Spare a thought for the Japanese voice of anti-whaling

Spare a thought for the Japanese voice of anti-whaling.

Whaling is an issue that Greenpeace Japan acknowledges often carries an element of patriotic sentiment for the Japanese public. “The anti-whaling campaign is always seen as pressure from outside and this is something Japanese people really don’t like,” communications manager Kyoko Murakami told Crikey. She describes the Japanese public’s general take on the issue as “anti-anti-whaling”.

Murakami explained that even if Japanese don’t necessarily support whaling, they don’t want outsiders telling them what to do. “That’s why we’re trying to raise this as a domestic issue,” she said.

Greenpeace Japan’s office in Tokyo is half a planet away from the Southern Ocean, the Japanese whaling fleet and their confrontations with the Sea Shepherd. The organisation takes great care to distance itself from the more militant protest boat — a prominent red banner on the organisation’s website declares “We are not the Sea Shepherd.”

Wakao Hanaoka, Greenpeace Japan’s oceans campaigner, explained: “We have to make it clear that non-violence is core to our principles and that we differ from Sea Shepherd. Also our strategy is different, we choose to campaign in Japan.”

Compounding frustrations are the Japanese media reports of clashes between the Japanese whaling fleet and generic “environmental activists” in the Southern Ocean.

“Whenever the Sea Shepherd did something, Japanese people would just hear that an environmental organisation did something, they think we’re part of the same group. There was no clear distinction. But the last two years we didn’t send the [Greenpeace ship] Esperanza [to observe the whaling fleet] and so now I think many Japanese are beginning to understand that Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace are separate organisations,” Murakami said.

It’s this guilt by association that makes Greenpeace Japan’s efforts to engage the public that much harder. Hanaoka recounted how Japanese often recoil in shock when he introduces himself as a Greenpeace campaigner.

“When I talk to fishermen around the coast of Japan, they have a big misunderstanding of Greenpeace Japan. They think we’re asking fishermen to stop fishing, consigning them to unemployment. But after we communicate with them, they understand our position and often agree that whaling should be stopped. Or at least they want the government to stop wasting money on whaling and spend it on managing fisheries instead.”

This domestic focus of Greenpeace Japan’s campaign includes an appeal to the Japanese public’s sense of fiscal responsibility. The current Democratic Party of Japan government was elected in September 2009, for only the second time since the Second World War, and one of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s election promises was a thorough review of government spending.

“What we are doing now is concentrating our efforts on getting the Japanese public to judge whether this whaling is the right thing to do. This whaling is done with tax-payers’ money,” Hanaoka said.

As a qualified marine biologist, Hanaoka is dismayed at the cases made for whaling on the Institute for Cetacean Research’s website. “I feel embarrassed as a Japanese that this is being shown as part of a research program,” he said, dismissing any cultural significance. “This whaling is happening on the other side of the earth, with modern techniques. There is no part of Japanese culture involved in this program.”

“At the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2008 in Santiago, the Japanese government had the choice between Southern Ocean whaling and coastal whaling in Japan. They chose to continue the Southern Ocean whaling, which shows that tradition is just an excuse that the Japanese government is using.”

Murakami believes the Japanese government’s overseas development aid has been used to buy votes in the IWC. “There’s a strong correlation between the countries that vote pro-whaling in the IWC and how much aid they receive from the Japanese government,” he said.

The Japanese government’s continued support of the whaling program extends even to what Greenpeace Japan consider an odious influence on the judiciary. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki — referred to as the “Tokyo Two” by Greenpeace — were arrested a month after they presented whale meat from a delivery service depot to state prosecutors as evidence of alleged embezzlement in the whaling program. The embezzlement investigation was dropped the same day as the arrests.

Greenpeace plans to use the attention and controversy surrounding the trial to draw public attention to the whaling program as a whole. “The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that the Japanese Government had breached the human rights of the two,” Murakami said.

Greenpeace isn’t optimistic enough to forsee an end to whaling anytime soon. But, Murakami said, “we are not alone and that’s really encouraging”. Said Hanaoka: “I often get letters saying they misunderstood the issue and now see that there’s no good reason for the government to be doing this.”