The legality and legitimacy of Japanese whaling - Part II

[Second and final part of a guest post by Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith - Part I is here.]

The second point to take away from Arch’s book is that when organized whaling became established in early modern Japan, under the watchful eye of domainal lords (daimyo), who could decide who had jurisdiction over particular whaling areas, or over bodies of whales either washed up on shore or brought to a particular shore for processing, regulation was a way of dealing with the local problems of particular businesses, and of their interrelationships, and of the ways those businesses could benefit the domain through fee exactions, as a kind of tax-like income for the domain. It was not about ensuring the continued availability of whale meat as a food source. Indeed, when it took hold and expanded during the Tokugawa peace, Japanese whaling was not primarily about food. It was about profit and about ensuring the continued supply of a wide range of whale products. Sutter is eloquent on this point:
Workers using windlasses to pull sheets of blubber off a whale for processing in the sheds behind.
Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan.
Whale meat, which today sits at the heart of Japanese claims for the (legality and legitimacy of) … whaling’s deep cultural importance, was the least of it. Arch shows that whale meat, either fresh or salted, simply did not travel well and was thus of minor dietary importance during the early modern period. But whale oil served as a vital illuminant, other whale products helped the Japanese fertilize and work their fields, and, in one of this study’s most surprising insights, we learn how whale oil was also widely used as a pesticide that allowed the Japanese to intensify rice culture [p. xi].
And, again, Arch herself is more pointed:
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