In an bitter twist of fate, Japan’s tsunami may have accomplished something conservationists have been fervently attempting for years: Driving a final nail into the nation’s pro-active whaling communities.
The first outsiders have recently reached the small town of Ayukawahama, which was crushed by 30-foot waves. Four hundred of its 1,400 residents are missing, assumed dead. The peninsula town is described as having been reduced to “an expanse of splintered wood and twisted cars.”
The waves rushed 600 feet inland, wiping out 80 percent of the town’s 700 homes, along with the headquarters of the biggest business in town, Ayukawa Whaling, one of the country’s most prodigious hunters of big whales.
Ayukawa lives off whaling. It is one of just four Japan communities that are home to small fleets that twice a year hunt whales in waters close to Japan, differentiating them from the fleet that heads to the Southern Ocean each November.
“There is no Ayukawa without whaling,” said a 27-year-old whaler.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
Given the hammering Japan’s northern coastal towns took from the earthquake/tsunami, and the ongoing radiation leaks from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, the future of fishing from the region has come into question. Just like the fishermen in the Gulf after the BP spill, seafood providers across Japan are concerned about public-relations fallout—even if its fish stays available and safe, i.e. nonradioactive.
Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, the world’s biggest—selling more than 400 species of fish six days a week, a $5.5-billion-a-year business supplying 40 million Japanese fish-lovers—has not yet backed off any species, but buyers have fallen off due to a lack of fish.
The immediate concern is that so many of the small towns in the north—and their boats, docks, jetties, nets, tackle and fishermen—are gone. Fish farms and onshore processing plants have been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of wild fish washed onto shore, dead. Scallops, sardines, oysters, seaweed, bonito and even shark’s fin have largely disappeared from Tsukiji in the past week.
The normally packed aisles of the sprawling market—the equivalent of 200 football fields under one roof—are relatively empty of buyers. “We’re not selling anything because there are no customers,” one wholesaler reported. Renowned sushi restaurants adjacent to the market are suffering too, in part due to the lack of tourists.
The Tsukiji market’s general manager, Tsutomu Kosaka, told the New York Times, “It’s not like the brand is just damaged now—it’s over. At least for now, the brand is finished. Gone. It’s hopeless.”
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
Among the first to be alerted to the shaking and rending of the earth off the coast of Japan last Friday? The fish.
While no video captured a mass exodus of sea creatures presciently fleeing the epicenter, it’s assumed that animals sense seismic trouble before man does. A squirrel can hear a dry leaf rustle more than 300 feet away. Elephants pick up infrasound.
Workers cleaning up after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami were surprised by how few dead dogs, horses, elephants and reptiles were found. They surmised that the animals had sensed the incoming disruption, and had headed for the hills. Even a five-second head start can be crucial when tsunami waves are coming.
On Friday, currents and powerful waves swept schools of fish toward Alaska in the north and Chile in the south. Yahoo News reported a boom day for fishermen off the coast of Mexico.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
Despite the incredible destruction caused by Friday’s earth-rupture and the subsequent massive waves that devastated Japan’s coastline – officially the ‘Honshu Tsunami’ – it was in many ways just another planetary flex.
The 8.9 magnitude earthquake tore a split in the ocean floor more than 200 miles long and sent thirty-foot waves towards Sendai. Experts are saying the quake was 8,000 times more powerful than the one that struck New Zealand just a few weeks ago and 7,000 times bigger than the one that crushed Haiti a year ago. One geophysical result of all that sub-ocean rumbling is that Japan is now 3.5 feet closer to the U.S. than it was a few day ago, its coastline dropped by two feet.
While the impacts on mankind are horrible and shocking earthquakes are still just the planet’s way of hitching up its pants, tectonically speaking.
Given the recent spate of powerful quakes around the world (Chile, an 8.8 magnitude temblor, the fifth strongest since 1900; the 6.0 quake that struck rural eastern Turkey) it would seem they are happening more frequently. But the truth is that the earth has always quaked; what’s different now is what’s happening above ground, not underground.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
As Sea Shepherd predicted, when two of its boats made port in Hobart, Tasmania, over the weekend – on the heels of a just-completed and successful campaign against Japanese whalers – Australian police greeted them.
Armed with search warrants both the “Bob Barker” and “Steve Irwin” were scoured by the police with Sea Shepherd boss Paul Watson observing. No charges were made, nothing confiscated. Yet the search went on, spurred by complaints by the Japanese government that the Shepherd’s activities in the Southern Ocean were “obstructing commerce and industry.”
Japan Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara had asked New Zealand and the Netherlands, as well as Australia, to condemn the anti-whalers, since the Shepherd’s ships are registered in those countries. It claims the Shepherd’s put the lives of Japanese crewmen at risk.
Australia’s Green party leader, Sen. Bob Brown, was at the docks to welcome the Sea Shepherd activists and told the press: “The good police (of Australia) are doing the work of Tokyo…I have written to the Minister for Foreign Affairs this morning calling for an end to this charade.”
Watson said this was the third year in a row his ships have been searched when they’ve first made port. “All I can say to the Japanese who every year say ‘you guys are eco-terrorists, you’re criminals’ is ‘look, arrest me or shut up.’ It’s just getting really irritating constantly being called an eco-terrorist without actually being arrested.”
While the Japanese did quit the whaling season early, it’s no guarantee they are giving up, despite that the Shepherds’ formally announced that this past season’s “Operation No Compromise” is finished.
They will most likely return to the Southern Ocean next year and in the meantime – since they took fewer than 100 whales this season, hardly the 900 they anticipated – it is possible they may turn to hunting whales closer to home, in the northwest of the Pacific Ocean.
For its part, Sea Shepherd says it will be back down south next season if necessary. “We will be prepared and we will be ready,” Watson said in a statement posted on his website. “Our objective is to defend the integrity of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. We have done so since 2002, and we will continue to do so if there are any future threats to the sanctuary and the whales.”
In more Antarctic-related police news, Norwegian skipper Jarle Andhoy, whose ship the “Berserk” sank off the coast on February 20 with three crewmembers onboard while he and another man attempted a misguided and secretive effort to reach the South Pole by ATV, has been charged back home with negligence.
It’s official: The Japanese have halted its whaling season a month early, crediting — or blaming — harassment from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s rigorous anti-whaling campaign.
Calling its four-boat fleet home, Japan’s fisheries agency said it had killed 172 whales (170 minke and 2 fins) this season, a quarter of what it had hoped for when the Southern Ocean hunt began in December.
“To ensure the safety of crew members’ lives, of assets and of the research fleet, the government is compelled to end the research,” Japan’s farm and fisheries minister Michihiko Kano said at a Tokyo news conference. “It’s regrettable that such obstructions have taken place. We will have to find ways to prevent such harassment.”
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
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