[/floatr]A book called Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling
by Andrew Darby was out last year in Australia and is due to be released shortly in America. The Sydney Morning Herald has a short extract:STIFF as a board, polished and precise as a Nikon camera, unbending in his devotion to the cause, Kazuo Shima carried the Rising Sun forward. "The anti-whaling groups constructed their campaigns like a drama, with high emotional content to wring money from the public," Shima said. "They cast themselves as heroes seeking to protect the fair maiden [whales] from a villain [Japan]. Their campaigns were designed to evoke fear [the alleged extinction of the world's largest mammals], love and hate. "To Westerners, the Japanese were the perfect villains. All of the stereotypes of Pacific War propaganda were rolled out to depict Japanese as cruel, barbaric and inhumane"...This is the conundrum for anti-whaling Westerners. What's in it for Japan? "The answer is both simple and complex," Shima said. "Pride is a large part of it. The Japanese have been badly treated: demonised and maligned." And if the resource was sustainable, why not use it? "The principle of sustainable use of renewable marine food resources, the maintenance of our culture and traditions, and the importance of defending truth and reason are too important to be abandoned in the face of an irrational ideology imposed by Western eco-cultists"...more...
