世論 What Japan Thinks

I picked up an evening paper today in Japan and this is what I saw:

The big headline in the middle is the Japanese transliteration of gotcha. Subheading inspired by Kill an Argie, Win a Mini Metro.

With the ongoing whaling by Japan being generally supported by the Japanese public, this perhaps sums up Japan’s official stance. It was Masayuki Komatsu of the Fisheries Agency who made that famous statement on minke whales being the cockroaches of the sea.

My mother sends me clippings of the Economist regularly, and in this month’s batch was a very interesting article on how 200 years ago it was Westerners, mostly Amercians, who were encroaching Japan’s sovereignty – rather than today when Japan fishes (or should that be mammals, if that noun is verbable) in Australia’s self-declared sovereign region – to take whales, with at the peak 550 ships sailing around the still-closed country picking off the local cetaceans.

As for whaling around Japan, vestigial echoes reverberate. Every northern winter, Japan faces barbs for sending a whaling fleet into Antarctic waters. And why, asks the mayor of Taiji, a small whaling port, should Japanese ships have to go so far, suffering international outrage? Because, he says, answering his own question, the Americans fished out all the Japanese whales in the century before last.

Just to tie this into surveys, here’s a story from this time last year on an opinion poll regarding Japanese attitudes to whaling.