The Interspecies Newsletter

 I have just returned from Japan EXPO, where Interspecies served during the month of August as an invited co-host with ICERC-Japan, at a pavilion inside the so-called NGO village. My purpose was to perform 3 shows about interspecies long term work of using music and art to communicate with various cetaceans around the world. ICERC is Japan’s foremost whale and dolphin NGO. During the final Sunday of my participation at EXPO, the NGO village hosted almost 100,000 people.

The  centerpiece of our pavilion, was a computer kiosk called the WhaleSinger, a musical instrument I designed in collaboration with German software company, Native Instruments. The Whalesinger is an innovative tool to teach children about cetaceans and underwater sound. A child presses an array of large buttons to view a picture and hear the call of 15 different cetacean species. A window then pops up to provide basic info, in both Japanese and English, about that species habitat, behavior, and endangered status. Press other buttons to hear these whale calls looped and layered to create simple melodies and rhythms. Turn a dial to add a gentle drone of waves breaking on the shore, or a slowly undulating musical tone. If you like what you hear, you can press the buttons in sequences of your own invention to compose original techno music of a startlingly high quality.

Over the week of my stay, I was interviewed by 3 newspapers. The Whalesinger was bulleted by the news as an essential sight not to miss at EXPO.  My final presentation of that weekend was documented in full, for viewing on Nagoya television. All this coverage was especially gratifying, given the fact that EXPO included almost 100 country and city pavilions and over 500 company, institutional, and organizational exhibits spread across a huge campus. Attendance at my presentation made it abundantly clear that the Japanese people are extremely interested in the intelligence, communication abilities, and grace of living cetaceans.

EXPO was for kids. Its general theme focused on innovation, technology, and environmental education to help guide children to build a new world where humanity works together to protect nature. The planners succeeded to present the Japanese, themselves,  as leaders, designers, architects, of this ecological good news future. Examples of their leadership role could be found everywhere you looked. The flanks of the hill upon which EXPO was built, were covered by the largest array of solar panels I have ever seen.  The toilets were simply remarkable, with solar-powered filtering systems that recycled a small amount of water to service the huge crowds for months on end.

This EXPO theme left me acutely aware of my own role of presenting a compassionate vision of living, intelligent whales and dolphins to a large mainstream audience of Japanese citizens. We Westerners so often think of the Japanese as ecological brutes. This view is, perhaps, most egregiously displayed by the ongoing thuggish policies of the Japanese whaling industry, as well as by the national disgrace of the Taiji dolphin drive fishery. The disconnect between EXPO’s vision and this international characterization is simply too glaring to overlook. I believe most eco-professionals would agree that, despite the solar panels and other eco-technology,  Japan will never emerge from its role as destroyer of nature until it stops killing whales and dolphins.

Every Westerner I know who works to protect cetaceans, eventually becomes painfully aware of the extent that the Japanese  government and media censor information from abroad that reports Japan’s nefarious role as the world’s primary whaling nation. The result is a vacuum. There is absolutely no discussion within Japan about either the dubious ethics of whaling, or its heated protest within the international community. In other words, both the Japanese government and the mainstream Japanese media are 100% complicit in sanctioning and supporting the whaling and dolphin killing.

How bad is the censorship? Next month, October, a large collective of  Western ecology groups are planning huge demonstrations at Japanese embassies around the world (see the story below). This protest is focused on publicizing the dolphin drive fisheries. Fishermen in several towns around Japan capture and kill dolphins by the thousands, mostly as a reckless measure to correct the egregious destruction of fish stocks by human over-fishing. At EXPO, I had the pleasure to work with several Japanese ecologists, many of whom focus on cetacean issues. Not one of them knew about this upcoming protest. Worse, the two people I spoke to at length about the protest, became embarrassed when I asked if they would publicly support it.

The embarrassment is chronic.  Within Japan, to take sides against the Japanese whale-killing juggernaut, is somewhat analogous to an American animal rights activist lobbyist against beef consumption in a ranching state. There is however, one main difference. The whaling industry is a very small group of men whose wild and threatened “product” provides food for an exceedingly small percentage of Japanese people. And their industry is condemned as profoundly anti-ecological by almost every government and whale scientist in the world. My friend’s embarrassment seemed yet another victory for the whaling industry.

This censorship reminds me of the way the Bush administration has so skillfully marginalized liberals in the USA, until the term itself seems a synonym for foolishness. In such a manner, the Japanese whaling industry marginalizes any and all forms of protest against the killing of cetaceans both large and small. Since the very beginning of the anti-whaling movement in the West in the mid-1970’s, this covert censorship has kept almost every instance of Western protest against whaling out of the Japanese media.

For some years now, I have been aware that my own work with whales is “acceptable” by Japanese media standards. Two reasons explain why I get interviewed so often. First, the Japanese people do love to learn about whales as much as anyone else. Second,  the basis of my work is in art and music rather than political activism. I make it past the covert censors because my message is for whale intelligence with an unmistakable focus on meeting the living animals themselves, and not against  the whale-killing industry. The notable result is that after 15 trips to Japan since 1978 working on cetacean issues, and with well over 100 interviews in Japanese newspapers, radio, and TV, I may be the only Western cetacean professional most Japanese people have ever heard of. And yet I get almost no support from Western whale groups, who reject my proposals for working within Japan as lacking the bite to ever affect whaling.

 Let’s take a closer look at this bite. Any attempt to stop whaling within Japan, can never succeed until whale protection groups figure out how to break through the complicit network of whalers, government, and media, that keeps this issue away from the Japanese people. Or permit me to state the case even more strongly. The best known Western anti-whaling groups are overwhelmingly directed by two different groups of professionals.  One group, the lawyers, are tactically effective by lobbying to contain whaling on the governmental level in the halls of the International Whaling Commission. Their work is important. It is mostly out of the public’s gaze. Unfortunately, it has almost no strategic value.

The other group, essentially publicists and organizers, direct protests as social statements that produce news to affect public opinion. Do you dutifully send in your money in support of groups whose protests make big news in London, or Los Angeles or Sydney? If so, you might ask yourself: what purpose does any anti-whaling protest serve other than as a fundraising event for anti-whaling groups? After so many years of working in Japan, I feel sad to conclude that your money is being wasted. No one in Japan ever hears about these protests. And until the Japanese do hear about them, and are prompted to discuss them and get involved themselves, nothing is ever going to change.

Protest is a powerful political and social tool. It engages people in the street, creates community, granting like-minded groups a legitimate outlet to express their discontent. A successful protest spreads the story of this discontent, achieving the important goal of eliciting more discussion, and asserting pressure on the people who actually have the ability to alter bad policy. But when the story, the community, and the pressure is always Western, and never reaches the people who are able to do something about it, protest never achieves its potential.  Discouragement and possibly outrage are two results. Years of aborted protest against Japanese whaling have left the protesters, themselves, feeling a negative opinion of the Japanese people.

In Tokyo, behind the scenes, the good old boy network of whaling publicists, government bureaucrats and newspaper publishers censors the protests, arrogantly insisting that they are protecting the Japanese people from foreigners who only wish to spread anti-Japanese sentiments. It is simply true that, within Japan, anti-whaling protest has become a synonym for an anti-Japanese smear campaign. Rather than join the international discussion, citizens reject anything originating from anti-whaling groups as anti-Japanese. Any Japanese who takes sides against the whaling industry, even by encouraging an open discussion of the issue, is considered foolish,, someone to be marginalized. 

Only when this embedded system begins to change—only when the discussion transforms to engage the Japanese people themselves—will the whaling industry ever become vulnerable. When the citizens of Japan do become engaged, I believe the Western anti-whaling protesters  will be very surprised at how much the Japanese people revere cetaceans.

After one of my whale shows, I was interviewed by a savvy journalist, for a book about some of the interesting presenters at EXPO. The man’s writing was focused on the community of EXPO, as a means to change the face of ecology within Japan. During the interview, I expressed some of the same ideas about media censorship I have put forth in this article. My interviewer had never heard this idea expressed before, and asked me to clarify what I meant by censorship. I described the worldwide protest against the dolphin drive fishery coming up next month. Then I asked if he would cover it if someone sent him a press packet. “I think you must know that my newspaper won’t publish something like that,” he answered with a laugh, as if it was shared joke between us. I responded, “But it is a major news event. Doesn’t that count for anything?” He just smiled.

This is what I learned about myself at EXPO. I am ready to take on this issue of censorship. I feel the whales deserve an honest  strategy appraisal by Western activist groups who receive public funds to stop whaling. Hopefully, either this essay, or far more likely, a well-orchestrated long term effort by several groups, will serve to invite the Japanese people to the table for discussion.  I feel my own putative celebrity within Japan gives me a certain qualification to guide others who are now getting paid to help save the whales. As I write these words, I admit that I  don’t know quite how to begin. If you have any ideas, let me know. And keep tuned.

—Jim Nollman, Aug 28, 2005, Nagoya Japan

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