Dolphins have been herded into a cove as part of an annual hunt in the Japanese seaside town made famous by an Oscar-winning documentary about their slaughter, conservationist group Sea Shepherd said yesterday. A town official said none were killed.
The dolphin hunt at Taiji, documented in The Cove, begins on Sept. 1 every year. The boats returned empty on Wednesday, but on Thursday, some dolphins were corralled into the inlet, according to anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd and a fishing official in Taiji.
The official in charge of media queries at the Taiji fishing organization said a handful of dolphins were kept for aquariums, but the rest were set free yesterday morning. He declined to give details.
He said the criticism the town has received from the West was unfair because residents were merely trying to make a living, and the rocky landscape made it difficult to go into farming or livestock.
Sea Shepherd said it has been monitoring Taiji with a small crew of Australians, New Zealanders, Americans and Japanese this week.
Ric O’Barry, who stars in The Cove, has gathered about 100 people in Tokyo, including supporters from abroad, to protest the dolphin slaughter. He took a petition with 1.7 million signatures from 155 nations to the US embassy on Thursday.
“The dolphins need defenders at the cove today and tomorrow,” said Michael Dalton of Sea Shepherd in a statement from Taiji. “If you came to Japan to save dolphins, the place to be is Taiji and the time to be here is now.”
O’Barry, 70, the former dolphin trainer for the 1960s Flipper TV show, has received threats from a violent nationalist group and skipped going to Taiji this year, a trip he makes every year to try to save the dolphins.
He said he had been advised by Japanese authorities not to go to Taiji, and repeatedly stressed that he does not want confrontation.
He was flanked by police, as well as supporters, when he went to the US embassy. But some of his supporters said they are headed to Taiji.
Nationalist groups say criticism of dolphin hunting is a denigration of Japanese culture.
The Japanese government allows a hunt of about 20,000 dolphins a year, and argues that killing them — and whales — is no different from raising cows or pigs for slaughter. Most Japanese have never eaten dolphin meat and, even in Taiji, it is not consumed regularly.
The government is also critical of Sea Shepherd, which has harassed Japanese whaling ships. In July, a Tokyo court convicted New Zealander Peter Bethune, a former Sea Shepherd activist, of obstructing a Japanese whaling mission in the Antarctic Ocean, assault, trespassing and other charges. He was not sent to prison and was deported.
The Cove, which won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary, depicts a handful of fishermen from the town of Taiji who scare dolphins into a cove, where they kill them. Other Japanese towns that hunt dolphins kill them at sea.
Taiji, which has a population of 3,500 people, defends the dolphin killing as tradition and a livelihood. Most of the dolphins are generally eaten as meat after a handful of the best looking are sold off to aquariums.
APARTHEID
In related news, Greenpeace chief Kumi Naidoo yesterday likened Japan’s treatment of two of its anti-whaling activists to the tactics of the former apartheid regime he once campaigned against in his native South Africa.
The activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, face possible jail terms on Monday for stealing a box of whale meat, which they later presented to media and authorities as proof of embezzlement in the state-run whaling program.
Naidoo, at a Tokyo news conference, condemned Japanese police for keeping the two activists in detention for 26 days after their arrests, during which they were interrogated without lawyers present while strapped to their chairs.
The way Sato and Suzuki were treated after their high-profile arrests more than two years ago “reminds me of the way that the apartheid system treated those that tried to oppose it,” said Naidoo, Greenpeace’s international executive director
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to