(from "ISANA" No. 6, 1992)

Jay D. Hastings
Attorney State of Washington U.S., Counselor, Japan Fisheries Association

The work was challenging. Japanese trawl and longline fisheries were faced with inevitable phase out from US waters. We measured our success by how much of a pre-200-mile fishery we could retain for Japanese fishermen. We could never gain anything.

I found Japanese fishermen to be honorable and their fishery positions credible to represent. After all, these Japanese fishermen were not engaged in whaling. This was important to me, because environmentalists had skillfully implanted in my mind a graphic picture of greedy Japanese whalers and their wanton slaughter. How could the whalers have so little with regard for these magnificent animals and their environment? I carefully avoided the remotest association with Japanese whaling.

By the mid-1980s whaling was becoming a daily headache in my struggle to salvage Japanese fisheries in US waters. Japan was resisting an impending world moratorium on commercial whaling. And because the United States threatened to cut substantially Japanese fisheries allocations in the US zone, the relationship with the United States was increasingly tense. I could not help wonder in frustration why the whaling issue must complicate my work.

These tensions were at a peak in the fall of 1988. I had planned a business trip to Japan. Three friends with the US government were planning to attend an international fisheries meeting in Tokyo at the same time. I asked if they would be interested in visiting a Japanese fishing port. They were most interested. They asked to visit a coastal whaling village!

I was surprised and disturbed. I did not want to show them anything related to whaling. But how could I reject their request? I frantically began studying Japanese whaling to find an appropriate village to which I could take my eager friends. Publications on the history and culture of Japanese whaling had been collecting dust on my bookshelf for years, but now I blew the dust off and got to work.

After mush hard study, Ayukawa was the village I finally selected, and I arranged for myself a pre-visit introduction. I wanted to make certain my friends would not see the more offensive aspects of whaling during the official visit. Jun'ichiro Okamoto, the whaling section chief of the Fisheries Agency of Japan had taken care of me when I first visited Japan in 1976. Now, after 12 years, he would introduce me to Ayukawa.

Ayukawa, located on the Oshika Peninsula of Japan's northeast coast, is a long way from Tokyo - both in traveling time and in its culture. The bus from Ishinomaki to Ayukawa also serves as the school bus in the remote areas of the Peninsula. It made several stops on the spectacular mountainous road that edges along the rugged coastline. The comments and stares from small school children confirmed that few foreigners ever visited this area.

The bus dropped us off on the main street of Ayukawa. What I understood had been a lively town at one time was now silent. We walked through the lonely streets to City Hall. There we met Mayor Shigehiko Azumi, other city officials and the town's head whalers, Mr. Yojiro Toba and Mr. Toshihiko Abe. We discussed the official tour which I was previewing. We planned that we would first go to the home of Mr. Toba for a brief meeting, then visit the Buddhist priest and the town's whale museum. I expressed concern over the impression my American friends might get from the Toba home, which I envisioned to be a mansion built with the plunder from whales. My hosts assured me that I was not to worry.

The simple tatami room of the Toba family home became my first classroom on Japanese whaling. As the town whalers proudly shared their profession with me, the long history of Japanese coastal whaling unfolded. I guess I had somewhat overlooked the importance of this history in my recent readings. When we visited the local Buddhist priest, he enrichened this history with his explanations of deep Japanese cultural and ethical values towards the whale as a provider of human life through food. I had also overlooked the meaning of these values to the Japanese people during my impulsive studies. And certainly the flenching of a small whale which I forced myself to watch later that evening proved to be mild compared with the dressing of a deer under the knife of a unskilled American weekend sport hunter.

That evening I mulled over my failure in prejudging an issue before I had made any effort to understand both sides. I recalled with pride American history and the revolution of my forefathers against the English throne's attempt to impose moral values on America colonists. And I recognized that American are now attempting to impose many American's morality upon the people of another culture. Should the Japanese people just give in to this pressure from Americans? Of course not, I realized.

The next morning we returned to City Hall to wrap up the schedule for the official visit. Before Okamoto-san and I left for Tokyo, Mayor Azumi told me that some seven or eight years ago, a group of American environmentalists visited Ayukawa. They walked around and took photos of everything related to whaling. The village people offered the Americans their traditional hospitality and proudly explained their way of life. But the Americans just said they opposed whaling.

Later Mayor Azumi heard of a report published by the Americans after they returned to the United States. The environmentalists reported that the people who live in Ayukawa are villains because they catch whales. Mayor Azumi paused a moment and then assured me there are no villains living in Ayukawa. I concurred, and I promised Mayor Azumi that I would return to this village with other Americans to help them share my experience, and, I hoped, my improved understanding of Japanese whaling.

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