Chapter 7 analyses the violent conflict between industrial whalers and fishermen leading up to the Hachinohe uprising of 1911. Whalers, bureaucrats, and fishing scientists used fishery science to discredit the ecological knowledge of the local fishermen. In their accounts, allegedly objective scientific knowledge proved that whaling would not harm fishing while the locals' counterarguments were ridiculed as religious superstitions. Unlike in Ayukawa, fishermen in Hachinohe showed stronger resistance, eventually leading to the destruction of the whaling station in Same-ura in late 1911. However, the whaling company was able to reconcile with the local fishermen by offering them job opportunities in the whaling business. By 1912, all protests in Northeast Japan ceased, and whaling towns, such as Ayukawa and Hachinohe, brought economic wealth to the region. It is argued that the dwindling resistance of the population was closely connected to the decline of near-coastal fishing around 1900. With the advent of offshore fishing, whales no longer held the same environmental importance for fishermen, as they were no longer dependent on them to bring sardines close to the shore.

Chapter 5 discusses how industrial whaling was disseminated from Norway and Russia to the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that industrial whaling, invented by Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn in the 1860s, was taken up by Russian and Japanese whalers as a way to colonise the coastal waters and marine resources around the Korean Peninsula. Industrial whaling techniques allowed whalers to hunt even the largest whale species, such as blue and fin whales, which had a devastating effect on the feedback loops of the marine ecosystem. After a Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, western Japanese whaling companies used colonial tactics to bring industrial whaling to the main islands. The chapter argues that the rise of industrial whaling altered the interaction between humans and cetaceans forever, leading to the swift destruction of the cetosphere. While industrial whaling was successfully disseminated in colonial Korea, Japanese fishermen were more resistant and began protesting the new methods even in regions that had long proto-industrial whaling histories. However, the fiercest protest against industrial whaling occurred in former non-whaling regions such as Hokkaido and the Northeast.