The US ambassador to Japan should visit Taiji to see the “humane” killing methods used in the dolphin hunt, a local Japanese fisheries official said yesterday, days after US Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy tweeted her disapproval of the slaughter.
His comments came as campaigners watching the hunt said the killing was under way, adding that the waters of the cove were red with the dolphins’ blood.
The official, who did not wish to be named, said Kennedy, the only surviving child of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy, should also see for herself how the hunt supports the local economy.
“This is a very small town in the countryside. We have no other major industries,” he said.
MAKING A LIVING
“I want her to come and visit so that she can understand how we make a living from it. Many fishermen make a living from the hunting, and many others also earn their living by working at food processing factories,” he added.
Kennedy stepped into the row on Friday when she tweeted: “Deeply concerned by inhumaneness of drive hunt dolphin killing. USG [US Government] opposes drive hunt fisheries.”
The mass killing of the animals came to worldwide attention with the Oscar-winning film The Cove, which showed how the fishermen of Taiji corral dolphin pods in the bay.
Some of the prettier animals are removed and sold to aquariums while others are butchered for meat, which is consumed in a small number of coastal communities. It is not widely eaten in Japan.
The Cove graphically showed the slaughter of the animals, whose blood turned the water red as they were stabbed to death.
However, the Taiji official said hunters no longer killed dolphins in that way.
“We have switched to a more humane way of butchering them,” he said. “We cut the spinal cord so that they don’t bleed. We don’t butcher them like before.”
However, activists from militant environmentalist group Sea Shepherd, who have been streaming live video footage from the area, said plenty of blood was in evidence, despite attempts by the fishermen to cover their cull with tarpaulins.
‘RED WITH BLOOD’
“Water of the cove continues to run red with the blood of innocent Bottlenose dolphins who have been murdered,” the @CoveGuardians Twitter account said.
The blood was not immediately apparent from footage on the organization’s Web site.
A local official said on Sunday that killing had begun, but refused to say how many animals had died.
Kennedy’s weekend intervention was followed on Monday by the publication of an open letter by late British singer John Lennon’s Japanese widow, Yoko Ono, who called on the fishermen to end the hunt because of the impact it had on the image of Japan abroad.
Japanese officials have hit back, accusing campaigners of double standards and saying the hunt is part of the country’s culture.
“We take away lives of animals like cows and pigs daily,” said Yoshinobu Nisaka, governor of Wakayama Prefecture, where Taiji is located. “I don’t think it is logical to say that it is only cruel to eat dolphin meat.”
In Tokyo, the central government said it would be explaining Japan’s position to Washington in the wake of Kennedy’s tweet.
“Whales and dolphins are an important marine resource, which should be sustainably used based on scientific data,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS