Machiavellism Perished

(Translated from a contribution article in "Nihon Geirui Kenkyuusho Juunen-shi" which was published on the 10th anniversary of the ICR in 1997.
* Foot note is mine)

Kunio Yonezawa
 Former Japanese representative on the International Whaling Commission


The world history of the study of cetaceans cannot be told without results contributed by Japanese scientists, and also research whaling in the Antarctic and North Pacific by the Institute of Cetacean Research are the world's invaluable property in their quality, scale, uniqueness, and academic value. These fruits were the prime mover in defeating the Machiavellism which dominated the IWC Scientific Committee after 1972, and finally let anti-whaling power admit that the basis of anti-whaling has nothing to do with science. The history of the IWC Scientific Committee also tells us a historical rule that Machiavellism, however skillfully plotted, will perish if it misses the immediate victory in the first chance. Two incidents which happened in 1977 and 78 were, in this sense, a typical example of self-destruction of Machiavellism.

The drama in 1977 was about computers. This year, the anti-whaling bloc made Dr. J.R. Beddington, their young hope, analyzed the stock status of North Pacific sperm whales and tried to use the result to ban the catch of this stock. Beddington's paper, which disputed Dr. Doi's paper which concluded that the sperm whale stock was in stable status, draw great attention because of using a new method - simulation, but it turned out later that this paper was a sham. Japanese scientists knew it by intuition.

There were various reasons, but summing up, Beddington's paper adopted Doi's model as the basic mathematical model. Since we noticed artificiality in the result, we strongly requested to have a special meeting to reach settlement and managed to hold it. The proceeding was as we expected. First, we detected that Beddington's computer program did not produce the result as he insisted, being pointed out he withdrew the paper. So, the proposal to ban the catch was rejected at this special meeting.

At that time, there were some members who strangely interpreted Beddington's mistake as good will, but the similar artificiality was found next year in his colleague J. Cooke's computation. After that, a rule was introduced in the Scientific Committee that result of computer programs must be checked by a third person. This drama was ugly, and it could be fatal if we coped with it in an improper way.

The second drama was caused by their boss, Dr. S.J. Holt, next year. Irritated by the tendency of not only the Scientific Committee but also some of the anti-whaling people to admit that minke whale stock was robust, he tried to argue against Dr. Ohsumi's paper which estimated the Antarctic minke whale population was over 450,000. Whatever scholastic discussion he had accumulated, it was just a pile of empty theory, and since the figure he insisted on was absurd - only 20,000 minke whales in the Antarctic - he was just laughed at by the majority of the Scientific Committee members. Since the Scientific Committee had been having discomfort with the domination of Holt, the failure of his performance strengthened it and his influence lowered rapidly.

After Holt lost influence in 1980, the IWC Scientific Committee could reach unanimous agreements in important decision makings such as adoption of the Revised Management Procedure. This change means the Scientific Committee recovered its tradition, as it rejected the moratorium resolution of the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm soon after the conference, but the way to today was, as seen in the above dramas, not smooth.

* In another article in this ICR publication, a Japanese Fisheries Agency's official Mr. Yagi points out as follows about the IWC Scientific Committee:

"... Situation in the Scientific Committee used to be that anti-whaling scientists, who did not do research by themselves, argued against the results by whaling nations such as Japan, Norway. Among the over one hundred people in the Scientific Committee, only four to five scientists have an anti-whaling stance, and the situation was that those people spoke without reserve, causing confusion in the committee. It looked as if their interest was in finding faults throughout the discussion. In the world of science, there are cases that we cannot assure the result of study is correct 100%, but if we explained like "This is 90% correct but there is 10% possibility that this is incorrect...", then four or five anti-whaling scientists emphasized the possibility of the 10%, and depending on how the committee's reports were written, they sometimes gave an impression to outsiders that difference of opinions in the committee was evenly divided. ..."
In such a situation a tendency that a policy that was based on a minority opinion in the Scientific Committee was adopted in the Plenary Session, supported by the overwhelming majority power of anti-whalers.

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