Japan's Whaling: The Politics of Culture in Historical Perspective (review)

Hiroyuki Watanabe, Japan’s Whaling: The Politics of Culture in Historical Perspective. Translated by Hugh Clarke from the Japanese Original, Hogei mondai no rekishi shakaigaku 捕鯨問題の歴史社会学: 近現代日本におけるクジラと人間, Tokyo, Tōshindō, 2006 Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2009. 222 pp. ISBN 9781876843755 Anders Blok Received: 28 December 2009 /Accepted: 28 December 2009 /Published online: 3 December 2010 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2010 Few East Asian science-infused topics have been as globally controversial over the past decades as the Japanese whaling issue. In what has become a predicable political ritual, Anglo-Saxon environmentalists react to reports of Japanese whale hunting in the Antarctic Ocean—ostensibly for scientific purposes—with vocal mass media outcries. Meanwhile, public knowledge of the historical and contemporary conditions of Japanese whaling remains limited, both inside and outside of Japan. This book by sociologist Hiroyuki Watanabe, published in Japanese in 2006 and now available to English-reading audiences, promises to rectify this situation, providing a well-researched account of relations between whales and humans in modern Japan. Focusing on early-modern hunting technologies, global overfishing, and the sensitive politics of representing whaling as “Japanese culture”, this book brings a host of valuable insights to ongoing debates. Beyond whaling buffs (like this reviewer), the book should appeal to wider audiences in Science and Technology Studies (STS) interested in the social organization of industrial technology and the cultural and material underpinnings of human–animal relations. Watanabe divides his book into six chapters, each zooming in on a different aspect of how Japan’s whaling industry has developed over the last century. In historical terms, the bulk of the book is dedicated to the period from the introduction of so-called Norwegian-style whaling, using harpoons and steam-powered boats, at the turn of the twentieth century, to the peak of Antarctic factory whaling in the 1960s. At the same time, Watanabe positions his analyses within an overarching East Asian Science, Technology and Society: n International Journal (2010) 4:619–622 DOI 10.1007/s12280-010-9158-6 A. Blok (*) Department of Sociology, Copenhagen University, Øster Farigmagsgade 5, Box 2099, 1014 Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: abl@soc.ku.dk A narrative of contemporary whaling debates, which he views as sadly deadlocked due to “single-minded emotions” (3). His main analytical ambition is to show that existing anthropological approaches to whaling, which present whaling as a longstanding and unbroken tradition, provide a simplified and politically problematic picture of historical realities. In a framework that corresponds well with STS notions of the contingency of human relations with technology and nature, Watanabe documents how, rather than one unified “whaling culture,” a plurality of relations among humans and whales coexist in modern Japan. Against this backdrop, each of the book’s chapters can be read as critically questioning some aspect of what has become, over the past 25 years, an anthropological and political orthodoxy in Japanese pro-whaling discourse. In Chapter 1, for instance, Watanabe analyzes the wide-ranging changes in industrial organization and social hierarchies brought about by Japanese adoption of Norwegian technology into their coastal whaling operations from around 1897 onwards. During this process of technology transfer, whale hunting was not conducted solely by the Japanese themselves: Norwegian harpooners acted as respected bearers of the new technology, while poorly paid Korean seamen undertook much of the manual labor. Large shares of these whale hunts were conducted off the Korean peninsula, and Watanabe thus convincingly links the rise of modern Japanese whaling to a history of colonial expansionism. This history, he shows, is conveniently hidden from view in standard anthropological accounts of “the diffusion of whaling culture.” In subsequent chapters, Watanabe challenges other aspects of the orthodoxy. Chapter 2 focuses on a specific historical incident: in 1911, fishermen from Same village, Aomori prefecture, violently rebelled against what they perceived as a polluting and destructive whaling industry. Relations between established fisheries and new whaling companies were rife with frictions, in part because local fishermen considered whales as benign incarnations of the Shinto god Ebisu. In Chapter 3, Watanabe turns to a fascinating consideration of the history of nature conservation in Japan, showing how two species of cetaceans (the finless porpoise and the gray whale) came to be accorded...