KINEJAPAN digest 2961

[Jim Fujii]

The Cove

I watched "Close-up Gendai" with dismay (but why should I have expected 
better from this program), and
thought it dove-tailed well with a talk by Steve Wise (author of Rattling
the Cage and other works addressing the legal issues of granting some
animals legal rights) who gave a talk at Tokyo University today.  Close-up 
Gendai (hereafter Gendai) begins by featuring a theater owner who does not 
want to repeat the mistake he had made a few years back of caving in to the 
right wing who did not want him to show the film on Yasukuni.  This time he 
takes a courageous risk in standing up to what is this time the organized 
goon tactics orchestrated by Nishimura Shuhei's 'Shin-uyoku'. 
Unfortunately, Gendai reports that very few people are coming to view this 
film in Tokyo.  Gendai's face, Kuniya Hiroko (who is a fluent English 
speaker, though she never uses it to confront or to involve anyone 
associated with the film)
leads the charge in focusing on picky holes that discredit the film's status
as 'documentary' while simply parroting the Shin-uyoku diatribe claiming the
film is an assault on Japanese fishing tradition dating back 400 hundred
years, and calling in turn for a film made with the voice of these 
fishermen.

An earlier shuzai-based piece by TBS had confirmed other information 
reported in the Japan Times and other publication venues that
only about 20 fishermen are involved in the annual dolphin culling and
slaughter in Taiji; highly lucrative, its prohibition would not translate to 
a 'way of life' for many, as for most of the year these same fishermen go 
about fishing for crabs and others sea animals
when the lucrative window for selling select dolphins at ridiculous prices
to burgeoning sea worlds across China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia 
closes.
The oft-invoked 'tradition' of dolphin trapping and killing in fact began 
with the uptick in prices for dolphins from this recent expansion of 
sea-mammal based entertainment venues, making the
narrative of a hundreds of years old tradition of dolphin capture
pure fabrication.

Getting back to 'The Cove,' its main points are two:  (1) the
scientifically based understanding that dolphins have the
intelligence, ability to communicate, and other measures of cognition and
sentience that might even exceed those of our close primate cousins, and
that confining them into sea world like environments is a death sentence, or 
leads unfailingly to
much shorter life expectancies for captive dolphins, not to mention the 
physical/mental cruelty that confinement to creatures designed to cover 
hundreds of miles at a time represents; (2) these dolphins have extremely 
high
concentrations of mercury that are also mirrored in very high levels in
Taiji residents who consume them.  Gendai addressed neither.  How Steven 
Wise and 'The Cove' come
together is in this way:  Japanese accounts of the film (by the way, I see 
no evidence
that Kuniya or any of the commentators have even viewed the film!) never
talk about the valuation of dolphins based on such science in the West.  In
fact, those involved in making the film focus on the message in Japan that
dolphin meat is unhealthy, believing (rightly, I am afraid) that the appeal
to the dolphins astounding cognitive and affective range would not resonate
in Japan.










--------------------------------------------------
From: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 1:05 PM
To: "To leave" <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: KINEJAPAN digest 2961

>
>     KINEJAPAN Digest 2961
>
> Topics covered in this issue include:
>
>  1) "The Cove" - NHK coverage
> by Michael Goldberg <ivw2 at yahoo.com>
>  2) Re: "The Cove" - NHK coverage
> by aaron.gerow at yale.edu
>  3) Re: "The Cove" - NHK coverage
> by Junkerman John <jtj at rf7.so-net.ne.jp>
>  4) Contacts for YOSHIMI Shunya for research project puroposes
> by "Sten-Kristian Saluveer (Niijanaa)" <sten at niijanaa.net>
>