Japanese Whaling on the Record with Dr. Noell Wilson (Mississippi)

Originally published: April 15, 2019.

To cite, please use:

Noell Wilson, interview with Tristan R. Grunow, Japan on the Record, podcast audio, April 15, 2019. https://jotr.transistor.fm/1.

[This transcript has been edited for clarity.]

Intro: In late December 2018, Japan announced that it would withdraw from the international whaling commission, and resume commercial whale hunting within its territorial waters as early as 2019.
[Good morning. Japan has confirmed it will resume commercial whale hunting next July, and is withdrawing from the international whaling commission-]
This came after decades of controversy following the 1986 ban on commercial whaling, after which Japan continued to hunt whales, reportedly for the purpose of scientific research. In announcing the withdrawal from the IWC (International Whaling Commission), chief cabinet secretary Suga Yoshihide noted that Japan will restrict whaling to its exclusive economic zone, and will only hunt whales that are no longer endangered.
[Japan’s basic policy of promoting sustainable use of aquatic living resources, based on scientific evidence has not changed, and under that policy we have decided to resume commercial whaling]
He also argued that whaling is a traditional part of Japan’s culture and cuisine, noting “in its long history, Japan has used whales not only as a source of protein, but also for a variety of other purposes”. Is whaling really a traditional part of Japanese culture and cuisine? And if not, where did it come from? I’m Tristan Grunow, and this is Japan, On the Record.
For more on this, I talked with Dr. Noell Wilson, associate professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Dr. Wilson is currently writing a book documenting the history of Japanese whaling in the 19th century, particularly in the Northern Pacific waters around the island of Hokkaido. We talked about the often forgotten American connection to the origins of Japanese whaling.

Dr. Noell Wilson: One of the overlooked dimensions of the U.S./Japan relationship seemed to be the connections between Japan and the United States that arose out of the presence of hundreds, really thousands of whaling vessels across the 19th century and to the 20th century.

Tristan Grunow: As you said, you know, the presence of the U.S. in the history of Japanese whaling often gets forgotten, in fact, it’s Matthew Perry who comes in in 1853 and one of the things he’s actually concerned about is whaling, isn’t he?

NW: He was, indeed! But it’s interesting, you know, and I talk with my students about the origins of map making and how that changed international relations. Think about the great circle route, from the Pacific coast of North America to Japan: the most direct route would have taken them on this curved arc through Hokkaido. One of the many reasons that Perry showed up in Japan was reports of Japanese mistreatment of shipwrecked seamen, largely whalers. The majority of these had actually wrecked on whaling vessels up in the Hokkaido maritime region, in the Okhotsk Sea. So I started to kind of wonder what was the kind of longer history, or the kind of bird’s eye view, of this significance, of this extraordinary presence of U.S. whalers in Japanese waters beyond simply being a prompt for Matthew Perry to show up.

TG: I understand many of the Japanese whalers who undertake the profession from the 1860s are actually training on American vessels?

NW: That’s, in fact, true. And recent work in archives in Hokkaido and the Hokkaido prefectural archives, as well as the Hakodate city library, yielded some really fascinating documents that narrate the development of the first apprentice program for Japanese seamen aboard western vessels -- they were American whaling ships and also one Prussian whaling ship -- and that the first passports were issued in Hakodate. This apprentice program was only available because the central Tokugawa government agreed to creating a passport program.
But anyway, the seamen happened to be from all over Japan. So I think it speaks a little to the cosmopolitanism of Hakodate, which is often considered a backwater, very peripheral, kind of in-the-sticks marginal port. But they had ended up there and actually had, I think, very detailed and expert information about currents, about tides, about water obstacles in the kind of North Pacific area, well in the Hokkaido maritime zone, from traveling on coastal traders. So some of these individuals were essentially recruited by the Western whaling vessels to give them better knowledge of the oceans and the immediate surrounding seas so that they could avoid shipwrecks.
So in Hakodate, some of the things these apprentices learned aboard the ships was not just about how to work the harpoon guns or the nets to bring the whales in, but a kind of intermediate step was also to maneuver and manage how to read a Western style sea chart, how to maneuver Western style sails, which were kind of set up with rope systems that were completely different from the Japanese style boat.

TG: So in some sense that transition to the deep sea pelagic whaling was as a result of this influence of the American whaling practice?

NW: Yeah. So everyone was getting on board with learning how to navigate a Western style sailing vessel, a multi-masted ship. And so the same guy who built the Goryokaku fort, Takeda Ayasaburo, started up a navigation school. And the source of much of his knowledge: he’d gotten permission, soon after his arrival in Hakodate, to go on board these U.S. whaling ships. And so he would walk around the cabins, talk with the captains through a translator about how you get through a storm, about how you repair a sail at sea when it becomes ripped, and really the nitty gritty of actually operating a vessel that would allow them to go out into the deep ocean.

TG: It’s fascinating that there is such long history of interactions between U.S. and Japanese whaling, especially when you consider the U.S. is one of the most vociferous critics of Japanese whaling.

NW: Yeah, it’s a bit of an irony then, that U.S. whalers in the late 1860s were responsible for helping launch Japanese open sea whaling. And it wasn’t only as part of this program, but before the Meiji Restoration and in the immediate aftermath, when the central Japanese state was sorting out how to control the larger island of Hokkaido, it put several of the domains in charge of different swathes of the island of the Hokkaido. And so Yamaguchi Prefecture was given responsibility for the northwest corner of Hokkaido. And so they attempted in the early 1870s, to launch an offshore whaling operation, and at that point too, bought some of their equipment and even one of their vessels from U.S. brokers in Hakodate, who at that point realized that the stocks of whales that they’d been pursuing in the north Pacific were in decline, that their yields weren’t what they’d been a decade before, and were trying to offload a lot of equipment that they knew was not going to be profitable to them in the decade ahead.

TG: And I assume this comes up in your forthcoming publication, Whaling at the Margins: Drift Whaling, Ainu Labor, and the Japanese State. Building from that, could you also talk about how the Ainu labors get involved with this Japanese whaling in the northern territories?

NW: Yeah, sure. The work that I’ve done on Ainu drift whaling has been determined by the archival record that I can track down. The data that we have is largely from the Okhotsk seaside, on the northeast corner on the island of Hokkaido. And one of the interesting takeaways from that work has been that Japanese merchants, as well as some Tokugawa officials -- these kind of local administrative officers in Hakodate -- essentially demanded a percentage of drift whale bone and meat and oil from the whales that the Ainu harvested on the coastline. At the time there was not an active whaling in Hokkaido. The local indigenous Ainu, for the most part, only took advantage of the whales that had washed up, that had been injured, chased by orcas, sick, or died from other reasons at sea. But when the Japanese merchants and their Tokugawa official counterparts in Hakodate realized how profitable it could be to them, they were very enticed by the profit that could be gained from selling the oil (occasionally used as pesticides), from the bone, and from the meat, which was dried and produced in different forms for jerky. And so they were very curious about all these Western multi-masted sailing ships circling around the island, that they knew to be whalers, and how they could take advantage of their technology so that they could multiply the profits that they were already extracting from the Ainu.

TG: And then, so when does Japan start the deep sea factory ship? Is that a postwar innovation or is that even something that’s happening in the pre-war period?

NW: It happens in the pre-war period. I mean it’s really kind of a late-Meiji story. And at that point the Americans aren’t really involved, it’s mostly the Norweigians. But until that point there were several U.S. missionaries in Hokkaido who became aware of the Japanese interests in developing deep-sea whaling who used that as an entry point to start conversation and befriend and develop relationships with some of the enterprising Japanese who were looking for ways to expand the economy of Hokkaido.

TG: So one of the defenses that the Japanese government is making now for Japanese whaling practice is that whaling has been so central to Japanese culture and cuisine. One criticism of that is well this is just something that the state is doing as a way to advance its own domestic policy. In fact the New York Times editorial that sparked a very vehement responses from the Japanese government was basically accusing them of that very thing. And your article was also looking at the relationship between whaling and the state, even going back to the colonization of Hokkaido. So do you see this as mainly a state issue, and less of a cultural issue?

NW: Well, I think the answer to that question from a Japanese perspective depends on where you are in Japan. Most recently having spent the majority of my time in Hokkaido, certainly I think the Ainu population there today is frustrated about the Japanese government’s continuing use of this idea of cultural exceptionalism, or tradition, when in fact if you think about the way that logic has been mobilized in other nations it actually has to do with indigenous practice. So there are groups among the Ainu, particularly among this one Easten city of Hokkaido Monbetsu who are lobbying the IWC periodically for permission as native peoples to return to active whaling. It’s a bit complicated because historically in the Tokugawa period, the fact of the matter is that very rarely did they proactively go after whales, they basically used the kind of protein involved from drift whaling. But I think one of the topics that’s missing from this conversation in the press and at a national level in Japan, and the reason that historical context is important for really appreciating the nuances of the discussion is the way that the Ainu population’s history of whale culture is almost entirely omitted from the conversation.

Japan on the Record is hosted, produced, and edited by Tristan Grunow. Transcripts by Maggie Trettin.