Oishinbo - Vol. 13 Ch. 113 - Battle of the Whales (Part 2)
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Oh my god, three more chapters of this... Please have mercy on me...
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I think using Jeff in these chapters is pretty telling. Kariya has shown he's comfortable with displaying Japanese culinary and cultural ignorance, but for whaling he has to present the narrative that Japanese people uniformly are okay with hunting and eating whale. It's not our culture that's wrong, it's that Westerners misunderstand us!
(They do not.)
(They do not.)
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Also, as I pointed out in the TL notes, it's pretty rich for Kariya to claim that Jeff is culturally ignorant when he comments on how much he likes horsemeat. Eating horses is very taboo for those of us in the United States, in fact, just a local example, here where I live in Pittsburgh about 7 years ago, there was a restaurant in the Lawrenceville (trendy hipster) neighborhood that was hosting French Canadian chefs for the evening and horse tartare was served for that night only. It created a massive backlash for that restaurant and there was a petition to actually make it illegal here in Pennsylvania to consume it (one of the organizers of the petition actually raised a number of issues with consuming it that would be close to Kariya's heart, such as the sheer amount of wormers, antibiotics, and fly spray used on horses)...
Getting back to the point, Kariya deliberately mischaracterizes and misinforms on the subject of whale conservation to the point where it has actually made double checking this chapter's TL difficult to do...
there is one particular time when japan massively go against the ban of whale hunting in the late 80s early 90s if i recalled it right.
it bleeds to several manga in this particular period.
seriously,
the difference between commercial hunting, personal consumption hunting, and farm production is VAST
especially commercial hunting low birth rate mammal versus farm production high birth rate avis/birds.
i have tried to explain similar topic of commercial hunting vs for personal food hunting impact difference several times to some of my friends.
there are tribes/culture that hunts whale for food and its still allowed by some conservationist but that is only because they hunts one or two whale that passes by their shores, for their group food. They don't go to open seas hunting year round. the overall damage for this local cultural hunting is low compared to open seas commercial hunting.
some species of whale does started to recover per 2024 but it still like a 90% after decades of whale hunting ban and there is still plenty species in endangered list. imagine we still allowed people to hunt them in early 90s. some of them will go extinct now.
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Westerners especially americans (or americanized)really like to bitch and make it their job about eating dogs,cats and horses,or whatever and surprisingly only on what they culturally dont eat nowadays.So they are free to restrict and try to impose on others because they arent affected.
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First of all, it's not even the United States that has expressed the strongest opposition to Japanese whaling. It's the British, the Australians, and the New Zealanders...
Second, and this is actually important because it goes to your argument... It does affect us just as much as it affects everyone else in this instance. In fact, there's a great cultural history of whaling here in the United States, especially in New England. The truth, no matter how hard it is for you to hear, is that Japan's whaling was unsustainable and they hunted the blue whale in particular, nearly to extinction. 98.5% of the blue whale population gone by the time of the moratorium on whaling... You can't just hunt a vital species of animal to the brink of death and then not expect it to affect the global ecosystem. Here in the US, we did the same thing to bison. Hunted them to the point of near extinction. It had to be stopped. So, protections were enacted and now bison meat is a sustainable industry. You want to protect your culture of whaling, then you should do it sustainably. The Japanese government has yet to express a desire to do that.
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I should wait for the next episode and not jump in too early, but their counter against the extinction argument is literally just "its ok because there are a lot of whales"??? Is that seriously what they're going with?
These people whine about protecting matsutake mushrooms because they're rare and railing against factories for polluting waters, but oh killing a ton of whales is fine because there's so many of them apparently??
Honestly the conversation about "but whales are smart" is such a strawman too. "You can't kill whales because they're smart" is missing the point and is just an empty argument. Refuting this doesn't prove anything.
These people whine about protecting matsutake mushrooms because they're rare and railing against factories for polluting waters, but oh killing a ton of whales is fine because there's so many of them apparently??
Honestly the conversation about "but whales are smart" is such a strawman too. "You can't kill whales because they're smart" is missing the point and is just an empty argument. Refuting this doesn't prove anything.
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Ignoring the cultural aspect, the monetary aspect, and the fucking culinary aspect, the main reason that whaling needs to stop is that it's NOT SAFE to eat the damn things. They build up mercury more than any other marine based life form because they live for so damn long, and eating too much whale is literally bad for your health.
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That’s true. I recall reading that some whale meat had tested as much as six times the safe level of mercury…
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The topic reminds me of eating dogs in South Korea. Even though an overwhelming majority of people in that country, my grandmother included, find the idea of eating dogs disgusting, there are still people there who insist that its some god given national heritage.
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Some years ago, a friend of mine, who has traveled all over the world, relayed a story to us of how one of the elderly students in his English class in South Korea had a dying mother when he was young and the local doctor said to feed her a soup of dog, but the real horrifying thing to me in the story was that the doctor was very specific that they couldn’t just do away with the dog. They had to run the dog until it was near collapse, and then they had to beat it to death… I think I greyed out at that point because I was genuinely horrified at hearing that. It wasn’t the idea of eating the dog that did it for me, just the manner in which it was done.
Needless to say, my position on this issue has I think been made plain, so I’ll just try and finish the rest of this arc as quickly as possible so we can all mercifully move on to better chapters…
This is even funnier considering theres like a 3 chapter story about how unsafe it is to eat raw salmom cos of parasites, and how awful it is that they had served raw salmon cos of their guests health...
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