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
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