Small-Type Whaling

This fishery has its origin in Japan in the late nineteenth century, when the Greener’s harpoon gun invented in American whaling was introduced to Japan (Matsubara 1896, in Japanese) and attempts for its improvement began (it was also termed a mid-sized whaling cannon) (Kaneda and Niwa 1899, in Japanese) A Sekizawa tried hunting Baird’s beaked whales off Chiba Prefecture in 1891 with a Greener’s gun mounted on a rowed boat (Sekizawa 1892a, in Japanese) and caught the first whale the next year (Sekizawa 1892b, in Japanese) In 1908, Tokai-Gyogyo Co Ltd succeeded in the Baird’s beaked whale fishery off Chiba using a Greener’s gun of 37 mm caliber imported from Norway (see Section 1371) This success triggered the establishment of numerous operations for hunting Baird’s beaked whales in Chiba

The governor of Chiba Prefecture recognized the importance of this whaling for the local economy and the risk of overcompetition among whalers and placed the fishery under a license system of the prefecture in 1920 At the time, the fishery was defined as Whaling with Rowed Boats or Motor Driven Vessels and 26 vessels got the license In the fishery of the time, the whales were taken from rowed catcher boats, and motor-driven vessels were used for towing whale carcasses and the catcher boats Chiba Prefecture further continued its effort to decrease the number of licensees (Komaki 1996, in Japanese) By 1942, the fleet declined to 15 vessels (Matsuura 1942, in Japanese)

In Taiji (33°36′N, 135°57′E) in Wakayama Prefecture, a particular kind of whaling cannon was invented and was in use for many years K Maeda of Taiji started the idea when he was shown a whaling cannon in Korea by A Sekizawa Later, in 1903, Maeda made a three-barreled whaling cannon and used it in hunting short-finned pilot whales off Taiji In 1904, he modified it into a five-barreled cannon, which was called “Maeda’s multi-barreled pilot whaling gun” and used it for hunting pilot whales in Taiji until around 1967, when the last pilot whale vessel in Taiji switched from Maeda’s multi-barreled cannon to a single-barrel, small-caliber cannon The pilot whale vessels of Taiji (also called tento-sen) first introduced engines in 1913 (Hamanaka 1979, in Japanese)

Thus, a type of Japanese whaling that was later defined as small-type whaling was established around 1910 This fishery was operated by 22 vessels in 1941 and expanded to the Sanriku coast on the Pacific coast of northern Honshu in latitudes 37°54′N-41°35′N (Matsuura 1942, in Japanese) The number further increased to 31 or 33 vessels (including those in the planning stage) in 1942 and to 46 in 1943, including expansion to more prefectures, that is, 2 vessels in Saga (northern Kyushu), 15 in Wakayama, 4 in Mie (Pacific coast in 33°45′N-35°00′N, 136°00′E-136°55′E), 2 in Shizuoka (34°36′N-35°08′N, 137°29′E-39°10′E), 9 in Tokyo (Pacific coast in 26°45′N-35°40′N, 139°07′E-142°06′E with southern islands), 10 in Miyagi (southern Sanriku Region in latitudes 37°54′N-38°59′N), and 4 in Iwate (middle Sanriku Region in latitudes 38°59′N-40°27′N), for a total of 46 (Nihon Hogei-gyo Suisan Kumiai [Japanese Association of Whale Fisheries] 1943, in Japanese; Table 41) As in the case of other cetacean fisheries in Japan, this reflected the government policy during the war (Matsuura 1942, 1943, both in Japanese; Chapter 2) The trend of increase continued after World War II, and the government identified a need to place the operation under a license system in 1947

The small-type whalers usually made daily trips within the prefecture of registration, but it was technically and legally possible to operate in any other waters In the postwar period, minke whales became the main target of the fishery, and vessels registered in Chiba or the Sanriku Region visited the Sea of Japan and the Okhotsk Sea for minke whales (which were scarce off the Pacific coast west of Chiba Prefecture) In some cases, their catch records may have been compiled in the prefecture of registration, not by the position of the actual catch, which must be identified before analyzing the statistics

In the 1941 season, 22 small-type whaling vessels took a total of 734 whales (Table 41) The average was 26 per vessel Six vessels from the Sanriku coast caught a total of

534 cetaceans: 397 pilot whales, 15 killer whales, 100 dolphins, and 22 minke whales This means that only 27% of the vessels took 72% of the whales and dolphins reported by the entire small-type whaling fleet Their catch was mostly short-finned pilot whales of the northern form; minke whales were a minor element The catch of 11 Chiba boats was 24 Baird’s beaked whales (the official statistics recorded 23: see Table 1314), 7 pilot whales, and a small number of presumably dolphins I question whether they made a profit by taking only 2-3 Baird’s beaked whales per season, or whether these Chiba whalers worked in other fisheries in the rest of the year Five Wakayama boats took 118 pilot whales and 50 dolphins (Table 41)

Small-type whaling expanded operations during the peri-war period, and it also underwent a considerable change in the target species as seen in the fragmentary catch statistics Table 41 was constructed to describe the changes, from Matsuura (1942, 1943, both in Japanese) that

recorded catch and operating vessels by regions (for the 1941 season) and from Maeda and Teraoka (1958, in Japanese) that gave catch statistics of 4 seasons from 1948 to 1951 Table 42 shows operation of the fishery in a later period based on various official statistics Ohsumi (1975) is useful for understanding the operations of small-type whaling in Japan for the years 1948-1972

The catch of minke whales by Japanese small-type whaling was small until 1941, when 22 minke whales were taken by 22 vessels (Table 41; Matsuura 1942, 1943, both in Japanese), but the catch increased to 285 in 1948 and about 500 per year in the late 1950s (Table 42) The minke whale remained the major target species of the fishery until 1987, the last year of commercial hunt of minke whales (Table 43) There could have been two reasons for the lower catch of minke whales in

Peri-World War II Expansion of Japanese Small-Type Whaling Indicated by Number of Vessels and Whales Taken

TABLE 4.2 Whales Taken by Commercial Small-Type Whaling during 1941-1987 (Official Statistics)

the early period The more plausible reason was that large-type whaling (for the definition see Section 54) operated off the Japanese coasts and supplied a large amount of meat of “sei whales” (which included both sei and Bryde’s whales) and fin whales The second possible reason would be the difficulty of distribution of products using the still undeveloped transportation system of the time from remote land stations to whale meat consumers, who were mostly located in western Japan Importation of whale meat from Japanese Antarctic whaling fleets was permitted experimentally for the first time in the 1937/1938 season, or at the beginning of the Sino-Japan war

The Japanese market for whale meat of the time was probably not large enough to satisfy the entire whaling industry A whaler’s wife recorded the hard life of small-type whalers who had to survive competing with large-type whaling and Antarctic factory ship whaling (Shoji 1988, in Japanese and English)

The major minke whaling grounds were off the coasts of Sanriku and Hokkaido during the period 1948-1972 Each of these regions recorded 40%–45% of the total Japanese catch of the species; only about 15% was taken in other waters (Ohsumi 1975) The minke whaling grounds were located on both sides of the Japanese islands and shifted northward with the progress of the season (Omura and Sakiura 1956) The Sea of Japan ground on the west side of Japan extended from northern Kyushu to western Hokkaido and to the Okhotsk Sea The fishing season ranged from February/March to October, with a peak in March-April in the southwestern area and in June/July off Hokkaido in northern Japan The grounds on the east side of Japan on the Pacific coast extended from Sanriku to eastern Hokkaido and to the Okhotsk Sea and were whaled from January to October with a peak in May-June off Sanriku and July/August off eastern Hokkaido (Omura and Sakiura 1956)

Only a few minke whales have been taken off Chiba; instead, Baird’s beaked whales have been the major target of small-type whalers there The species was hunted only off the Chiba coast and consumed locally until the beginning of the

1940s (Kasuya 1995, in Japanese) Statistics on Baird’s beaked whales taken by small-type whalers are available by region only for 1948-1952, 1965-1969, and from 1982 (Table 1314) Whalers off Abashiri (44°01′N, 144°16′E) in the southern Okhotsk Sea recorded a catch of 24 Baird’s beaked whales in 1948 and continued the operation thereafter, suggesting that they started the hunt perhaps in 1942-1947, that is, during World War II or shortly after it In other regions, catches of more than 10 Baird’s beaked whales have appeared in the records for the Sea of Japan since around 1949, for off Sanriku since around 1950, and off Kushiro (42°59′N, 144°23′E) on the Pacific coast of eastern Hokkaido since around 1951 Thus, I conclude that in areas other than Chiba and Abashiri, hunting of Baird’s beaked whales started around 1950, or several years after the end of World War II Fishing grounds for the species in the postwar period were off Chiba, off Sanriku, Toyama Bay (c. 37°N, 137°15′E), off the Oshima Peninsula (41°20′N-43°20′N, 139°40E′–140°00′E, off southwestern Hokkaido), and off Abashiri (Omura et  al. 1955) During the years from 1948 to 1972, the operations off Sanriku and Chiba each recorded about 40%–45% of the Baird’s beaked whales taken in the whole of Japan; the remaining regions (Hokkaido coasts and the Sea of Japan) took only about 15%

The season of the Baird’s beaked whale fishery was from early summer to autumn off Chiba and Sanriku with a peak in July-August The small catch of the species off Kushiro had a peak in October-November, the Okhotsk Sea operation had two peaks in May-June and September-October, and the Sea of Japan operation had a peak around July These peaks in Baird’s beaked whale takes reflected two factors other than migration of the species through the fishing grounds One was the presence of minke whales Minke whales were preferred over Baird’s beaked whales because they sold at higher price and were easier to capture Another plausible factor was an unevaluated effect of poaching of sperm whales It has been reported that some small-type whalers off the Pacific coast of Japan poached sperm whales and reported some of them as

Whales Taken by Commercial Small-Type Whaling during 1941-1987 (Official Statistics)

TABLE 4.3 Operation of Japanese Small-Type Whaling before and after Cessation of Commercial Whaling on Minke Whales with the 1987 Season

Japanese; see Section 1372) Such distortion will be small in the statistics of the Sea of Japan and Okhotsk Sea operation because sperm whales are uncommon there Japanese smalltype whaling off the Pacific coast of Japan reported takes of about 4400 Baird’s beaked whales during the 25  years from 1948 to 1972 Recent abundance of the species in the region was estimated at about 5000 (CV = 056) (IWC 2001) It should be investigated whether the abundance of Baird’s beaked whales in the early 1940s could have been large enough to explain the catch history and current abundance estimate (Kasuya 1995, in Japanese)

Although the term gondo [pilot whales] is mostly likely to represent two forms of short-finned pilot whales off Japan, it was also possibly applied in many of the early statistics to small numbers of false killer whales and Risso’s dolphins (Chapter 3) The small-type whalers of Taiji hunted shortfinned pilot whales of the southern form, supported by the food preferences of the local community, which identified Risso’s dolphins and false killer whales as inferior to shortfinned pilot whales This situation was comparable to the Baird’s beaked whale fishery off Chiba that was supported by local demand for meat of that particular species Ohsumi (1975) using published statistics of gondo [pilot whales] by prefecture in 1948-1972 showed that about 50% of the Japanese pilot whale catch was obtained in Wakayama Prefecture (Taiji included) and another 35% in the Sanriku Region The current understanding of distribution of stocks of pilot whales suggests that the former was of the southernform short-finned pilot whales and the latter of the northern form of the species The analysis of Kasuya (1975) of monthly operational reports of small-type whalers presented to the Fisheries Agency in 1949-1952 reached a similar conclusion Matsuura (1942, 1943, both in Japanese) reported a catch of 397 pilot whales off Sanriku and 118 off Wakayama in 1941 He also reported a rapid increase in the number of small-type whalers off Sanriku, that is, 7 vessels in operation and 4 vessels in preparation (as of July 1942) From these bits of information, I have the impression that largescale hunting of pilot whales started off Sanriku possibly during the war as in the case of other small-cetacean fisheries Catch statistics and quotas for small-type whaling are given in Tables 42 and 43