Someone Call the IWC!

I just ate some whale meat! I swear, I didn’t kill the thing. It just showed up in the school lunch today. I’m sorry!

So, I was in the tea room today, and the tea lady and another teacher said that we were having “kujira” for lunch. Kujira is whale. “Ahh!” I thought. “Oh,” I said, “isn’t that a bit expensive for school lunch?” (We can’t even get beef for school lunch because it is prohibitively expensive.)

Ok, a little background. Japanese people eat whale meat, but only very rarely. Traditionally, whale meat was a delicacy, but recently it has become enormously expensive.

Ok, more background. Japan is a member of the IWC (International Whaling Commission) which monitors and sets (non-binding) standards for commercial whaling. In 1986, in the face of a lot of “Save the Whales” signs, the IWC passed a moratorium on all commercial whaling – effectively reducing yearly catch quotas to zero. Because of this, some countries (like Canada) left the IWC, and others, like Norway, simply exempted itself from the ban (with no penalty, I might add). There is a little loophole in the ban that allows whaling for “scientific purposes.” This is where Japan comes in. Japan complies with the moratorium, but still continues active whaling under the auspices of “research.” They say they can learn only learn certain things about the whales if they kill them and cut them up. Most Western scientists think this is BS. Did I mention that a stipulation of the exemption for scientific research is that none of the whale meat can go to waste? Jackpot! Kill the whales for “science” and then sell the meat. Everyone gets what they want. Japanese whalers get their profit, and the few people in Japan who want whale meat get their whale meat. Way to work the loopholes.

So, this is how whale meat comes to Japan. There’s not very much of it, and its very expensive, so you’d almost never see it in supermarkets or at regular restaurants. So, how did it make its way into my school lunch? I was told that this whale meat was “special” whale meat that is only available for schools. So, whomever the nutritionist bought the meat from must have been greatly discounting the price. Here’s my theory: the whalers make a small portion of their catch available, for almost no money, to schools. That way, they give a generation of children (from whose diet whale meat is completely disappearing) a taste for kujira. That doesn’t sound so crazy, does it? If no one is exposed to whale meat, no one will want to buy whale meat, and the whalers will be out of work. They have to occasionally give a common folk a taste of their goods.

So, that was my moral dilemma for the day. First, whether or not to protest. When I decided against that, whether or not to eat it. Which I inevitably did… It really didn’t taste all that different from beef… or horse for that matter. Yeah, they eat horse here too.