The Japanese can be so honest at times and yet so silly. I remember hearing an immigration official tell me it was for my safety that the doors of the car I was riding in could not be opened from the inside. Yes, captives get strange notions about how to safely tuck and roll off an island highway at 90 kph, to be sure.
Cultural captives also can be persuaded to indulge in something illegal or immoral, such as the eating of whale meat, raw, red and lovely.
It was a few days before I was leaving Japan after my year of teaching there. How can you stick by your own culture and convictions when someone is offering you a delicasy out of respect, something you'll never have the chance to taste again?
What if it had been human flesh?
Remember how much trouble the earth was in in Star Trek IV when the humpbacks were gone? We western humans with liberal educations, especially those who grew up during the dolphin-safe tuna movement, tend to feel Cetaceans to be thinking and emotional beings.
Yet, I ate some. It was the best meat I ever had, guilt notwithstanding, so I can understand the attraction.
It's totally bogus that Japanese scientists need to kill off 50 humpbacks in order to conduct research, but what if someone told you that cow was endangered and you couldn't ever eat it again?
Curb Girl: what an urban-based accidental journalist accidentally thinks when she's falling face-first on figurative pavement
4 comments:
The recent publicized slaughter of the penned dolphins plus this "scientific" hunt of whales tells me that this Asian culture has a ways to go before it can once again be romanticized.
Wow, you made a Star Trek reference. I never thought I'd see the day.
Your #1 Trekker fan, free
I also am both amazed by the reference and made thoughtful by the last graph. It's true that Western cultures tend to romanticize sea mammals, but maybe that's a relation to our own past; how poorly we've treated cetaceans and how few there are left. Whales are a shrinking species, and whaling for "research" is a patent lie to get around an international ban. The cow, on the other hand, is a terrestrial animal whose numbers can be verified quite easily. There are millions of them! Not that that makes a difference. If we were merely trying to eliminate some of the excess population, we'd all be eating venison. No, though the meat may be very tasty indeed, it's not worth the price in species diversity.
sobering - I don't understand if there is an international sanction against it how can they do it? I probably didn't read thoroughly... and of COURSE they had a ceremony! (I think I'm still tired of Japanese ceremonies even after all this time - Bad Susan :(
Post a Comment