Recent acclaim for Oscar-award winning documentary, The Cove, has unveiled a small Japanese fishing town to be a mechanism of dolphin slaughter. Japan is essentially the only nation that kills and consumes dolphins. Every year, nearly 23,000 dolphins die by the hand of Japanese fisherman in Taiji, Japan. Because of the shock value felt by oceanographic associations and animal rights activists around the world, this issue is seen as a national concern, one which was understood by the heroic efforts of a film crew and dolphin enthusiasts alike who risked arrest to bring the truth to light.
Of course, Americans will see this horrifyingly inhumane treatment of dolphins as a cause for concern. The film shows raw, clandestine surveillance footage of what really happens behind the “No Trespassing” sign of this Wakayama prefecture’s seaside cove. However, the aim of the American activists in making this film was to tug at the heart strings of Americans in theatres across the nation as they watch sweet, innocent dolphins being savagely slaughtered by a race of people relatively unknown to the American majority.
If the filmmakers could demonstrate a deeper understanding of the Japanese culture, one that would present both the traditional side and global opposition, the film could be more effective. Instead, watching ocean water run red with dolphin blood by way of guerrilla camera tactics simply instigates an emotional response, one of moral contempt.
The Japanese feel Westerners are imposing their own standards and values on the Japanese, which could be considered a sort of ethnocentrism. America is no stranger to the ways of propagating ethnocentric behavior around the world. Nonetheless, out of respect to the Japanese and credibility to the facts and filmmakers themselves, one would think that this issue of defining culturally universal values would be addressed. Alas, it was not.
Negotiating and compromising on a factual basis, especially when crossing cross-cultural borders, is the best approach to making a documentary film that should highlight a real issue of global proportion. Filming angry Japanese fishermen from a rural town when a camera crew of foreigners has no intention of civilized conversation or at least a few simple linguistic formalities of the language will of course enrage those who are trying to defend a practice that is globally attacked. This doesn’t make the Japanese fishermen of Taiji victims, but it naturally puts them on the defense.
On the same token, if humans watch anything die, especially in a somewhat unknown land and by people who are unidentifiable to most Americans because they are foreign, it will make us feel something.
So, Japanese would like to know, where is the line drawn? What is the difference between the hundreds of thousands of cows and chickens slaughtered in unkempt, often governmentally protected factories where working conditions are unsafe, laborers are underpaid and oftentimes working illegally as immigrants and the mass-production of meat works for the sole purpose of consumption. Why is it OK, or at least not globally challenged, that Americans kill so many animals? What is the criterion?
The film argued that the self-awareness of dolphins made them a unique mammal, one that can understand physical pain and pleasure more so than other animals. Such self-awareness comes in the form of the intelligence of dolphins to take their own lives under a state of depression from stress of performing in dolphin shows.
Nonetheless, this parallel of the dolphin's self-awareness to that of a human attempted to reason that dolphins are emotional beings. Be that as it may, most animals can feel pain when they are kept in captivity or killed. In the film; however, a self-awareness for an animal with a potentially keen sense of self turned into a sort of American self-righteousness for saving that particular animal. This view conveniently assumes that our own lives are the most precious and valuable form of life on this earth, and from that criteria, we can easily put price tags on all other forms of life in a hierarchical manner.
The argument could be made that dolphins don’t mass-breed in captivity, and are not being farmed or raised in herds for the specific purpose of being eaten. They’re being hunted. And any wild animal hunter either for food or game, should have restrictions so as to protect biodiversity and the homeostasis of the environment.
The purpose of the film was to try and get Japan to stop killing dolphins. It could be argued that the filmmakers and activists weren’t bluntly attacking Japanese society all together, just this “tradition” in which they deemed unknown to the majority of Japanese.
Yet, if Japanese tradition was honestly analyzed, it should have been stated that whale was one of the principle staples of protein during World War II, when the country was in a bleak state of turmoil and, as an island nation, they used the resources they could to survive. Due to dire need, Japanese used every part of the whale, including oils and certain tendons of the mammal as a substitute for rubber or plastic in various manufactured goods such as athletic equipment.
Japanese tend to reserve confrontation as a last resort. By attacking and exposing this ritual dolphin killing doesn’t make the Japanese want to stand up for themselves. It makes them retreat back within and attempt to smooth things out without public debate. This may seem cowardly to the American people, but then again, it’s a clash of culture which seems to be conveniently overlooked to prove some sort of arbitrary point that the Japanese are either ashamed or clueless about the goings on in their society with regard to dolphins.
Most Japanese may not have known about Taiji’s yearly dolphin slaughters, but they certainly knew about the Japanese habit of whaling, whether it was understood by living it or reading about the makeshift survival attempts of the people during times of war. The film seems to blur the distinction between the incident they were trying to document in Taiji and problems that could occur with whaling and sustainability.
Japanese are not blameless in this matter. Their politicians are just as corrupt as those of the Western world, considering how the Japanese bought votes from impoverished countries such as Dominica and St. Kitts to vie for whaling support at international whaling conferences where the majority of participants are opposed to Japanese habits of whaling. However, this doesn’t make Japan any more corrupt of a country than any other.
The film certainly caught the attention as a suspenseful and heart-wrenching story about the inhumanity performed on our mammalian friends of the sea, which it was dually rewarded for in the Academy Awards. However, if the objective of the filmmakers and activists were to stop slaughtering dolphins, they picked the worst strategy, mainly because they decided negate any opportunity to express both sides to a degree that would make Japanese at least seem somewhat intelligible.
Moralizing documentaries such as this one are ultimately just a piece of entertainment for the viewer which offers moral justice to each, and of course, we would be more than willing to pay for that rush of moral superiority. It’s hard to find an audience, or win an award for that matter, with a documentary that is objective and not moralizing since there is no feel-good sense of premature accomplishment.
Yet, we should feel responsible for understanding a situation fully before judging it based off of one film that takes a moral high-ground to chastise a nation of people who are otherwise uninvolved with dolphin hunting. If the filmmakers could exhibit the sensibility and sensitivity to the culture they were scrutinizing, then it would have deserved more than just an Oscar.
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