The Song of the Whale: The Shaping and Reflection of Japanese Whaling Culture

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_55How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Japanese whaling; ecological ethics; whale culture; militarism; environmental protection

Abstract

This paper systematically traces the historical evolution of Japan’s whaling culture, its contemporary motivations, and the international controversies it has sparked. While whaling in Japan dates back to the Jōmon period, modern commercial whaling emerged as an industrial endeavor driven by 20th-century militarism, with whale oil extensively utilized as a wartime resource. Post-war, Japan circumvented international bans through “scientific whaling,” sustaining commercial operations via a tripartite network of government, bureaucracy, and business interests. Despite the government’s justification of “cultural tradition” for resuming commercial whaling, actual whale meat consumption remains negligible with limited public acceptance, revealing underlying political and economic motivations. From the perspectives of ecological ethics and East Asian views of life, Japan’s whaling practices are unsustainable. They violate international consensus and ecological holism, necessitating a return to East Asian maritime ethics centered on harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The Japanese whaling issue is not merely a dispute over resource utilization but a deeper conflict between cultural narratives and global environmental governance.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qing Tian
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - The Song of the Whale: The Shaping and Reflection of Japanese Whaling Culture
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 491
EP  - 497
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_55
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_55
ID  - Tian2025
ER  -