Since it's a holiday, I'm going to abstain from complaining about idiots in my own country -- take a break, ya'll. Instead, I'm going to complain about idiots on the other side of the world.
Let's start with this story.
Of about 29,600 public elementary and junior high schools nationwide offering lunches for students, 5,355 schools, or 18 percent, responded they had served whale meat in their lunches at least once in fiscal 2009 through March 2010, according to the survey conducted from June to August this year.
The Institute of Cetacean Research, which carries out the government's whaling, provided whale meat to local municipalities for school lunches at one-third of the market price, which was ¥2,060 per kg in 2009.
It's hard to even get your head around all the ways in which this story is wrong. Not factually incorrect, simply wrong.
First, the only whaling that is supposed to take place is for "scientific research." So how is it that something which is not supposed to be on the market has a "market price"? How can it be sold at a discount when it's not supposed to be sold at all? And why in hell is Japan making it available as part of the school lunch program?
To start with, Japan interprets "research" as allowing it to take around 1,400 whales a year (yeah, it says 1,200 in the linked article, but they're a bit on the low side) -- including minke whales, fin whales, sei whales, Bryde's whales and even some relatives of Herman Melville's protagonist, 45-ton sperm whales. This "research program" began in 1986, the year after Japan officially gave up it's commercial whaling program. When Japan proposed that they be able to more or less go on whaling as normal in the name of "research," the IWC rejected the program. Japan went ahead anyway. In 1987, the IWC ordered Japan to stop. Japan went ahead anyway. The United States felt obliged to step in at this point and Ronald Reagan ordered all Japanese fishermen out of US waters until they complied with international law (how very non-Ronald-Reagan-as-icon-of-crypto-corporatism of him).
Even so, Japan's whaling continued. Early in the 1990s, the number of whales killed was reduced, but as international attention waned, the numbers crept back up. As it turns out, killing 1,400 or so very large animals for "research" leaves quite a bit of meat behind. Whatever it is the Japanese are researching, it's apparently something tiny. Some might say, something that's not there at all. And as the International Whaling Commission stipulates that any whale meat left over from research can't be wasted, the research-remnants are promptly processed.
By the mid-1990s, Japan was again regularly ignoring the IWC and little was being done about it outside the ranks of activists. At this point, the Japanese government started two programs of such strategic boldness that they demonstrate that long-term thinking is not dead everywhere in the world.
First, Japan set out to change the IWC rulings. Odds that the members of the IWC would suddenly come around to Japan's way of thinking at first might have seemed remote. Not only was whaling hugely unpopular in the IWC countries, but the animals were clearly still endangered. There seemed no good reason to reverse the opposition. Besides, Japan had made a habit of spitting at the IWC's annual decisions -- not exactly the kind of thing that wins friends among the spit-ees. But throughout the 1990s a number of small nations developed a sudden interest in whaling and asked to be added to the ranks of the IWC. By an astounding coincidence, many of these nations received significant aide from Japan. In 1994, the IWC created the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in the antarctic with Japan being the only vote against. A few years later, when a vote on expanding sanctuaries was made, the court had been sufficiently stacked that the vote failed. By 2006, the greatly-padded ranks of the IWC actually voted that the ban on commercial whaling was "unnecessary." Once Japan had been chastened by the IWC, but increasingly the IWC is just an extension of the Japanese government.
Meanwhile, Japan worried about whaling's image at home. Japanese citizens had generally supported the idea of whaling as part of their national tradition, but the idea wasn't translating into whale burger bonanza. The truth was that the whale meat made available through the government's "research" program wasn't selling. What to do? Some whale meat was exported to other markets around the world, including the US. Some was even sold as pet food. But starting six years ago, the Japanese government began a program that would both get rid of the excess meat and help bolster the market for the future -- they would feed it to kids. And that's how it came to be that a fifth of Japanese school children are getting a personal connection with byproducts of cetacean research.
Japan, which aims to resume commercial whaling, is hoping to increase consumption of whale meat as meat stocks of whales captured by the institute have piled up to around 4,000 tons.
Just how wimpy does it make support for most goals of the United States, when Japan is willing to spend billions of yen and decades of time building support for butchering endangered animals? That, by god, is commitment.
It's also why, no matter what you think of Paul Watson, mock-documentaries, or hijinks on the high seas, you should remember that there are some really giant dicks in this story -- and I'm not talking about the whales.