EVERY YEAR, beginning in September, local menus around the Japanese fishing town of Taiji expand to include fresh dolphin sashimi.
Eaten raw with a dab of ginger and soy sauce, the glistening raw flesh resembles liver with a coppery aftertaste that lingers in the mouth long after you’ve chewed it past your protesting taste buds.
Six hours from Tokyo and accessible only via a coastal road that snakes through tunnels hewn from dense mountains, this town of 3,500 people was once largely ignored. Now that isolation has been ended by the prying eyes of western activists.
Even before last year's Oscar-winning documentary The Covewinged its away around the world, a steady trickle of foreign protesters were arriving in the rusting town square to cross swords with local bureaucrats and the two dozen fishermen who run the hunt.
But the US movie’s success and the tireless propagandising of its star, former dolphin-trainer Ric O’Barry (70) who arrived in Tokyo this week with a petition of 1.7 million signatures demanding the hunt be stopped, has made this one of the most watched little towns on the planet.
By the end of the hunting season perhaps 2,000 small whales and dolphins will have been slaughtered for meat that ends up on the tables of local homes and restaurants and in vacuum-packed bags in supermarkets.
As Taiji’s notoriety has grown, fuelled by The Cove and celebrity criticism from Jennifer Aniston, Robin Williams and other high-profile environmentalists, tensions have sharpened. Protesters have clashed with the fishermen. Nets and boats have been sabotaged, activists arrested and several environmental groups have been effectively banned from the town.
Foreigners now almost inevitably mean trouble, especially when they come with cameras. Locals speak with special venom of a BBC documentary that they say depicted them as barbarians. "One fisherman told me if the whalers could kill me, they would," says Mr O'Barry, who once trained dolphins for the 1960s TV series Flipper.
Japanese police have told him to stay away from the town following threats from ultranationalists. Plans for a celebrity-filled rock festival in Japan to highlight the hunt have been abandoned and he can now barely leave his hotel. “But I always try to stay on the right side of the law. If I get arrested, I’m out of this fight.”
Around Taiji, whale meat has been eaten for hundreds of years, local officials claim. Restaurants and shops offer dolphin and whale sashimi and humpback bacon, along with tuna and shark-fin soup. A canteen next to the Taiji Whale Museum, where trained dolphins and small whales perform tricks for tourists, sells Minke steak, sashimi and whale cutlets in curry sauce.
Dolphin is cheaper than beef or whale. Unlike most Japanese children, who have no idea what whale tastes like, Taiji kids know their cetaceans. “I don’t like the taste of dolphin because it smells,” says one. “I prefer whale.” Inside the museum, out-of-towners are often stunned to learn of the local tradition.
The fishermen, who consider dolphins just big fish, like tuna, are bewildered that anyone would find this cruel, dubbing the weekend protesters “extremists” and demanding they be allowed to continue their “tradition”.
Mr O’Barry claims he was told in private by town officials that the real reason for the hunts is “pest-control.” “They’re overfishing and want to kill the competition for the fish. That’s unacceptable. These animals don’t have Japanese passports, they belong to the world.”
