ecological knowledge of the locals is more than just superstition. The reader is, however, not given more details about which scientific research is referenced here. Instead, the cascading effects whale oil and blood have on a coastal ecosystem are further explained. Recognising that the direct link between whaling and coastal pollution is not universally accepted, the article further states:

Even if we would make the assumption that whale oil and blood have no impact on the fishing industry, Hinode Beach [Ebisu Beach] at Kabushima is an inexhaustible reservoir of sardines. If a whaling station is established, it will become impossible to engage in fishing here. Kabushima is also a breeding ground for seagulls, which is the only place where fishermen can detect the arrival of schools of fish and has been declared a no-fishing zone by the fishermen. The establishment of a whale flensing station will prevent the arrival of seagulls and cause trouble (fuben meiwaku) for the fishermen.¹⁶

This paragraph further shows the intimate understanding of the fishermen regarding the coastal ecosystem and its feedback loops. In order to protect spawning sardines and the breeding of seagulls, the fishing communities have long restricted the access to the waters around Kabushima Shrine and Ebisu Beach. The seagulls are given here a similar role as whales, as their presence indicates, where schools of sardines can be found on the open water. Protecting the breeding grounds of the seagulls is therefore also an essential part of the consideration of the locals. Even today, one can find hundreds of seagulls breeding on the rocks near Kabushima. Finally, in the last paragraph, the article deals with the effects of air pollution:

When whale meat is boiled, it emits a fierce stench that is harmful to the health and which, depending on the direction of the wind, is transported not only to Same-ura and Shirogane but also Konakano and Hachinohe. Same-ura has recently been gaining fame as a scenic spot in the Northeast, but the stench from the whaling station will be so foul that tourists will no longer come. Also, Kabushima is a sacred place where Itsukushima Shrine resides. [We] fear that the impurity will pollute the sanctity of the place.¹⁷

The issue of air pollution has been largely disregarded and ridiculed by the pro-whaling faction. For example, Ishida Tako, the guesthouse owner, claimed that the fishermen had ‘the superstition that burned whale oil would kill all the cattle and horses’.¹⁸ Air pollution was an emotional topic as already twenty years earlier, in 1891, the Ōnanha faction had successfully delayed the construction of the new train line to Hachinohe with the argument that the smoke of the steam trains would destroy crops and bring diseases, while the opposing Doyōkai faction had stressed the importance of the train line for the economic development of the region. Diseases like cholera were indeed rampant after the construction of the train line, but this was caused by the accelerated contact with the outside world and not by the smoke.¹⁹ With the construction of the whaling station, the question of air quality and public hygiene was again discussed. Ironically, the anti-whaling faction claimed that the air pollution would destroy the emerging tourist industry which had only recently gained momentum due to the establishment of the railway. Interestingly, none of the newspaper articles are referencing the local Ebisu belief directly but this article ends with a reference to the Shinto belief of impurity. The fishermen seemed to fear that whale blood near Kabushima Shrine would cause the sacred space to become impure. The main issue the locals had with the whaling stations seems to have been the danger of pollution and what this would mean for the local ecosystem and economy.

This brings us to the question of how we categorise whaling pollution in the context of the Japanese political discourse of the time. The most famous Meiji-period industrial pollution case is the Ashio Copper Mine Incident. In the 1880s and 1890s, the reckless extraction of copper released previously contained toxins into the nearby river. These toxins caused massive environmental pollution downstream: silkworms used for sericulture died by eating poisoned mulberry leaves; dead fish drifted on the river; forests withered and died; almost 250,000 acres of paddy land was contaminated; and the health of the local population deteriorated. In 1897, over 4,000 farmers marched on Tokyo demanding an end to the pollution and the Meiji government responded with the Third Mine Pollution Prevention Order, which forced the operator of the mine to install filter beds and sediment basins and to reforest the nearby forests to prevent the toxins from reaching the river.²⁰ Less well known are the cases of air pollution caused by copper refineries in Ehime Prefecture around 1900. Here, sulfur dioxide was released into the air by the Niihama and Shisakajima refineries, which damaged the crops of nearby fields. After a series of violent protests, the national government organised compensation talks between the operator and the locals and in 1909, the company conceded and agreed to develop new technologies to remove the sulfur dioxide from the emissions, compensate the victims, and alter the production schedule during the agricultural season.²¹

Indeed, one further reason for the declining fish catches was industrial pollution caused by the sewerage of cities and waste of factories.²² The latter was certainly true also for whaling stations, which are described in almost every source as large contributor to coastal pollution. Unlike chemical waste products from factories, the expected pollution in Same-ura was caused by something the fishermen had been familiar with for centuries from beached whale incidents: whale blood and grease. The whaling companies claimed that whaling would bring prosperity to the villages as whale blood, grease, and oil leaking into the ocean from the stations would sink to the bottom of the ocean after a few hours where it would work as a fertiliser for the marine flora and fauna. This would help marine life prosper and new fish stocks therefore came to the region.²³

However, according to Kondō Isao, a former whaler, the discarding of unprocessed whale waste into the oceans led to the clumping of whale blood, which would settle on the seafloor like three-meter-deep mud. The flora and fauna in the affected areas would then die due to a lack of oxygen.²⁴ Therefore, whale waste is best understood as part of the industrial pollution issues of the time. While whale pollution had already been a major issue in the Edo period, industrial whaling amplified the problem. Before, the flensing of a whale had taken a whole day, whereas it was now possible to not only hunt many more animals but to also flense them back-to-back, producing much more waste more quickly than proto-industrial whaling. In the same way as whales have become an industrial commodity, their discarded carcasses rose similarly to an industrial waste product that threatened the well-being of the local ecosystem.

The Role of Imperial Science

Despite the fierce opposition, Hasegawa and other members of the pro-whaling faction, pushed forward with the plans of a whaling station and organised a secret trial flensing. In late April 1909, they bought a fin whale caught by the Olga for 350 yen. Protected by six policemen they dismembered the whale at a provisional site at Ebisu Beach and transported the meat and bones to a fertiliser plant at the mouth of the Minato River. While Hasegawa made a profit of 30 yen from this trial run, the dumbfounded fishermen were left with a tremendous amount of whale blood and stinky oil contaminating not only Ebisu Beach but also the Minato River, leaving behind dead fish, seaweed and crabs.²⁵ Hasegawa’s intent had probably been to demonstrate that local entrepreneurs could make a profit by buying the waste products from the whalers to produce fertiliser, a method that he had probably copied from Ayukawa, but all he did in the eyes of the fishermen was to confirm their suspicions that the external costs of whaling would have to be paid by the ecosystem and ultimately them.

Eventually, the news of the growing conflict between the whaling and anti-whaling faction also reached the Aomori prefectural government. To verify or disprove the accusations of the fishermen, the government requested a scientific inquiry from Professor Kishinouye Kamakichi (1867–1929) from Tokyo Imperial University, who had in the past conducted similar studies in cases of fisheries disputes. Kishinouye arrived in Same-ura in June 1909 and stayed at the guesthouse of Ishida Tako. He gathered fish and shellfish who had died close to the provisional whaling site and conducted several autopsies to determine if an unknown ‘whale poison’ had been the cause of death. After the end of the investigation, he initially refused to disclose his results to the public; instead, an engineer working for the government asserted that whale blood had been found to have no effect on fish and other sea life.²⁶ Finally, Kishinouye agreed to give a short presentation at the Minato Fisheries School with an audience of around 300 people in a tense atmosphere. Kishinouye lectured mostly about the benefits that industrialisation would bring to the region and he recommended to invest more capital in buying new fishing equipment. When pressed by a journalist, he confirmed that in his opinion whaling could be harmful to coastal fisheries. However, his own scientific inquiries were unable to determine which role – if any – whale blood and oil played on the death of the fish he had autopsied. As there was no established theory yet that could conclusively explain these deaths, the experience of the fishermen should be taken into account more in the future.²⁷ Kishinouye’s response left many fishermen unsatisfied and one commentator in the Ōnan Shimpō asked whether science was even the right tool to solve the whaling pollution crisis:

The scientific principle [gakuri] is still under research. The fact [jijitsu], on the other hand, is a thousands-of-years-old definitive unchangeable thing. The scientific principle is still very immature. … We have to respect science, but only so few of the scientific principles are known, and they do not have satisfying explanations for countless phenomena. It is a fact that all marine creatures have died just at the place where the blood and oil of the flensed whales have poured into the ocean. It is said that it is difficult to know if the cause of the deaths is linked to weather, currents, shortage of nutrients or indeed some poison of the whales, but it can’t be helped that the reason can’t be specified as science is still immature today.²⁸

No one disputed the fact that there were dead fish in the water, but the factions debated over the right epistemology to determine if there was a causal connection to industrial whaling. Pro-whaling advocates did not acknowledge the ecological knowledge of the locals, as they believed it to be based on religious superstitions. In their eyes, the only form of ‘legitimate knowledge’ could be produced by the new scientific fields such as fisheries science or marine biology. Kishinouye’s inability to provide concrete evidence that fish had died because of a ‘whale poison’ was seen as proof that whaling was unrelated to environmental pollution.²⁹ This claim was refuted by the anti-whaling faction. According to the commentator in the Ōnan Shimpō, that fish died where whale waste was let into the ocean was an ontological reality and took precedence over the question of whether fisheries science can establish a link between the two. As the livelihoods and survival of thousands of fishermen depended on the question, an inconclusive answer, such as provided by Kishinouye, was simply too high a risk to allow whaling to continue.³⁰ For the anti-whaling faction, fisheries science was limited in its scope and potential explanatory power and one rather had to rely on first-hand observation and knowledge of former generation, i.e., their ecological knowledge to accurately describe and understand the situation.³¹

The conflict between the pro- and anti-whaling factions was at a tipping point in Hachinohe when Dai-Nihon Hogei merged with other whaling companies into Tōyō Hogei in May 1909. The appearance of a new whaling juggernaut shifted the power balance once again in favour of the pro-whaling faction. Without losing much time, Tōyō Hogei applied a new request for the construction of a whaling station at Ebisu Beach. They also used a new tactic: instead of negotiating directly with the fishermen, they went to their largest political supporter: the Ōnanha faction, the owner of the Ōnan Shimpō newspaper. The Ōnanha faction had been sympathetic with the fishermen but was mostly managed by representatives from the merchant class. Tōyō Hogei invited reporters of the Ōnan Shimpō to visit the Daitō Hogei whaling station at Ryōishi in June 1910 to prove that whaling would bring economic prosperity to Hachinohe. Apparently, the scheme worked perfectly as the Ōnan Shimpō wrote favourably about the trip:

A month has passed since the inauguration of the operation, and already ten whales have been caught. From now on, we will enter the whaling high season. Especially our whaling spot is not like the Sea of Kinkazan, where the [whales stay] offshore, and will have a more promising future with high profits. Like many other fishing places with factories, there have also been some initial discussions in Ryōishi. However, now the factories created a demand for hiring many people to the extent that even women and children are now receiving good money. Because the village receives great profit by the demand of goods for the factory, it now welcomes the industry with great affection.³²

The Ōnan Shimpō highlighted the high wages of the workers and the economic growth of the town while downplaying the anti-whaling movements in Ryōishi as mere ‘discussions’ and failing to mention that this newspaper had, up until this point, written repeatedly that whaling would bring famine and death to the fishing communities. In June of 1910, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce approved the building of a whaling station at Ebisu Beach and granted the company a license to hunt whales between April to September of the following year. This news was celebrated in the Ōnan Shimpō who claimed that while in the past fishermen had protested against the whaling station as there had been no time to conduct deeper research whether whaling would damage the fishing industry, such research had been conducted in the meantime and it had been shown that ‘there are many benefits [to whaling] and little harm. The benefits will outweigh every possible harm’.³³

In the following negotiations between the Same-ura fishing union and Tōyō Hogei regarding the compensation for possible environmental pollution, the Ōnanha faction took up a new role as neutral mediator. Under the new agreement, the Same-ura fishing union would receive ten yen for every whale killed and flensed at the station.³⁴ With this proposal, Tōyō Hogei managed to turn the situation around and the two most important political factions, the Doyōkai and the Ōnanha, were now both supporting the whaling station. Meanwhile, Hasegawa and his supporters had managed to secure their exclusive contracts with the whalers and remained the sole buyers of the discarded whale waste to be turned into fertiliser.

However, this deal had been made without the knowledge or consent of the other fishing unions, who did not receive any compensation, even though the pollution was not contained exclusively to the waters around Same-ura.³⁵ Yoshida Keizō, the unofficial leader of the anti-whaling movement, was especially unhappy. The fishermen had elected him as the head of the Minato Fishing Union explicitly to deal with the situation. Furthermore, as a fish fertiliser producer, he was a direct competitor to Hasegawa and had much to lose personally if the deal went through. Sardine catches would likely drop even further and unlike Hasegawa, he could not compensate for the loss with whale fertiliser as Hasegawa had an exclusive deal. Under the leadership of Yoshida, the opposing fishing unions decided to visit the other industrial whaling places on the Noto Peninsula, in Chōshi, and Ayukawa. They wanted to see with their own eyes if whaling really did not harm sardine fishing as Tōyō Hogei had repeatedly claimed. After the trip, Yoshida sent a report in early 1911 to the Minister of the Interior in Tokyo and the Aomori Prefecture governor stating:

For a detailed investigation, [we] visited every coastal whaling station in the whaling regions. The large-scale damage of the sardine fishing was obvious. The growth of seaweed is obstructed, fish, and shell breeding was disturbed. Fish species increasingly leave coastal waters; it is clear that the normal fishing industry is suffering.³⁶

Most shocking for Yoshida, however, was that this obvious destruction had not been recognised by scientists as being caused by whaling. He urged the minister and governor to revoke their approval otherwise the lives of the fishermen would suffer: ‘To make the matter simple, for the profit-making of a single company, the well-being of a whole region is gambled.’³⁷ Yoshida’s report further increased the pressure on the local elite, and eventually, the mayor of Same-ura, Kubo Tadakatsu, who had been a supporter of whaling, had to resign. However, the report did little to change the minds of the bureaucrats in the ministries.

The Attack and the Aftermath

Despite local protests, the construction of the whaling station went along and in April 1911, three whaling ships arrived in Same-ura to officially open the first season. As we have seen in the opening paragraph of Chapter 5, Ōashi Bō, a writer for the Ōnan Shimpō attended the opening of the station in June, praising whaling as the future of Hachinohe. One hundred and fifty people worked at the newly built whaling station at Ebisu Beach and an additional 350 people worked at the fertiliser plants owned by Hasegawa and his friends. This made Tōyō Hogei the biggest provider of jobs in Hachinohe.³⁸ Together with the western Japanese whalers arrived also the Norwegian gunners, who lived in the guesthouse of Ishida Tako. After work, they celebrated with the other whalers at lavish parties to the envy of the rest of the population. Some younger factory workers also flirted with local women, which was not taken well. According to rumours, one of the Norwegian gunners even had a child with a local Geisha.³⁹

Over the course of the summer, the whalers hunted 186 whales, which was a spectacular success for them. Most whales were brought via a slipway to the station and flensed on dry land. This meant the outflowing blood was contained and pumped into a holding pond so as not to pollute the surrounding area. As the whaling station was not yet finished, however, more whales were caught than the pond could contain and most of the blood and oil leaked into the ocean unfiltered. Hasegawa and his associates were also not able to cope with the large quantities of waste and the whalers could only sell a small percentage of the whale waste, with the rest being thrown back into the ocean. Soon, sea life began to whiter near the station and fishing became impossible, as nets and fishing lines were clogged with blood every time they were let into the water. The sardine swarm that normally reached Hachinohe in September did not come that year. It goes without saying that the fishermen blamed the whaling operation for their poor catch results and to make matters worse, the price of rice rose by over 20 per cent compared to the previous year.⁴⁰

To make ends meet, the fishermen began to illegally harvest Sakhalin surf clam that had died from the exposure to whale blood and been washed ashore. The coastal area around the whaling station had effectively been transformed into an industrial sacrifice zone for the whaling business. The whaling company paid such concerns little attention and instead applied for an extension of their whaling activities until the end of the year. When the official approval was delayed, however, Tōyō Hogei decided that two of the whaling ships should continue to the Korean whaling grounds, while one stayed behind and continued whaling without a license.⁴¹

That the government ignored the illegal whaling after the expiring of Tōyō Hogei’s license was what the final straw that broke the camel’s back. In an emergency meeting on 31 October 1911, the leaders of the anti-whaling faction met at a nearby guesthouse to discuss the situation.⁴² Fishermen came and went throughout the night, and it was finally decided to start the raid on the whaling station in the early hours of the next morning. Over 1000 fishermen, many of them armed with knives, clubs, and swords, assembled in three groups and attacked from various sides the whaling station, which was fiercely defended by the employees and eight police officers. The attack on the station ended in a fiery inferno when the whale oil caught fire during the siege, causing two of the attackers to be killed and two very seriously injured (one later died). On the side of the company and the police, 14 people were injured, three of them severely. All facilities, as well as stored oil and meat were lost, the total of the estimated damage was estimated to be around 180,000 yen.

After the station had been laid to waste, the rioters continued their rampage through the street of Same-ura. They demolished the local police station, the house of Kanda Shigeo (the former Minato Fishing Union head), and the guesthouse of Ishida. At Hasegawa’s house, the rioters not only systematically broke all the furniture, but they also set the hated fishing gear and boats on fire and destroyed all documents and certificates related to loans Hasegawa had given to fishermen. Around eleven in the morning the rioters broke up and police officers and fire fighter from Hachinohe and the surrounding villages rushed to the scene to restore order and put out the various fires. A military division that was holding a practice drill in the neighbouring Iwate Prefecture were ordered to go and appease the situation, but they arrived only after the rioters had already dissolved. Nevertheless, forty people were arrested the next day and among them were the suspected ringleaders of the riot, including Yoshida Keizō.⁴³

Over the following weeks, the police held an interrogation of the arrested rioters. In their report the police theorised that a group of instigators (presumably the group around Yoshida, but the names were omitted from the records) had been responsible for manipulating the locals into a mob. The police claimed that these instigators had made use of the superstitious belief of the rioters that whale oil and blood had an effect on fishing. All forty suspects denied having taken part in the riot, however. Furthermore, in the protocol of the interrogation, we can see that several of the accused even denied having been against whaling. Only one accused, a twenty-nine-year-old man working in the fish fertiliser business, stated bluntly: ‘Whales are gods. It’s bad to catch them.’⁴⁴

A month later, on 6 December 1911, a preliminary hearing was held, after which the magistrate released the following written statement:

Originally, in the district of the defendants, whales were called o-Ebisu-sama (Revered Mr Ebisu) and regarded as sacred. It was held that sardine fishing depended a great deal on the benevolence of passing whaling and there was a custom in the area whereby, as soon as a whale spout was seen far out to sea, those watching would clap and bow three times in prayer beseeching the god for good fortune in fishing. Consequently, there are many traditional tales and proverbs about how shoals of sardines coming close to shore are blessings from the god Ebisu to the fishermen living along the coasts. And, because there are still some among the fishermen even today who believe this, any talk of catching whales, let alone cutting them up and letting their blood and oil spill into the sea, is regarded as anathema to them.⁴⁵

The magistrate highlighted that there had been no proof that whaling was an issue for public health or that it would negatively affect the local flora and fauna. Following the conclusions drawn in the police report, he accused the people connected to the fishing unions of having used the superstitions of the fishermen to instigate an attack on the whaling station for their own sinister reasons.⁴⁶ As fishing historian Ishida Yoshikazu has pointed out, with this report the elite deflected from the pollution issue and illegal whaling by blaming the riot on the unfounded ‘Ebisu superstition’ of the locals.⁴⁷ In this way, the ecological knowledge of the fishermen was turned against them as it was reduced to its religious component. Any mention of whaling causing pollution was thus made invalid as it was based on superstition and not scientific research, the only form of legitimate knowledge in a ‘modern’ society.

A few months later, in February 1912, the full trial was held in the Aomori District Court. Leading the defence was the famous lawyer and member of the House of Representatives Hanai Takuzō (1868–1931) from Hiroshima. Hanai had made himself a name by defending commoners against large corporations and he had just recently defended a group of farmers in the Ashio Copper Mine Incident. In front of the court, Hanai refuted the claim of the prosecutor that the whaling station had caused no harm to the fishermen and pointed out that the violence had only broken out because Tōyō Hogei had broken the law by continuing whaling even after their license expired. Without the wrongdoing of the whaling company, the incident would never have happened. As the government had done nothing to stop the company despite their illegal whaling, the fishermen had no other choice than to use violence.⁴⁸

The accused fishermen received also help from an unexpected direction: Oka Jūrō, the president of Tōyō Hogei, appeared before the court and admitted that part of the guilt laid with his company: ‘It was our fault. I would like to offer the defendants 10,000 yen per person in compensation. We will not demand compensation for damages.’⁴⁹ Oka did not deny the accusation that industrial whaling caused coastal pollution and he explained that the company had in the past in such instances negotiated with the local fishing union and donated money to the community for buildings schools or roads. However, in hindsight, the negotiation with the fishing unions around Hachinohe had turned out to be un satisfactory.⁵⁰

With this admission of guilt, it was finally acknowledged that the rioters had not only acted out of superstition but that their ecological concerns had been legitimate. In the end, twenty-three of the defendants received prison sentences between one and eight years, while six rioters were fined forty yen each. Yoshida Keizō was found not guilty. Only a few months later, all rioters were granted a general pardon upon the death of Emperor Meiji.

Much has been debated as to why Oka Jūrō was willing to take part of the blame for the outburst of violence. While Ishida saw this as a sign of the virtuous character of Oka, Watanabe Hiroyuki argued that it was more likely that the Same-ura whaling ground had proven so valuable that Oka wanted to make peace with the locals as quickly as possible.⁵¹ Indeed, after the raid, Oka Jūrō travelled to Hachinohe himself and met with all the key players in the anti-whaling movement to broker a compromise. After making little progress for some time, a deal was finally reached when he announced that Tōyō Hogei would in the future strictly observe the whaling period and take measures to prevent blood from being spilt into the ocean. As a further concession, Tōyō Hogei donated money to fund the cost of the trial. Oka also promised to hire family members of the arrested fishermen to work at the station. In general, Tōyō Hogei would train more locals and hire them to work in the industry. Furthermore, the company agreed to help facilitate new industries related to whaling in the region. For this, Oka terminated the exclusive whale fertiliser contract with Hasegawa and sold whale waste to everyone who was interested.⁵² Okas attempts at nemawashi paid off: When he finally had the approval of the locals, he immediately submitted a request to rebuild the station. He hired one hundred local fishermen to rebuild it and in June 1912, whaling commenced once again. Oka’s intervention not only appeased the situation in Hachinohe but also secured the future of the Same-ura whaling station, which was important for the further expansion of industrial whaling towards Hokkaido.

Conclusion

The Same-ura Incident was by no means the only ‘site fight’ of a civil movement against a controversial industrial facility in the Meiji period. Also, considering the degree of violence and the number of people involved, the death toll of three was relatively low. Rural protests against elite rule had been widespread in early modern Japan: one study counted over 6,800 peasant uprisings (ikki) over the course of the Tokugawa period.⁵³ In the first years of the Meiji period, when the Meiji state performed land and fishing reforms, non-violent and violent protests increased dramatically against the government, but with the growing acceptance of the new government and the continuing industrialisation of the periphery more and more protests were no longer directed against the state itself but against local elites, such as landlords, factory owners, and capitalistic fishing entrepreneurs. Contemporary newspapers described the Same-ura protests as a violent movement (bōdō), a term used to describe violence against homes and properties of officials and wealthy merchants, but short of an all-encompassing rebellion.⁵⁴

While the Same-ura Incident was the most violent clash between whalers and fishermen, as we have seen, anti-whaling protests were not limited to northeastern Japan and appeared at nearly every newly built whaling station, even in regions with a long whaling tradition. This suggests that the conflict was more complex than a cultural struggle between western whaling regions and northern non-whaling regions. Instead, I argue that the main source of conflict was not whaling per se, but the industrial methods that caused large-scale coastal pollution. In the Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan, fishing experts debated the existence of a nation-wide anti-whaling movement, but from what we can tell from local sources, the individual movements were not connected to each other. Political scientist Daniel Aldrich argued that controversial facilities often produced public goods from which large parts of the society profited, while the specific sites, where these facilities were built, had to deal with the ‘public bad’, which were in this case the external costs of a degraded ecosystem.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, the particular circumstances of the Hachinohe region, the long dependence on sardine coastal fishing, which was helped by foraging whales, the experience of coastal pollution of whaling in the past, and the local culture and folktales surrounding whales were all additional factors that made the whaling question even more explosive than in other regions.

The problems the Hachinohe fishermen faced were not all caused by industrial whaling, however. Coastal fishing seems to have been in decline for years. The seriousness of the situation became apparent in the early Meiji period when the traditional iriai system was abolished and the pressure on the stocks increased drastically. The result was a decline in sardine fish catches, which hit Hachinohe fishermen the most. Increased demand for fisheries products, including fish fertiliser and oil, for the increasing human population as well as better fishing equipment, contributed to the constant pressure on the coastal fish stocks. The poor fish catches of 1911 were, therefore, not caused by whaling but were simply a sign of the low resilience of an ecosystem reaching its threshold.⁵⁶ It is very likely that climatic factors also played a role as the world’s climate was still adapting from the Little Ice Age to a warmer weather regime. This only reinforced the point, however, that an already weakened ecosystem was less resilient against additional disturbance. In other words, the fishermen were already fighting against the deterioration of the coastal ecosystem that they had caused when whaling arrived and made everything worse. From this, we can see that the anthropogenic taking over of the cetosphere was closely connected to changes in the fishing regime.

Finally, let us consider why the anti-whaling movements played out so differently in Ayukawa and Hachinohe even though both communities are situated on the Sanriku Coast and have a long history of rejecting organised whaling. In the case of Ayukawa, this goes back as far as 1677, when the town was part of the anti-whaling coalition against the Kii whalers. The Hachinohe region did not have such an organised anti-whaling opposition in the Edo period, but countless whale strandings had contributed to the creation of a distinct culture of ‘living with whales’ transmitted through folktales and material objects such as the Same-ura whale stone. A further commonality was the economic reliance on sardine and bonito fishing for producing proto-industrial fish fertiliser exported to the core regions. Whales played a vital part in bringing fish closer to the shore and indicating the presence of fish stocks.

Unlike the Oshika Peninsula, the fishing villages near Hachinohe were not separated by inaccessible rias but were all easily reachable either by land or water. This not only made environmental pollution less site-specific, as wind and water currents could disseminate pollutants much more efficiently, but also allowed for a mobile fishing society. Many Hachinohe fishermen worked during the herring season in the waters off Hokkaido, encouraging interactions between fishermen originating from different villages. Indeed, the fishing villages directly adjunct to Hachinohe (Same-ura, Minato, Konoha, and Shirogane) are so closely connected that they form their own social and ecological system. Direct contact between the fishing unions, merchants, and also fishermen was common. As many of the locals worked as travelling fishermen and were away most of the year, more people were living in the region than the near-shore fish stocks could otherwise sustain. The social strata were also more complex than on the Oshika Peninsula, where a small number of families had managed to monopolise most of the capital. In Hachinohe, medium-sized fish fertiliser merchants, like Yoshida Keizō, also had a chance to thrive. Well-off fishermen had access to the new net techniques invented by Hasegawa or even owned a motorised boat to harvest offshore fish stocks.

The arrival of the whaling companies created a decisive rift not only between elite and subaltern fishermen but also among the fertiliser producers. By looking at the development in Ayukawa and other places, Hasegawa Tōjirō realised the potential industrial whaling had for supplying his fertiliser business and his exclusive deal with the whaling company would probably have worked in a place like Ayukawa. In Hachinohe, however, more stakeholders were involved in the fertiliser business and when Yoshida and other middle-sized fertiliser producers realised that Hasegawa had outmanoeuvred them, they found allies among the subaltern fishermen to give additional weight to their political goals. Over the course of the whaling dispute, the fishing unions changed their stance towards whaling several times, showing that a power struggle among the elite existed.

On the eve of the raid, only the Same-ura fishing union, remained pro-whaling; all other unions had switched to the anti-whaling faction. Excluding the middle-sized fish fertiliser producers from the benefits of industrial whaling had proven to be a mistake. Although Tōyō Hogei was the largest employer in the region, the economic boost industrial whaling brought to the region was not large enough to demarginalise the existing, already overcrowded local population. Instead of seeing industrial whaling as an opportunity, they felt a moral obligation to protect their traditional way of life. Whales also played a bigger role in the ecological knowledge in Hachinohe as the locals not only referenced the old whale folktales but also had a close religious and ecological attachment to Kabushima Shrine and the nearby Ebisu Beach. Whaling at these places not only angered the gods, but it also destroyed the local flora and fauna. In the end, it was Tōyō Hogei’s willingness after the incident to integrate the locals into the industrialisation process that solved the conflict. They not only trained and hired locals to work at the station, but they also financed new peripheral industries such as whale fertiliser plants to give a new economic perspective to the locals. Thus, the Sanriku Coast became part of the Japanese whaling empire and the anti-whaling movements were soon forgotten.

8 Washing Away the Past

On 11 March 2011, Ayukawa was erased by an 8.4-metre-high tsunami. Of the roughly 700 houses, over two-third were washed away in the span of a few minutes. Despite the near-complete destruction, the number of victims was surprisingly low for a community of 1,400, with seventeen dead and six missing. The two last whaling stations, situated near the port, were crushed first by the waves, erasing some of the last reminders of Ayukawa’s past as the main whaling port in northeastern Japan. During a debate in the House of Representatives, Shitamichi Yoshikazu, the chairman of the Japan Small-Type Whaling Association, pushed for a swift reconstruction of the Ayukawa whaling stations:

Ayukawa was a representative example of Japan’s coastal small-type whaling: a town that preserved the history and tradition of 9,000 years of whales used by the Japanese race. Should the light of whaling go out in Ayukawa, not only will the regional community collapse, but it would also mean that Japan’s whaling history has come to an end.¹

Like Shitamachi, many local stakeholders believed that the fate of the town was inextricably linked to the continued existence of whaling: ‘The only way for Ayukawa to live is to make use of the whales for the development of the town. The tsunami has not changed that.’² Indeed, only one year after the tsunami, one of the whaling stations was the first building to be repaired in Ayukawa and coastal whaling commenced once again in 2012. As folklorist Kato Kōji argued, the people of Ayukawa drew much strength for the reconstruction of their town from an idealised image of their hometown during its Golden Age in the 1950s.³ This last chapter will trace the development of industrial whaling in northeastern Japan after 1912 and show at the example of Ayukawa how the region reinvented its own past to become part of Japan’s national whaling culture. But as whaling became the principal symbolical capital of Ayukawa, its former local ecological knowledge, how to live side-by-side with whales without hunting them, was forgotten.

Exterminating the Gentlemen of the Sea

It is not without irony that the Same-ura Incident solidified industrial whaling in northeastern Japan. With the decline of near-coastal fishing at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cetosphere no longer held the same environmental importance for fishermen as they were no longer dependent on sei whales and other baleen whales to bring sardines close to the shore. Whales had become a solely industrial commodity and while this commodity played a key part in the community’s economy, the animals themselves lost their cultural importance in the everyday lives of the locals.

Furthermore, the geographical location of the Same-ura station functioned as a bridgehead for Tōyō Hogei and other whaling companies to expand their activities to Hokkaido. While Tōyō Hogei opened a successful station at Muroran in southern Hokkaido in 1912, the whaling companies Dai-Nihon Suisan and Kii Suisan both encountered local resistance in Akkeshi and Nemuro and had to move to Konbumori in 1914. The two whaling stations in Konbumori helped the little town to prosper and in only a few years the number of houses doubled.⁴

In 1915, Tōyō Hogei set its eye on the main prize: The Sea of Okhotsk, where hundreds of whales gathered each summer to feed on the plankton bloom. They opened a station in Abashiri and presented the local fishing union with an offer similar to the one in Same-ura a few years earlier: a tax of five yen for every caught whale. Having learned from their experiences at the Sanriku Coast, they also built their station four kilometres outside of the settlement so as to not disturb the local fishing activities. As whale meat was not popular among the locals and Tōyō Hogei wanted to reduce waste as much as possible, they sold the waste to local entrepreneurs to produce oil and fertiliser. Even after the opening of a whale meat salting factory in 1916, whale fertiliser remained important economically. After only five years, however, the whalers had exhausted the local whale stocks to the degree that the station had to be closed again.⁵

With the advancement of refrigerator technology, it became possible to store whale meat during the summer months, further bringing down whale meat and oil prices.⁶ At the Sanriku Coast, whale fertiliser remained economically relevant for another few years. By 1923, twenty-five independent whale fertiliser businesses were operating on the Oshika Peninsula and in Ishinomaki. However, by then they only contributed to around 5 per cent of the overall profit from whaling.⁷ Whales were captured offshore in the Sea of Kinkazan and the local population saw whales primarily in the form of flensed carcasses and piles of whale meat drying in the sun outside of the town. The anthropogenic transformation of the coastal environment fundamentally changed the human–whale relationship, leading to a new regime in which the ocean around Japan became a firm part of the anthroposphere and was no longer shaped by cetaceans as the main keystone species.

This new regime was put to the test for the first time in the early 1930s, when the fishing and whaling industries had not only to contend with exhausted marine resources but also with the Great Depression. The prices for whale oil and meat dropped so much that many whaling boats stayed in the port as the running costs of the crew were higher than what they could earn with a good whale catch. Alone in 1931, over 10,000 cans of unsold whale oil were stored at one company.⁸ During this time, over 200 people lost their jobs in the whaling industry in Ayukawa. Even harder hit was Hachinohe, where in 1933, the whaling station in Same-ura, which had at this point been integrated well into the community and provided jobs for over 500 people, had to close due to financial difficulties. This time, locals fought fruitlessly to keep the station running.⁹ The Great Depression also coincided with a drastic reduction of whale stocks in the Japanese waters. In May 1930, the marine biologists Hayashi and Inouye of the Imperial University Tōhoku presented a dark future for whales and the whaling industry in the Japan Times & Mail:

At present the sei-whale, the third in industrial value, is on the way to be exterminated. … All kinds of whales living in the water around Japan are decreasing not only in number but also in size. We can say nothing but that they are dying away. Thus, one of the largest whaling grounds in the world is now being ruined.¹⁰

Reports of whales decreasing in size are alarming as they indicate that whales are caught before they have matured and had thus not the opportunity to reproduce, which would over time potentially destroy the stock. The authors of the article feared that at the current rate of hunting, whales may go extinct, which would be a loss for humanity:

The whale is a huge, powerful creature. But it is not a lion or a leopard: on the contrary it is quite harmless. According to the experience of the whalers, it does not actively attack mankind, rather it has a tendency to become intimate with us. Whales are magnificent and awe-inspiring in figure and have something gentle and great in manner. They may be called gentlemen of the sea. It is sometimes said that whales waste the fishing grounds. Most fishers now know, however, that this is merely unfounded conjecture. We can hardly find one reason why they must be exterminated.¹¹

Hayashi and Inoue’s depiction of whales as ‘gentlemen of the sea’ stands also in a stark contrast to the whaling industry, for whom whales are little more than industrial raw material. Interestingly, the authors do not argue that whales are useful for fishing communities, but rather note that they are not hurting fisheries. In this way, whales have lost their status as ‘gods of the sea’ that bring fish towards the shore for the human benefit. However, by giving them new characteristics, such as an awe-inspiring figure or gentle manners, Hayashi and Inoue depict whales as harmless animals that do not deserve to be exterminated, but rather be protected because of their inherent value as living beings. In the article, the authors do not morally question the right of the whaling industry to hunt whales, but rather point out that without international regulation, whales ‘will disappear everywhere most probably long before the middle of this century’, which ultimately will hurt the whalers themselves most.¹²

First attempts to make such international regulation were undertaken with the Whaling Convention of 1931 and 1937, but in both instances, the Japanese government was unwilling to sign these agreements. Instead, the larger Japanese whaling companies joined their international competitors to hunt whales in the southern hemisphere, ignoring the hunting seasons and catch limits agreed upon by the other whaling nations. In 1934, Nippon Hogei (formerly Tōyō Hogei) bought their first factory ship from Norway and sent it together with five catcher boats to the Antarctic region. A year later, a second whaling fleet followed and by 1938 six factory ships belonging to three Japanese companies were operating in the region. Until 1941, when whaling was halted due to the Second World War, Japanese whalers killed over 32,840 whales in Antarctic waters, compared to 14,296 whales in waters around the Japanese Empire (including Korea, Taiwan, and Karafuto) in the same year.¹³

The Rise of Coastal Whaling

Let us return once more to Ayukawa. While the whaling companies fundamentally changed the social and economic life of the village, one continued point of contention was the exclusion of locals for higher positions in the companies. Most fertiliser businesses were in the hands of local entrepreneurs, and many locals were hired as low-income workers on the whaling stations and whaling ships. However, positions such as captain, gunner, but also management of the stations were almost exclusively in the hands of men from western Japan. Moreover, the fertiliser plants were completely dependent on the large whaling companies for their main raw material of whale waste, meaning the companies could dictate whatever prices they liked.

In 1925, a group of fertiliser merchants came together to form the first independent whaling company ‘Ayukawa Hogei’ that was exclusively in the hand of locals. However, despite catching over 100 whales in the first season, the company struggled to become economically viable. A newspaper article of the time indicates that the other whaling companies, especially those from Kansai, had strongly opposed the founding of Ayukawa Hogei and did everything they could to prevent the company from becoming a threat to their market dominance. For example, Ayukawa Hogei only received a permit to hunt sperm whales and was not allowed to hunt any other species, while they were also not permitted to sell whale meat, forcing them to turn the whole whale carcass into whale fertiliser.¹⁴ Meanwhile, the other whaling companies were allowed to hunt most whale species and they gradually expanded their influence. After 1923, some companies received special permits that allowed them to hunt whales even farther away than 100 miles from the coast.¹⁵

After only a few years of operating, Ayukawa Hogei was sold in 1937 to a western Japanese whaling company.¹⁶ Nevertheless, Ayukawa Hogei left a precedent as the first independent whaling company in Ayukawa: starting in 1933, former employees of larger whaling companies and local entrepreneurs began to hunt smaller whale species that the industry had so far deemed economically worthless, such as minke whales or Baird’s beaked whales. Other than for the larger whale species no regulation existed for these whales and so anyone who could obtain a small, motorised fishing vessel and purchase a whaling gun could become an independent whaling entrepreneur.

Instead of turning these whales into fertiliser, however, they were sold locally for their meat. Initially, the demand for whale meat was negligible and the prices extremely low, but with the outbreak of the Second World War and the rationing of food, whale meat became an important source of proteins and an indigenous whaling cuisine developed at the Sanriku Coast based on minke whale meat. In 1944, large-scale whaling ceased as the whaling vessels were needed for the war effort and so many gunners and sailors who had so far worked for the large whaling companies joined the minke whale hunt.¹⁷ While the large companies brought wealth to the town, the small-scale minke whalers, which were often family-owned businesses, were much more incorporated into the social fabric of the town and were regarded by the locals as ‘our whaling’.¹⁸

After the war, the Japanese whaling industry, like many other industries, laid in ruins. Initially, the American occupying force restricted Japanese fisheries to the immediate coastal waters, but the fishing zone was extended further and further into the Pacific in the following years in order to feed the population. This included whaling, which was extended to the Ogasawara and Kazan Islands in November 1945 and in August 1946 also to the Antarctic waters.¹⁹ The prospect of renewed whaling in the Antarctic region was received with enthusiasm in Japan. A representative of the whaling industry calculated that each season enough whale meat for feeding thirty million Japanese people could be obtained.²⁰ In fact, 46 per cent of all animal protein consumed in 1947 came from whale meat, although this was mainly because much of the meat industry had been destroyed by the war.²¹ In the 1947 fishing season, 1,320 whales were killed in Antarctica, while coastal whalers killed as many as 1,992 whales, most of which were smaller species.²² In the eyes of many Japanese, whale meat saved them from famine and misery directly after the war. For the first time we can speak of a truly Japanese national whaling culture, for which whaling towns like Ayukawa stood as its symbolic representation.

A Festival for the Wild Beasts of the Sea

Despite its short existence, Ayukawa Hogei was not only an important first step of the region to emancipate itself economically from the whaling industry, but also to grow culturally independent from the western whaling culture. Even though whales had been transformed from helpers and messengers of the gods to an industrial raw material and old forms of local knowledge began to disappear from the collective memory, whales remained important cultural symbols. Over time, the religious and cultural importance of whales was re-evaluated and adapted to the new socio-economic and ecological realities. Today, for example, there are several whale memorial stones on the premise of Ayukawa’s main Buddhist temple Kannon-ji. As I argued in Chapter 2, whale memorial stones were a custom of the western whaling places and differed from the natural-looking whale stones erected on the Sanriku Coast prior to the introduction of industrial whaling.

Despite the 300-year history of the temple, all whaling-related monuments at Kannon-ji are dated sometime after 1906. The oldest two cenotaphs were erected by Tōyō Hogei in 1922 and 1928 respectively to appease the souls of whalers whose boats had been lost in the Sea of Kinkazan. The third monument is a three-metre-high whale monument tower from 1933, which reads:

Memorial tower for the spirits of one thousand whales.

(Ayukawa Hogei Company)

Unlike the two older monuments, this stone was not donated by one of the large whaling companies but by Ayukawa Hogei. According to a contemporary newspaper article from November of 1933, the stone served as a protection against the ‘whale curse’: “The whalers believe that the motherly love is very strong in whales and when a whale calf is shot the mother will become insane and starts hunting after the whaling boat and even curses the families of the whalers to die with diseases. To counter these curses, this whale memorial tower has been erected.”²³

As we have seen, in the Edo period, whale curse stories were connected to western Japanese whaling places and were uncommon on the Sanriku Coast. Mayumi Itoh argued that these rituals and memorial towers showed that the whalers not only wanted to relieve their guilt of killing whales but also treated whales, in religious terms, in the same way they did humans who died at sea.²⁴ Finding such a story here suggests that the perception of whales changed in Ayukawa after the introduction of industrial whaling. Furthermore, the timing of the erection of this stone was no coincidence as only a few months earlier, a massive tsunami had destroyed large parts of Ayukawa, including many fertiliser plants.²⁵ With this monument, Ayukawa Hogei not only sought divine protection but also demonstrated to the community and the other whaling companies that they had been successful in capturing over 1,000 whales, despite the constant pressure from the other companies, the difficult financial environment of the Great Depression, and the 1933 Sanriku tsunami.

The whale memorial stone was meant as a symbol of the emancipation of the locals from the larger whaling companies. Not only had Ayukawa Hogei successfully demonstrated that they could perform whaling techniques, but they had also appropriated western whaling culture. Ayukawa was now equal to the western Japanese whaling companies. In this way, by the end of the war, in Ayukawa and at other whaling ports of the Sanriku Coast, a new coastal whaling culture had developed due to the establishment of independent whaling entrepreneurs. These coastal whalers not only facilitated new cultural traditions, which they adopted from western Japan, but also helped to establish a regional whaling cuisine based on minke whale meat, that differed from other regions.

The notion of a ‘whale curse’ remained a central pillar of the Ayukawa whaling culture. While not many primary sources have survived, we receive some glimpses of this culture from the novel Kujira no Machi (The Whaling Town) from 1943, which was re-released in 1955 under the more dramatic title Umi no Yajū (The Wild Beasts of the Sea).²⁶ Taikichi, the protagonist of the novel and possibly the alter ego of the author, who was a sailor himself, moves from Hokkaido to Ayukawa to work on a whaling ship.²⁷ In one scene in the novel, the crew of his ship captures four sperm whales and tow them with a chain to their catcher boat. However, one of the chained sperm whales is still alive and stares with hatred in his eyes towards the whalers. As one of the sailors assures Taikichi, the hate of the whale is not reserved for him: This whale is not holding a grudge against you. It is the captain. Before he was a captain, he has worked as a gunner and has until now killed over 1500 whales. It is the grudge of 1500 whales that the captain has gathered inside him.²⁸

Later in the novel, the crew pays their respect to their shipwrecked comrades at the whale memorial stones at Kannon-ji. One of the whalers explains that some decades ago a ship from the whaling company Tōyō Hogei did go missing in the Sea of Kinkazan and the crew of thirteen was never found again. Many people in Ayukawa believed that a sperm whale was responsible for this.²⁹

Unlike Hayashi and Inoue, the novel does not portray whales as ‘gentlemen of the sea’ but rather as ‘wild beasts of the sea’, showing yet another shift in the perception of whales. According to the novel, the whalers believed whales would resent the humans for hunting them and would even attack the ships. This resentment could even transcend death and the angry souls of the whales could bring misfortune to the whalers or the community as a whole. To counter such curses and to relieve the guilt from killing other living beings, the erection of whale memorial stones and the holding of whale memorial services was necessary.

Such memorial services were ritualised in a yearly festival starting in 1953 when the first community-wide religious ceremony was held to celebrate the catching of over 40,000 whales since 1906 (Figure 8.1). Prior to the festival, whalers, of whom most originally came from western Japan, had held religious rituals among themselves. The new festival was integrated into the traditional Tanabata and O-Bon festival and included Buddhist rituals to comfort the spirits of whales and shipwrecked sailors alike with a floating lantern memorial service. For this, a priest from Kannon-ji brought down a whale tablet to the sea in a ritual called umi segaki so that the whale souls can be sent off to the sea beyond.³⁰ The appeasement of the whale souls was modelled after similar Buddhistic rituals from whaling regions in western Japan. It was believed that whales, like humans, could after their death become a Buddha and enter Nirvana or be reincarnated into a new life. However, when they are killed violently, they might end up as wandering hungry ghosts among the three Worlds of Karmic Reincarnation tormenting the living. The primary religious goal of the festival was therefore to appease the ‘wild beasts of the sea’ so that they would not bring harm to the community.

Figure 8.1 Whaling festival in Ayukawa in the 1950s.

Photograph by Kanoi Seisuke.

However, the festival fulfilled also other cultural needs of the Ayukawa community. Alongside the religious rituals, the festival was from the beginning designed to attract tourists from Sendai and Ishinomaki. A boat race and a demonstration shooting of a live whale took place in the harbour, baseball games and water sports. Moreover, the woman association reinvented and performed a New Year’s folk dance from nearby Tashirojima, as the ‘Seven Gods Dance’ to impress visitors.³¹ Anthropologist Masami Iwasaki-Goodman has argued that this first ‘whale festival’ (kujira matsuri) marked the beginning of a new era when whales and whaling finally became a collective symbol for all inhabitants of Ayukawa.³² As a whaling port, the population of Ayukawa was affluent with many people staying in the town only for a few years before moving on. As a consequence, families were often torn apart and local associations fulfilled quasi-familial roles for many inhabitants of Ayukawa.³³ It is thus important to recognise that the festival was organised not by the whaling companies, but by the local groups, such as the firefighters, the women’s group and the youth group. In later years, the organisation of the festival was taken over by the Ayukawa stores and shop organisation.

Similar to the whale memorial tower of Ayukawa Hogei in 1933, these associations appropriated the religious symbols and rituals from the western Japanese whaling culture and made them their own. For example, in later years, the live shooting of a whale was replaced with a plastic mock whale that was caught in the harbour with the net-whaling technique as part of a performance.³⁴ As we have seen, the net whaling technique has never successfully been established in the region and it is therefore not an essential part of the regions whaling history. While most locals were aware of this fact, by including the net-whale performance in the whale festival, the associations invented a new tradition that for outsiders seemed to be older than it actually was.³⁵

The whale festival was cemented as part of Ayukawa’s culture on a national level with the release of the feature film Kujira o tatakau otoko (The Men who Fought Whales) in 1957, which might be loosely based on the previously mentioned novel. The protagonist of the movie, a Japanese gunner called Yamagi, arrives in Ayukawa suspecting that a rival gunner was involved in the death of his brother. The two gunners and their respective crews soon come in direct conflict with each other, also because both men are interested in the barmaid Yuki. The climax of the movie is set during the whale festival and after a bar fight, Yuki reveals to Yamagi that everything had been a misunderstanding, as the rival gunner had actually been a good friend of the brother but felt guilty for not being able to prevent his death during a whale hunt.

The film was shot on location, featuring footage of real whale hunts and the flensing of whales at a whaling station, giving us a glimpse of life in Ayukawa during the ‘Golden Age’ of whaling. The whale festival itself was performed a second time in this year in Ayukawa, so that the movie crew could film it.³⁶ We can see that during this time period the flensing was mostly done by the local women, something also mentioned in the novel.³⁷ While the life and hunt on the ships were portrayed in the movie as a purely masculine affair, the processing of the whales was no longer in the hands of men. Indeed, as early as 1911, 40 per cent of workers at the local fertiliser plants were women, who were preferred by the owners, as they could be paid lower wages than men.³⁸ Women are also prominent during the whale festivals, for example when a large whale puppet is dragged during the street and some flenser open its belly to reveal three dancing women inside. Gender roles had thus shifted, and women had become an integral part of the new Ayukawa whaling culture, not only as workers at the whaling stations but also as performers at and organisers of the whale festival.

Unlike the novel, whales appear here not as wild beasts but as a natural force that only the most masculine men can harvest to further his social status among his peers and among women. Despite its title, the movie is not really concerned with the fight between men and whales, but rather whales are tokens of male potency as the rival whaling crews define their struggles over which group can kill more whales. In one scene only one group was able to shoot a whale in the Sea of Kinkazan, while the other group had to return to the harbour empty handed, looking entirely defeated. This is further highlighted during the whale festival, when Yagami has to show his superiority by defeating an opponent gunner by shooting the mock whale in the harbour with a harpoon cannon. Also, a reporter in the movie tells the captain of one of the whaling ships that ‘all people of Japan believe that you do a very good job and are very grateful for your work’, highlighting how a ‘masculine art’ like whaling was constructed as a service for the nation. Overall, the movie was an important propaganda piece for the whaling industry and presented Ayukawa as an important whaling port with a long history.

A Whaling Town without Whales

Ayukawa reached its peak in the middle of the 1950s, when the population had grown to 3,795 inhabitants. The city centre boasted not only stores for daily life, but also a movie theatre, bars, cafes, billiard halls, cabarets, pachinko parlours, and other entertainment establishments.³⁹ Older inhabitants often remember this time with nostalgia as the ‘Golden Age’ of Ayukawa, when the smell of whale oil in the air was associated with wealth. However, all this wealth came at the price of a destroyed cetosphere.

Shortly after the war, the Fisheries Agency had divided the whaling industry into three categories: pelagic whaling, which mainly focused on the Antarctic Ocean, large-type coastal whaling (LTCW), and small-type coastal whaling (STCW), the latter specialised in hunting smaller whales for local consumption with whaling vessels weighing less than 30 tons. Initially, the Fisheries Agency gave permits freely, and by 1948 over 73 vessels had registered as STCW, leading to fierce competitions among the whalers. Similarly, the five LTCW companies hunted large whales near Hokkaido and the Sanriku Coast without restrictions, but soon the whalers noticed a decrease in the size of the caught whales, just as Hayashi and Inouye had already warned in the 1930s. The Fisheries Agency began setting quotas for sperm whales, but according to Kondō Isao, a whaler and local historian from Ayukawa, the LTCW companies met in secret to set their own quotas. The companies began to actively deceive the Fisheries Agency supervisors who were sent to the whaling port to overwatch the quotas.⁴⁰

The same tactics were also used when two observers from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), of which Japan was a member since 1951, arrived in Kushiro and Ishinomaki to monitor Japanese coastal whaling in 1972.⁴¹ The whalers organised that the observer who was supposed to control the whaling stations in Onagawa, Ayukawa, and Yamada was accommodated in Ishinomaki, which was too far away to make effective control visits. Only after repeated complaints was the observer transferred to a nearby hostel in Ayukawa. The whalers not only falsified official records by recording the size and sex of the caught whales incorrectly but also proceeded to flense whales at night so that the observer could not record the true number of whales caught.⁴² These attempts at deception and mismanagement, born out of the need to remain financially viable, not only damaged Japan’s international reputation but also accelerated the disintegration of the whale stocks. As a result, by 1971, fin whales were effectively extinct in the Sea of Kinkazan, followed by sei whales in 1975. Kondō concludes: ‘The actual number of animals captured after 1950 is known only to the gods, the published number of whale catches are completely meaningless.’⁴³

Meanwhile, other nations terminated their whaling programs, and the international community demanded an end to all whaling activities. While the two IWC observers were operating in Japan, a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling was suggested at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. These were devastating news for Ayukawa. Only a year prior, in 1971, the new panoramic ‘Cobalt Road’ was opened that shortened travel time by car from Ayukawa to Ishinomaki. It was hoped that this new road would be a large boost for local tourism. In anticipation of large tourist crowds, the founder of Toba Hogei, a local whaling company, took a large loan to build a massive hotel near Ayukawa.⁴⁴ Indeed, in the first year, over 750,000 guests came to the Oshika Peninsula. The main attraction for most tourists was minke whale meat, which was served at local restaurants or was sold at souvenir shops.⁴⁵

However, the prospect for implementing a whaling moratorium threatened the booming tourist industry. A local craftsman, who made jewellery out of sperm whale teeth, commented at the time: ‘That the protection of whales has become so much talked about recently, worries me. To put it bluntly, if they decide not to take whales anymore, I’ll be out of business.’⁴⁶ These worries were shared by many locals as 600 jobs were directly or indirectly connected to whaling in Ayukawa. Tourism alone, especially without fresh whale meat and other whale products to sell, would not be enough to compensate for the loss of the whaling industry. Furthermore, without the tax money from the whaling industry, further investments into infrastructure were also threatened.⁴⁷

In an attempt to prevent the moratorium, the mayor of Ayukawa travelled to Tokyo to fight for the survival of commercial whaling. While he and others made whaling a national political issue, they could not prevent that the IWC voted for a ban on commercial whaling on great whales in 1982. Originally, Japan vetoed this decision and was thus not bound by the moratorium, but when the US government threatened to reduce the Japanese fishing quota in the American exclusive economic zone, the Japanese government rescinded their veto. The moratorium went into effect at the end of 1987, officially ending commercial whaling in Japan. However, this was not the end of all whaling activities: The LTCW companies merged their assets to form Kyōdō Senpaku, a new company that sent its ships to the Antarctic starting in 1988 to conduct whaling for scientific purposes, which was allowed under the moratorium.

The large companies that conducted LTCW had all interests in other fisheries, making their withdrawal from the unprofitable whaling industry less severe, especially as they were generously compensated by the Japanese government. STCW companies, on the other hand, were hit much harder: not only were they not compensated they were also forbidden to hunt the now-protected minke whales. Even so, STCW operators in the four communities Abashiri (Hokkaido), Ayukawa (Miyagi), Wada-ura (Chiba), and Taiji (Wakayama) did not give up their licenses and instead continued whaling smaller species such as Baird’s beaked whales, that were not protected by the moratorium.

In 1988, an international workshop of anthropologists aimed at answering whether STCW should be categorised at the IWC as ‘aboriginal whaling’, which would have allowed to hunt a limited number of minke whales again. The researcher conducted fieldwork in the four communities and concluded that they possessed a ‘whaling culture’ that they defined as ‘the shared knowledge of whaling transmitted across generations’.⁴⁸ They continued:

This shared knowledge consists of a number of different socio-cultural inputs: a common heritage and world view, an understanding of ecological (including spiritual) and technological relations between human beings and whales, special distribution processes, and a food culture. The common heritage found in Japan’s whaling culture is based on a long historical tradition.⁴⁹

While a majority of IWC member states rejected the notion of categorising STCW as aboriginal whaling, the workshop and its participants became instrumental in portraying the ‘whaling towns’ as bearer of a shared Japan whaling culture that was based on a long historical tradition.⁵⁰ The cultural and religious whaling traditions of Taiji and communities in northern Kyushu, which had long since given up whaling themselves, were thus represented as a genuine part of Ayukawa’s history.⁵¹ No mentions are made in the workshop report or in later publications by the same authors that fishermen in northeastern Japan and Hokkaido had for centuries developed their own non-whaling culture and protested against the introduction of western Japanese whaling culture. The struggle to keep coastal whaling alive after the moratorium, facilitated the need to reinvent a historical whaling culture that was shared among the communities. In this narrative, the history between humans and whales began in Ayukawa in 1906 with the introduction of industrial whaling, and any previous relationships that might have existed faded from the collective cultural memory.⁵²

The 2011 Tsunami

The loss of their main economic resource, minke whale, was a huge shock for coastal whalers in Ayukawa. While the other three remaining whaling towns had focused on other species, Ayukawa’s local cuisine had since the 1940s been focused mostly on minke whale meat. Nevertheless, under the provision of the IWC moratorium it was still possible to hunt some smaller, not protected cetacean species; therefore, the STCW began targeting a small number of Baird’s beaked whales, even though its meat was not particularly popular in the region. To support the struggling coastal whaling industry, in 1994 the Japanese Government began organising scientific whaling expeditions in the North Pacific, modelled after the controversial Antarctic scientific whaling programme. After 2003, one of these programmes allowed the two remaining whaling companies to hunt the otherwise protected minke whales. Without this additional money made from selling the minke whale meat at local markets, the whaling business would not have been profitable.⁵³ Indeed, 10–20 per cent of all whale meat in Japan is consumed in Miyagi Prefecture.⁵⁴

This was the situation, when the 2011 tsunami hit Ayukawa, pulverising the town in a few minutes. In the direct aftermath, it was unclear if the complete destruction of the coastal infrastructure would also mean the end of whaling for Ayukawa. However, in order to rekindle a shared identity and prevent the disintegration of the community, as more and more people moved away from the region, local stakeholders began to argue that the future of Ayukawa itself was inextricably linked to the whaling industry. The national government itself promised quick help and allocated 2.28 billion yen from the Tōhoku Reconstruction Funds for whaling purposes. However, soon it came to light that the money was not intended for Ayukawa but rather to pay for protective measures against anti-whaling groups in the Antarctic Ocean. Having lost precious time over this political scandal, the few years earlier founded Ayukawa Hogei decided to rebuild the whaling station with its own money and in 2012, the scientific whaling operation was once again conducted in Ayukawa. Whalers have struggled to find enough minke whales in the sea off Ayukawa to fulfil the government-set quota. After the tsunami of 2011, coastal whalers in Ayukawa on the Oshika Peninsula began to notice a sudden drop in minke whales in the Sea of Kinkazan.⁵⁵ One of the involved researchers speculated that the tsunami might have changed the oceanographic conditions so much that the minke whales had temporally changed their migration route and no longer came to the region.⁵⁶ To make matters worse, most of the captured minke whales turned out to be sexually immature, indicating that the hunt was not sustainable. Because of the poor performance, the government began in 2017 to move some of the scientific whaling programmes away from Ayukawa to Hachinohe and Abashiri, where they hoped they would receive better catches.⁵⁷

Despite these difficulties, local stakeholders worked hard for keeping the Ayukawa coastal whaling culture alive. Starting in 2012, a group of senior citizens, who met after the tsunami in a temporary housing facility, began to sell whale meat online and experimented with new whale recipes. Similarly, locals also revived the whale festival, which was held once again yearly after 2013. When I visited the festival in August 2017, most of the whaling company workers were away whaling in Hachinohe. In the evening, the spectators could go down to the harbour to watch the cutting of whale meat; besides this, the whaling companies played a much smaller role in the new festival than they did before the tsunami. There were also no rituals for appeasing the angry souls of hunted whales. Instead, priests from Kinkazan performed an old dragon dance. Motifs of whales were represented on several posters, but the animals themselves were only ‘attending’ in the form of whale meat. Apart from a small amount of frozen minke meat that was sold, volunteers were giving away free samples of fresh Baird’s beaked whale meat, sponsored by the whaling companies. As Baird’s beaked whale meat does not taste good raw, it was cooked and various creative new dishes were tried out; for example, whale pizza, whale cornflake sticks, and grilled whale meat served with miso.

The festival is one of the main events of the year for the people of Ayukawa. However, according to folklorist Katō Koji, who was directly involved in the revival of the festival, its objective has changed: ‘Before the tsunami, it was a whale festival for a whaling town, but now it exists to hold the community together and bring back people who had moved away.’⁵⁸ Katō further explained that the whale festival plays an important role in the local identity of Ayukawa, even though most people nowadays have little to do with whaling. Even whale meat, the most obvious symbol of the local whaling culture, is only eaten on special occasions like this.

Since 2014, a group of interested citizens, both former and current, have met several times to discuss the reconstruction of Ayukawa. They have developed a plan for a completely new harbour area, with a business district, a tourist centre where various whale products are to be sold and a new whale museum. The museum is intended not only to display exhibits from the destroyed Oshika Whale Land but also to ‘teach, protect and transmit the culture and history of Ayukawa that had thrived under the whaling industry in the past’. As in the 1970s during the ‘nostalgia boom’, it is hoped that Ayukawa will once again profit from its ‘whaling culture’ image. The new harbour area with the whale museum opened in 2021, exactly ten years after the tsunami.

Conclusion

Over the course of hundred years, the Northeast, with Ayukawa at its centre, developed its own regional identity as a whaling region that was part of a national framework. While in the first decades, western whaling companies effectively monopolised not only the whaling economy but also the cultural life of the Northeast, since the 1930s local initiatives have begun to reinterpret western Japanese whaling culture as part of the Northeast’s own culture. The founding of their own whaling companies, the building of whaling monuments and eventually the establishment of a whale festival, which was prominently featured in contemporary media, effectually led to the Northeast becoming Japan’s primary whaling region, while whaling in western Japan became almost irrelevant save for its historical significance.

With these changes also came a reinterpretation of the role of whales for the coastal communities. No longer were they regarded as benevolent ‘gods of the sea’ that brought benefits to humans. Other non-violent interpretations, such as the ‘gentlemen of the sea’, were similarly quickly abandoned and instead the discourse moved towards the ‘wild beasts of the sea’ that were dangerous to humans and only the most skilled and heroic whalers were able to take on directly. With the end of the cetosphere, the agency of whales also diminished. We can see this for example directly after the war, when, according to the popular discourse, whale meat saved the Japanese nation from starvation. However, it had not been the sacrifice of the whales that had made possible this miracle but rather the ingeniouity of the industrial whaling fleet in the Antarctic Ocean Indeed, at this point, outside of rituals performed at whaling festivals aimed at tourists, whales had transformed from gods that actively shaped the lives of humans to little more than an obstacle for efficiently extracting marine biomass for industrial products.

While Ayukawa flourished during its ‘Golden Age’ as a whaling town, the loss of the Northeast’s less intrusive and violent non-whaling culture had dire effects on the abundance of whales and the well-being of the overall coastal ecosystem. The capitalistic logic behind industrial whaling led to severe overharvesting, which was compensated by the taking of immature animals and the direct forgery of statistics and deception of the Fishery Agency and the IWC. The truth is that it was not the international community and their cries for an end of slaughtering of cetaceans that brought an end to industrial whaling but the whalers themselves who had destroyed their own ecological foundation. The IWC moratorium was a convenient way to abandon a devastated industry without losing face as blame could be placed elsewhere.

But whaling did not stop completely. In the past thirty years, Ayukawa and some other communities persistently continued small-scale coastal whaling in the hope to revive the whaling industry one day, as they believed that the economic and social future of their communities was dependent on whaling. The 2011 tsunami reinforced this feeling, and the reconstruction of the town was linked directly with the coastal whaling industry. The regulatory framework given by the IWC moratorium gave the remaining whalers the opportunity to experiment with new forms of coastal whaling that were less intrusive to the ecosystem and might be in its small scale even be sustainable. However, the damage done to the cetosphere seems to be so all encompassing that even the hunting of fewer than hundred whales a year seems to be too much for the ecosystem to handle. As it stands at the moment, the whale pilgrimage to the Sea of Kinkazan has come to an end.

Epilogue

In late 2018, just days after the Japanese government announced its decision to withdraw from the IWC, I visited Ayukawa one more time. While politicians in Tokyo and in some of the whaling towns such as Hachinohe or Kushiro, enthusiastically proclaimed a new age of Japanese whaling, people in Ayukawa were less optimistic. Certainly, like the other whaling towns, Ayukawa had fought hard for the past thirty years to reverse the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling. At the time, the reconstruction of Ayukawa after the 2011 tsunami was steadily progressing, the groundwork for the new harbour area with the whaling museum had just been laid. It seemed like the timing for a resumption of commercial whaling could not have been better.

However, the locals I spoke with expressed concern that Ayukawa would not be able to compete with other regions that wanted to participate in whaling. As Ayukawa had lost most of its infrastructure and working population due to the tsunami, the town was no longer a prime candidate for a whaling place. Situated at the tip of the Oshika Peninsula and with no access to a train system, reaching the hamlet remained inconvenient. In the past, its remote location was more than compensated with the fact that the Sea of Kinkazan had been brimming with cetaceans. After a hundred years of hunting, only ruins of the former ‘castle of sperm whales’ remained, however. The whales, it seemed, had moved elsewhere. To make matters worse, the recently rebuild whaling station had been constructed with the restrictions of the moratorium in mind, who had only allowed the hunt of some smaller-sized whales. Animals larger than eight metres could not even be processed effectively at the station. For the locals, it, therefore, seemed likely that commercial whaling will move to ports with better infrastructure and location.

It is too early to tell whether coastal whaling will be able to become commercially viable again. However, looking at the present-day debates, it becomes clear that there is little doubt for people in Hachinohe or Ayukawa that they are representatives of Japan’s ‘national whaling culture’. Older forms of human–whale interactions that existed in the region prior to the introduction of industrial whaling have disappeared completely from the collective memory. We can further exemplify this shift in the role of the whale god Ebisu. During one of my interviews with a former whaler from Ayukawa, I noticed a small Ebisu household altar (kamidana) in his living room. When I commented on this, he looked very surprised, as he could not recall the meaning of the altar and so he asked his wife about it. As it turned out, the couple were not aware that their household altar was dedicated to Ebisu and did also not know the cultural background apart from vaguely remembering him as a ‘god of fishing’. Similarly, at the present-day whale festival in Ayukawa, Ebisu does not play any major role.

The lost knowledge of how to live peacefully side-by-side is of course only one of many side-effects of the anthropogenic takeover of the cetosphere. Industrial whaling in the twentieth century decreased the worldwide whale stocks so drastically that the cetosphere ceased to exist. Only in the past fifty years have NGOs and other concerned voices called for a restoration of the cetosphere by ending commercial whaling and setting up ‘whale sanctuaries’.¹ Bringing back the cetosphere may also come with some risks, however, as the oceans have become part of the anthroposphere and there will potentially be a conflict of interest between cetaceans and commercial fisheries.²

In this regard, some pro-whaling nations articulate the view that humans and whales are in contest over the same marine resources and that the culling of marine mammals is necessary to ensure a sustainable harvest of fishery products.³ Japanese scientists from the Institute of Cetacean Research calculated that whales consume roughly 280 to 500 million metric tons of marine animals annually, while commercial fishing constitutes ‘only’ 90 million metric tons.⁴ Norwegian scientists found that the increase in minke whales after the end of commercial whaling led to a decrease in certain fish species in the Barents Sea, where cetaceans consume over 100,000 metric tons of cod each year.⁵ In the view of these scientists, restoring the whale stocks to their previous levels could only be done at the cost of the fishing industry and, therefore, humans have no other choice than to set up a small-scale sustainable whaling program to prevent the collapse of the current fishing regime.

Other scientists, mainly from anti-whaling nations, have rejected this interpretation by arguing that marine mammals mostly eat squid and fish that are not harvested by humans while providing necessary services to the marine ecosystems that humans cannot easily imitate.⁶ A return to the cetosphere would produce a more diversified and abundant marine ecosystem and would be, in the long run, more beneficial for humans as well.⁷

What can environmental histories like the one presented in this book contribute to these debates? The historical perspective taken here reveals that some coastal communities in northeast Japan (and possibly in other regions of early modern Japan) have lived closely with whales without being in direct competition with them. Indeed, the local ecological knowledge of how to benefit from the cetosphere was widespread among the villages and can be traced in historical documents, folk stories, and material objects since the early Edo period. This study has revealed that early modern Japan possessed not one singular whaling history but several competing whale-human cultures.

While many coastal communities regarded whales as divine beings, the reason they refused to conduct whaling was not that they saw intrinsic value in the animals,⁸ but because the cetosphere had tangible socio-economic and cultural benefits for the coastal communities. Killing whales threatened the long-term survival of the community as they would no longer bring sardines and bonito closer to the shore and the outflowing whale blood and oil polluted the coastal ecosystem. Instead of seeing whales only as a resource that can be harvested for meat and oil or as an unwanted competitor that disturbs the human-managed fishing regimes, the human-cetacean relationship was much more nuanced and layered. ‘The gods of the sea’ could bring wealth and prosperity in one region and ‘curse’ a whole community in another. This book has mostly looked at how early modern coastal communities imagined the effect the cetosphere had on them. To this day, the question of whether sei whales bring sardines and capelin closer to the shore has not been definitively answered. Furthermore, many of the feedback loops a whale-dominated coastal ecosystem provided have probably been lost for good. At this point, it is questionable if humanity has the ability to restore the whale stocks to pre-industrial whaling levels and thus reinstate the cetosphere. As this book has shown, however, it seems likely that it would lead to a more diverse marine ecosystem from which humanity and many nonhumans would profit in many different ways.