ABSTRACT

Having looked at a number of whaling communities in Japan, we will now turn to the whalers themselves, and in this chapter portray the lives of several of those who have been involved in various aspects of Japanese pelagic and coastal whaling. Here our aims are more serious than the mere provision of what some might refer to as “palm tree anthropology”. By focussing on the lives of a flenser, crew member, gunner and owner, we want to make plain the variety of career paths open to those involved in Japanese whaling. By bringing in the wives of two whalers, we aim to show how women act to integrate both crew members on a whaling vessel, and these whalers into the community in which they themselves live all year round. At the same time, we are able to provide details of training methods in the whaling industry, as well as of whalers’ attitudes towards whales. By revealing how much distress the moratorium on whaling has caused people, and by showing the kinds of problems they have faced in adapting to new ways of life, we want to give the reader an idea of what it means to be a whaler in Japan and to suggest that neither whaling nor whalers are quite so barbaric as is sometimes made out. Here is a group of people who are proud of their skills, proud of the communities of which they are a part. At the same time, however, they share with certain Indian tribes of the Amazon, for example, or coal miners in Britain, the same sense of frustration and anxiety common to all people whose way of life is threatened with extinction.