ABSTRACT
The coordinated, village-based coastal whaling of the Tokugawa period became more ship-based, operating farther offshore, with attempts first to expand in the 1850s to northern Japan, to around Korea beginning in 1877, and leaving offshore bases by the turn of the century, and then as far as Antarctica by the 1930s. This chapter discusses the rise and fall of organized whaling in the Tokugawa period, beginning with the earliest groups, which appeared slightly before this period, in the 1570s, and ending with the nineteenth-century troubles that were concurrent with the end of the period, although in some cases this type of organized whaling group lasted until 1900 or so. In the nineteenth century, Taiji’s net whaling group had 300 crew in the boats alone, having added a dozen boats to their existing fourteen chaser boats. An impact of the whaling industry appears in the religious responses to the death of whales, both in whaling villages and outside of them.
