
Japan and the whale - Perados
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35397749
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pvaldes
I had cut the flesh and bones of many whale, dolphin and porpoise corpses and
personally I will not eat this meat unless really hungry and disperate. And
I'll never, ever, no-way, eat it raw as sashimi.

I'm not afraid of the flavor; and is not the ethics/religion/ideology behind
the idea that will stops me doing this. Is not even that they are endangered
species.

The main reason to me are the parasites.

I'm talking of the gastric volcanoes 'spitting' herring worms, and the
pulsating 'alive spaguetti dish' picture that you see when you open the gut,
and the fat tailed and 70 cm long Crassicauda worms blocking the blood vessels
of the kidney; or dissolving with chemicals parts of the skull of the live
dolphins.

Is also the St. Lawrence belugas accumulating high loads of mercury, lead,
PCBs, PBDEs and other stable toxic compounds in the fat and having high rates
of cancer by this. And the fact that whales travel thousands of miles around
the planet each year, and Fukushima guys and other companies are still
releasing water contaminated with toxic waste to the sea.

The flavor is not the problem, the problem is that currently this meat is not
safe to human consumption.

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emodendroket
Aren't salmon somewhat similar in this regard?

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snowwrestler
Any animal high in the food chain is likely to concentrate heavy metals, which
is why pregnant women are advised against eating a lot of salmon or tuna while
they are pregnant.

Salmon flesh is not, to my knowledge, infected with parasites. I've eaten it
straight out of the fish in Alaska and it was clean, soft, and tasty.

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emodendroket
Salmon are kind of infamous for worms, which is why they're not traditional
sushi fish.

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pvaldes
Some species are worst than other in this sense, Cod for example. Salmons are
relatively clean, but Ocean Sunfish... oh my..., prehistoric life forms
everywhere :-)

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jmadsen
I think there is another strong element that was completely missed out in the
article, though I would like a Japanese person to confirm this:

The right wing political groups in Japan have a disproportionate sway on
politics. They push very hard the idea of "Japanese-ness".

In the grade schools here, once a year, the children are served whale for
lunch as a way of teaching them their "feeling of Japanese identity" I have
always assumed they (the right wing) were one of the driving forces behind
this.

Aside from that, people rarely eat it. The folks who like it talk about its
unique flavor, but I've never thought it was anything special & I think most
folks here feel the same.

~~~
ue_
>as a way of teaching them their "feeling of Japanese identity"

In my opinion, if it must be taught rather than naturally experienced, it
can't be worth much. This just goes to show how much people are invested in
using anything to push their own agenda.

That said, it's hardly uncommon to create an identity, say that it exists,
then control people with it. Look at any nation in any war for example.

For me, it doesn't make any sense to have an idea of "Japanese-ness"; it's
based around culture and that can be learned an experienced. If all that's to
it is knowledge, there's no reason to push it as something unique. It's not
dissimilar to a physicist teaching their fellow physicists the "feeling of
physicist identity".

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lxmorj
When I was in Iceland I was told it's a kind of food supply insurance plan.
Both Iceland and Japan are small, and in the even of a war, blockade, or other
trade limitations access to whale meat is necessary.

The skills required to successfully hunt whale are only learned through
whaling, and therefore it's necessary to keep doing it on a small scale to
have the ability to spin it up in the future.

It's a good narrative, but I can't say whether or not it's accurate...

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daniel-cussen
There's truth to this.

After the famine in Germany during and after WW1, the German high command
decided running out of butter (as in "guns and butter", it's both, not one or
the other: you want guns you need butter) would not happen again. Even before
Hitler became chancellor, the military prepared for WW2 by buying whale oil at
low prices to stockpile and building up a whale factory fleet with assistance
from the (largely unemployed) Norwegian whaling fleet. As a direct result,
during WW2, Germany was well fed.

Given large enough whale stocks, it's a very viable strategy for wartime or
blockade.

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pvaldes
This is a myth; we forget the more logical option. Krill shrimps are edible
also, there is plenty in the sea and you just need a net. Is by far much less
dangerous option for sea workers and human consumers. In famine times you need
to save as many energy as you can, and use the precious fuel wisely. In any
case, not enough strong fishermen would be available to go to a dangerous and
demanding fishing trip, because the men will be at thousand km of home, doing
war.

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rdl
I had whale in Ishinomaki a couple years ago -- I didn't actually know it was
a whale restaurant when I went in (everything was in Japanese, no one spoke
English other than via a barely-working google translate on android), and
while there was a picture of a whale somewhere, I just think of that as a
"sea" thing, not food.

Once I was in, I didn't want to be rude and leave, and was curious. It was
basically beef or very fatty tuna taste; not worth the drama. Not bad, but I
don't think it's worth the international condemnation to continue eating it.

(JPY 3000 or so all-in; Japan outside the big cities is actually cheap.)

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jpatokal
For reference, though, that's kind of expensive as far as Japanese meals go.
You can easily have a pretty nice full Japanese meal with less exotic protein
(chicken, pork, beef etc) for Y1000.

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ekianjo
In Tokyo it's more like 1300+, but anyway there's a wide range of meal prices
in Japan. You can eat for cheap but you can also pay a lot more if you want to
go higher end.

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dnr
I had some raw whale meat in Norway, and it was really delicious. A lot like
beef tartare. Not gamey at all, as the article implied.

(They have quotas on the number of whales that can be killed, and this meat
was legally harvested, or at least that's what I was informed. I had no way of
checking myself.)

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smcl
I suspect if you're in somewhere like Norway you're not likely to have been
misled on the whale's origins

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vidarh
In recent years the quotas for Minke whale has rarely even been met, so
there's very little incentive for someone to risk illegal whaling. I think
most of it basically goes to tourists now, with a small proportion to people
nostalgic about the old days.

I don't quite get how someone would find it amazing - to me, as I've mentioned
elsewhere, it basically used to be an acceptable cheap beef substitute.

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lmm
It was a wartime food. It's the equivalent of American cheese, or apple
crumble/carrot cake in Britain.

