(Not) Leaving #Taiji

It is now 72 hours since I left Taiji, the first 30 of which were travel from Japan back to Scotland via France and Wales. I found it both interesting and very pleasing to note that 4 nations is still not as internationally diverse as an average Cove Guardian group.

In the just over a day since I got "back," I've been home, I've been to work, I've met some friends and I've even been to a funeral though thankfully as a work duty rather than through any personal connection. It should have felt like a slightly busier "normal" day. It didn't. It felt like I had abandoned the most important task of my life so far. It felt like unfinished business. It felt bad.

Watching Taiji Dolphin Defense on Livestream TV has not helped as there have been 3 hunts since we left, one where all the dolphins escaped, one where a mother and 2 babies were captured and one which is happening as I type this.

Those hunts and the dreadful aftermath will be future blog material for sure but they are just too raw to write about tonight.

There are three tasks facing me now:

Firstly making sense of the last month most of which was spent in Taiji. There have been some incredible high points, there have been too many desperately low points.

Secondly, I need to develop and implement a plan to engage with individuals, agencies and corporations who will be motivated both to ensure the best interests of Japan and to end the dolphin killings and captures in Taiji. Those dolphin killings and captures in Taiji clearly do not serve the best interests of Japan. If you are reading this blog and think you can help with that then please contact me via my Google+ page.

Finally I need to work out I can get back out there to continue this "unfinished business" and make sure that Cove Guardian is not just a nice slogan on a t-shirt, it is who I am.

Cove Guardians Anna Oliver and Nicole McLachlan

Perhaps I should have said 3 tasks facing us and used "we" instead of "I" for those 3 tasks because I have no doubt that my best friend and fellow Cove Guardian, Anna, will be as instrumental in helping to bring all this to fruition as she was amazing defending dolphins in Taiji over Christmas and New year. One thing that did make sense from the minute we got involved with this campaign was the need for mutual support on every step of the journey.

The emotions triggered by the experience of Taiji are so very strong and the impact so very personal though that I will keep my blog mostly about my impressions for the time being. Having said that, if my experiences have inspired you to get involved then you should recognise that the Cove Guardians are a growing and strengthening "we" and so there is no reason why you cannot also become a member of that amazing team of ocean champions. Cove Guardians come from every corner of the globe including Japan, could you be the first from your part of the World as Anna and myself were from ours?

In today's blog I am going to try and make some kind of sense of my initial thoughts regarding my Taiji experience, a starter for ten if you will because I do not think there are enough words to describe the full experience in a single attempt. Proof reading this I realise I have not managed it at all, it's going to take a long time to exorcise these demons if it can even be done.

I arrived thinking that the "story" was of some poor, impoverished fishermen claiming tradition as an excuse to murder what they reputedly describe as "big fish" with the occasional bonus of a live dolphin being sold to a dolphinarium generating a welcome cash windfall.

The truth was the exact opposite.

The Taiji dolphin drive hunt is an extremely well organised and ruthless, profit-driven and demand-led, live capture business with those dolphins not deemed worthy of being sold into captivity being butchered to squeeze every last penny out of that day's evil activities with no thought whatsoever to the morality of those actions.

The evil men who lead this programme are amongst the wealthiest individuals in this part of Wakayama whilst most of the rest of the town has an obvious and significantly lower standard of living than is generally evident throughout the rest of the prefecture.

This raptor is flying wild and free above the Dolphin Base
sea pens where live dolphins are held prisoner and forced
to turn tricks for spoilt tourists

Ignoring the poverty and ignoring the dolphin captures and slaughters (although it really is an impossible thing to do) we would have to view Taiji as a small, traditional fishing village with very impressive eco-tourism potential, not just from marine eco-tourism but also from the diversity of birds and land wildlife in the area.

The wildlife is amazing whilst the scenery is spectacular and, to me as a businessman, the ethical commercial opportunities are as obvious as it is staggering to see them being ignored.

As the fishermen of Taiji seem hell-bent on hunting dolphins to extinction whilst also wiping out every other species of fish in the surrounding oceans the end seems as inevitable as the end already experienced by countless similar traditional fishing villages the World over.

I spent my teenage years living and working on west coast fishing boats during the late 1970s and early 1980s at a time when we (Scotland) were fighting Iceland, Faroes and Norway over who had the most "right" to fish cod to extinction.

Juvenile hammerhead shark landed at Taiji butcherhouse

Of course we didn't know that is what we were doing then but it is now so very hard to understand why those same nations, my own included, are repeating exactly the same arguments and behaviours in the 2010s over mackerel.

I suspect if I had not escaped that lifestyle that I would still be on the boats, still too blind to see what should be plain to all but I have escaped and I now know the issues so there is at the very least a moral obligation on me to face those issues and do what I can about them. 

If I was still on the boats I also have no doubt that I would be amongst the poor fishermen wondering how a very few of our community had managed to get so rich whilst the rest of us just got poorer and more and more tied up with regulations. I would almost certainly have been trapped in the "us against the World" mentality that seems to be gaining the Taiji dolphin exploiters support which they absolutely do not deserve from their harbour neighbours.

Governments say it is all about jobs but it has seemed to me for some time that a combination of licensing more and more super-trawlers whilst also issuing licences to murder marine megafauna (cetaceans in Japan, pinnipeds in Scotland) to solve the problem of coastal community employment  is the marine equivalent of fighting a house fire with gasoline and that is what I spend most of my time lecturing about to anyone who will listen.

More wildlife at Dolphin Base, Taiji

In any case, it is clear that tourism - especially wildlife tourism - is the really easy, minimum investment solution to coastal community employment but it does require an element of "cleaning up your act" before it can be most heavily promoted.

That may explain why it is the most overlooked potential net contributor to GDP for my country, or at least the most under-recorded, or possibly it is simply because it is too hard for a politician to take credit for stuff that existed before the politicians started interfering with it to begin with.

I cannot help reflecting that in Scotland our Police would prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who harmed a dolphin or pilot whale or any other wildlife, marine or land - although admittedly not licensed seal killers, see this blog for more info CLICK. They would prosecute both deliberate and accidental harm and that is only right and proper. In Taiji, the Police are obliged to protect those whose deliberate intent is to harm these magnificent animals both by lethal injury and by enslavement with all the subsequent harm which goes with that.

I thought that I was fully prepared for the experience of actually being a Cove Guardian but I now know that nothing prepares you for Taiji, there is always going to be a surprise around the corner. One pleasant surprise has been the warmth and pleasantness of the Japanese people we have encountered and I have no doubt that as more and more Japanese nationals become aware of what is going on in this village of hell that we are approaching the start of a credible solution for this solvable problem. I will explore that much more fully in a day or two when I am in a calm place and able to focus on the positive. For now, please accept that there is a lot of positive and it does give great hope for the future.

For now, thank you for reading.

New Traditions are NOT Traditional

This blog should have been written 24 hours ago but I couldn't see the keyboard for tears.

Yes, it does say Glaswegian at the top of my blog. Yes, I am tough. But I'm not tough enough to see mums and babies being driven into a killing zone; I'm not tough enough to hear the death throes of those same mums and babies being slaughtered directly below our vantage point; I'm not tough enough to then hear the bodies of those mums and babies being loaded into the killers' barges; I'm not tough enough to see the bodies of those mums and babies under the tarpaulins as the barges emerge into plain view; and I'm not tough enough to see the meat sale after those mums and babies have been delivered to the butchering shed in Taiji town. I'm not tough enough to experience all of that without emotion. So I cried.

I'm not ashamed and I'm damn sure not going to apologise even though I am clearly not as tough as the big, brave, hard, macho men of the Taiji Fishermen's Union who laughed and joked as they slaughtered those mums and babies.

I am not as tough as the male and female dolphin trainers from the Taiji Whale Museum who were present throughout the slaughter and who I am convinced are aiding and abetting some kind of grand scale "dolphin laundering" so that the captive industry can claim that "their" dolphins did not come from Taiji.

I am not as tough as those trainers who must have known what the outcome was going to be when they decided not to purchase any of those dolphins for their captive dolphin slave trade.

I am not as tough as the trainers who watched the barges being loaded with the bodies

I am not as tough as those trainers who then rode the same barges back to Taiji harbour with the killers and disembarked at the butchering shed calmly walking past the bodies of those mums and babies who they had condemned to slaughter and had seen transported a matter of minutes earlier.

I never want to be that tough.

I am not weak though and I am aware that the more my heart aches, the stronger my resolve is becoming. I have faced significant physical challenges and many moral tests in my life, this is simply a mental challenge without any moral test whatsoever. You see, I already know the difference between right and wrong and what I saw yesterday was as wrong as it is possible to be.

Let me describe Thursday 20th December 2012 in Taiji to you.

The banger boats left as normal at first light and scattered to the horizon in search of dolphins.

We now know that they had a specific order for the live capture of at least one striped dolphin (Stenella Coeruleoalba), a beautiful animal: sleek, graceful, fast.

Within a couple of hours they were back in view, clearly in drive formation: they had found their prey and were chasing it back towards the killing cove.

From around 5 miles out we could see through our long-range lenses that they had found a very large pod and waited in fear lest they had found another super-pod of 200+ bottlenose dolphins as had happened last week. (See the chilling end to that horrible capture in my last blog 101 Damnations.)

The tell-tale puffs of black smoke appeared as killers on the helm slapped engines from full ahead to full astern and back again, chasing the pod and creating walls of sound to drive the dolphins ever onward to their certain doom.

Whether by accident or design, by the time they got closer we could see that the pod had split, a large group ahead of the southernmost banger boats and a smaller group seeming to draw the hunters close attention at the Cove end of the line of death.

With more experienced Cove Guardians amongst us we were warned not to rejoice too quickly when we saw that one of the groups had escaped. These hunters were not chasing for food, as they claim they have been doing traditionally for centuries even though the dolphin drive hunt was never a tradition, indeed as practiced by the Taiji dolphin killers it would be impossible without modern technology, powerful engines and long-range communications equipment.

No, these hunters were chasing the big cash prize - live dolphins for sale to the entertainment industry. Live dolphins to be sold into a life of slavery, made to dance for and swim with human parents and children who must not know the horror which produced that experience for them and the ongoing misery which accompanies it.

Surely no parent could allow their children to participate in this international web of death and exploitation firmly tied to the evils of Taiji if they were aware of the evils of Taiji, could they?

Could you? Could you still give money to dolphinariums now that you know what is going on?

The boats got closer and closer and eventually we were able to identify their intended victims: a group of around 25 to 35 striped dolphins many of which were very young juveniles.

The murderers drove them ever onwards, no longer needing to hammer the metal tubes which produce that sickening taung, taung, taung, taung sound interfering with dolphin senses, stopping them communicating and chasing them to harm. Instead they were now throwing slap-sticks from the smaller skiffs which had joined the banger boats.

And so the pattern continued all the way into the killing cove where we watched them drop net after net to confine them ever closer to the beach, hidden from our cameras under tarpaulins erected each morning in anticipation of a capture.

So desperate are the authorities to keep us from viewing what is going on and exposing it to a still mostly unaware World that they commit a Coastguard cutter to the operation as well as an onshore police deployment which would not be unimpressive at a full scale riot involving an aggressive mob of hundreds.

All this to monitor our slack handful of vegan pacifists armed with nothing more deadly than a camera, carrying nothing more offensive than a bottle of water and a packed lunch.

We don't break laws here but it is very obvious that no-one has any fear of us breaking any laws, they are just terrified that we get the one picture which horrifies the World into action.

The Taiji fishermen know that if the World becomes fully aware of what is happening here that they will be forced to stop. They also know that, like Governments the World over, the Japanese Government is scared to stand up to them, a minority for sure, but a powerful and vociferous minority in the fishing community.

These men are the controlling kingpins who have the biggest boats, the biggest houses, the most expensive cars and the greatest unfair influence on how funds are distributed amongst a community which claims to offer fairness to all who go to sea but which patently fails to deliver on that promise. These men pander to the captive entertainment industry who are the main source of BIG income for them, not the dolphin meat sales which they claim as their "traditional" raison d'être.

I don't have that iconic image yet but if a picture paints a thousand words then I hope and pray that my thousand words paint a picture and that you will share them far and wide. Share them with anyone you think does not yet know about this. Share them especially with any Japanese friends you have because even a few miles away we are aware that Japanese people are simply unaware, they just do not know what is being permitted in their name.

But we are aware, and, like my fellow Cove Guardians I already have impressions of the most awful horror represented by images like this:

When the dolphins were eventually brought all the way into the Cove and herded under the tarps, we were told that the trainers from the Taiji Whale Museum had rejected them all as unsuitable for their dolphinarium. Very simply, the babies were too young to survive without their mothers and the mothers were no use to these evil people.

So the slaughter began. Their way of dealing death is by using a spike t-bar to stab through the dolphins spine. The death throes are lengthy and horrific to listen to. Again and again and again.

The photo above shows the last dolphin which tried to escape that slaughter by throwing herself onto the rocks lining the cove. She was dragged off and sent back to her death.

This photo shows a youngster leading a mum and two babies from the same family group and was taken less than 10 minutes before that slaughter began, less than 20 feet from where that slaughter took place. There was no escape, there was no mercy. They were not wanted by the dolphinarium so the fishermen had to kill them.

These evil men could not let them go or else people would question their "traditional hunting to feed their families," although no-one seems to question why so many of the actual "fish" fishermen in this town are having to scratch a desperately poor living while the dolphin salesmen get rich beside them.

Despite the horrors of Taiji I am nevertheless falling in love with the rest of Japan. It is a beautiful country and her people are mostly wonderful, friendly, warm-hearted and generous. She also has the most magnificent diversity of marine wildlife and the scenery has to be seen to be believed.

Taiji is a problem though. It must be one of the few regional main fishing ports in the World which doesn't feature in any published English language tourist guide books.

That is insane given the hotels in the town and the potential of this area to compete with the best wildlife tourist resorts in the World. Taiji's negative impact on the entire prefecture, indeed on the entire Kii peninsula cannot be ignored either; nobody wants to be tainted by association with what is happening here but everybody is. So we see a familiar pattern again, a few wealthy men become even more wealthy and the majority have to offset the cost of that wealth with undeserved damage to their own reputations and the obvious impact on their own earnings.

If like me you think this is wrong. If like me you think that killing dolphins in the 21st Century is blatantly wrong. If like me you think this needs to stop then please encourage everybody you know to read this blog and to visit these links:

Sea Shepherd Cove Guardians on Facebook Cove Guardians Page (Official)

Cove Guardians on Sea Shepherd Web Taiji Dolphin Defense Campaign

New traditions are NOT traditional. They are changeable. Changeable for the better.

Thank you for reading.




Addendum:

Apparently the 20th December was International Human Solidarity Day. Not sure what that meant for the rest of the World exactly but I damn sure didn't experience any solidarity whatsoever with the malicious dolphin killers here in Taiji. There are a growing number of wonderful Japanese people who I do feel solidarity with, some of them even in Taiji, but they are people with whom I have a strong common bond - like me, they detest the killing. Like me, they want it to stop as well. Please help their voices be heard.