Is Japan Secretly Planning A New Whaling Ship?

Monday, 17 December 2007, 5:38 am
Press Release: Greenpeace


Is Japan secretly planning to build a new whaling ship?

All around the world, increasing numbers of people and governments are urging Japan to give up its whaling operations in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Back in Japan however, there is evidence that plans are emerging to build a brand new whaling factory ship which would extend whaling for decades to come.

It is beginning to emerge that Japanese whaling interests want to build a new factory ship to replace the aging and fire-plagued Nisshin Maru, which is now 20 years old. The Suisan Keizai newspaper (a Fisheries Industry publication in Japan) revealed earlier this year that:

....because the Nisshin Maru is getting old and the capacity to hold whale meat on board is not enough to meet the demands from the new expanded research whaling activity, there are some voices asking for a new factory ship...The factory ship, Nisshin Maru, caught fire not only this year, but also once in the past. And in both cases, the causes of the fire were not identified... (Translated by Greenpeace)

The "some voices" calling for the new ship are likely to be the only real beneficiaries of Japan's whaling programme: a handful of bureaucrats who are abusing public money to carry on a research programme that generates no useful science and whale meat that sits unsold and unwanted in cold storage.

The Japanese Fisheries Agency (JFA) has been understandably quiet about the prospects of spending billions of yen of public money on a new whaling factory ship. Recent public opinion polls in Japan have seen the trend of declining whale consumption and the shunning of whale meat by younger Japanese people continue. The JFA and the handful of bureaucrats who benefit from whaling are no doubt hoping the plan stays under wraps until it is too late to stop it.

What Does the New Whaling Factory Ship Look Like?

If the Japanese whalers want a factory ship that can hold all the whale meat taken from the current "research" program (called JARPA II), the factory ship needs to be able to hold up to 6,000 tons of whale meat . The current Nisshin Maru has capacity to hold around 2,000 tons. This suggests that the new factory ship will be at least 2 to 3 times the size of the current one.

The current Nisshin Maru was built with the cost of 7 billion yen (US$ 63 million) 20 years ago. It's likely a new, larger ship could easily cost between 14 billion and 21 billion yen (US$125 million to US$188 million).

Who is financing the Construction?

Private financing of the new ship is unlikely as no bank or other private financial institution would loan money to whaling given the declining consumption of whale meat in Japan and the risk to their international reputation.

Therefore, it is most likely that it will be public money from Japanese government institutions that will be used to build the ship. The strongest candidate is the Overseas Fishery Cooperation Foundation (OFCF).

In March 2007, the OFCF changed their guidelines for giving loans, mentioning that they will grant loans to proposals that fit into the category of "Cooperation in international efforts to manage marine resources." The new guidelines contain a sentence that clearly suggests their intention to provide loans to whaling activities:

"Cooperation in international efforts to manage marine resources" applies to proposals that make a contribution to ..... the research and study of the management of fish species, including marine mammals..." (Translated by Greenpeace)

No surprisingly, the chairman of the OFCF is Michio Shimada, the former director general of the Japan Fisheries Agency, which oversees the whaling operations. The Japan Fisheries Agency has also given around 1.2 billion yen (US$10.5 million) in annual subsidies to OFCF.

If the OFCF is granting loans for construction of the new whaling factory ship, then Japanese tax money will be used to finance the construction.

Who is Building the Ship?

Greenpeace has conducted a survey of 23 ship building companies in Japan asking whether they would be willing to accept an offer to build the whaling factory ship. The only company among the major ship builders that did not give a definitive "NO" was Mitsubishi Heavy Industry LTD.

If Mitsubishi did take the contract to build the new whaling factory ship, their international reputation would be severely tarnished.

How Can We Stop This?

Tell the Japanese Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Minister of Administrative Reform that building the new whaling factory ship with tax payers' money is a bad idea.

Killing whales for fake science which nobody needs and whale meat which hardly anyone wants is an abuse of Japanese taxpayers' money. We can not simply wait until a contract is awarded and construction begins.

Send the letter below asking Japan to stop plans to build a new whaling factory ship, and start planning how to end the whaling in the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary.

The battle for truth

BEHIND THE NEWS
Julian Ryall
Oct 17, 2007

A former Okinawa governor is fighting to ensure wartime atrocities are not erased from textbooks, writes Julian Ryall

Wearing only rags, and bandaged or hobbling, the old men, women and terrified children left the sanctuary of the cave in the limestone cliffs at the very southern tip of Okinawa. Standing out to sea were the warships of the US Navy, from where came calls relayed over loudspeakers for the survivors to surrender. Blinking in the bright sunshine of May 1945, the villagers began to cautiously make their way towards the American soldiers' lines.

Masahide Ota would often see the little groups start out on their journey into the no-man's land that divided the US Marines from what remained of the Imperial Japanese Army's forces in the Mabuni district of the disputed island. Most of the time, they were shot before they had gone more than a couple of hundred metres. They were not killed by the Americans, to whom they posed little threat, but shot in the back by their own soldiers.

Photo: Masahide Ota, former governor of Okinawa

"I saw it happen every day," said Mr Ota. "The local people wanted to surrender but the Japanese soldiers would not allow them to go and they killed them when they tried to escape. And they didn't just kill the civilians; there was no food and the only well had been contaminated by the bodies of the dead, so soldiers were killing each other for food or the contents of their water bottles," he said. "I saw Japanese soldiers throwing grenades at each other so they could drink.

"I had been conscripted into the army myself at that time, but I never thought I would see the day when friendly soldiers would be killing each other. The terrible things I witnessed every day changed my ideas completely."

What Mr Ota, now 82, witnessed in the final days of the conventional fighting on the island changed his life. He went on to study in Tokyo and live in the US before winning election as the governor of Okinawa in 1990, a post he held until 1998. He then became a member of the Social Democratic Party in the Upper House of the Japanese Diet for six years up until July.

Throughout his private and public life, Mr Ota has dedicated himself to ensuring that what happened on Okinawa is never forgotten. Such a stance has made him highly critical of right-wing historians' reinterpretations of events in Okinawa in 1945, and he vehemently opposes plans announced by the Japanese government to rewrite history textbooks that are to be issued to students at the start of the new school year next April.

In March, then prime minister Shinzo Abe ordered that school-book references to the involvement of the Imperial Japanese Army in the suicides of Okinawan civilians be deleted.

Nationalist historians claim that suicide pacts were voluntary and not the result of orders. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology responded by decreeing that as there was disagreement among historians as to what happened in Okinawa, it would be unfair to state that the civilians had killed themselves as a direct order from the military. In response, a draft textbook prepared by publishing house Shimizu Shoin altered a passage that read some people "were forced by Japanese troops to commit group suicide" to "there were people who were driven into group suicides". Other publishers similarly watered down Japan's official view of history.

The new government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has made some conciliatory moves, with new Education Minister Kisaburo Tokai telling reporters: "The ministry will deal with any applications for further revisions in a serious manner. A panel will be convened to make a fair judgment on the issue if necessary."

Photo: A crowd of 115,000 gathers last monthin Kaihin Park in Ginowan, Okinawa, to protest against former prime minister Shinzo Abe's order to modify school testbooks.

Mr Ota remains incensed at official efforts to beautify history. Public outrage led an estimated 115,000 Okinawans to protest on September 29 in the city of Ginowan, marking the largest public protest since the prefecture reverted to Japanese control in 1972.

"It is truly a terrible thing to try to rewrite historical truth," said Mr Ota. "The people of Okinawa will absolutely not allow this to happen. Tens of thousands turned out to demonstrate against the plans and, in a very rare case of all the municipal assemblies joining together, 41 local authorities also protested."

According to Mr Ota, who founded the Ota Peace Research Institute in Okinawa's largest city, Naha, the government is increasingly falling under the thrall of the right, and aims to win sufficient political support to rewrite a constitution drawn up after the war that renounces the use of military force.

"The main reason that they want to change the constitution is because they would like to drop the `Self-Defence Forces' title and simply have a real and regular military," said Mr Ota. "They want Japan to be recognised as having military units that can go and fight wherever the government wants."

But with the actions and excesses of the Imperial Japanese Forces in the 1930s and 40s still remembered by some and documented in textbooks, the right is having trouble winning over the majority of the public.

Mr Ota said their approach was three-pronged. Firstly, the nationalists are rewriting the events known as the Nanking Massacre, claiming that maybe a few hundred citizens of the city died in disturbances, a far cry from the 300,000 deaths China blames on the Japanese army. Their second target is the women who were forced into sexual slavery as "comfort women" for Japanese troops during the years of expansion throughout Asia and the Pacific, with the right claiming they were mere prostitutes who volunteered to serve in frontline brothels and were paid for their labours. The third target is reversing the myth perpetrated by Okinawans that the military murdered civilians and forced others to commit suicide.

After his wartime experiences, Mr Ota knows that he is fortunate to still be alive. As the Allied invasion approached, the Japanese military headquartered beneath Naha's Shuri Castle conscripted all the students from the city's 12 boys' schools and 10 girls' schools. The boys were given a gun, 20 rounds of ammunition and two grenades, with the instruction that one grenade was to be thrown at the Americans; the other one was for themselves. The girls were given rudimentary first aid training and served as nurses.

Of the 460 students from Mr Ota's school, 305 were killed; of the 120 pupils in his grade, just 37 survived.

Known as Tetsu no ame (the "rain of steel"), the US forces landed on the main island on April 1, 1945, in the largest Pacific theatre amphibious assault of the war. The Japanese defence was tenacious and made the most of the terrain and extensive fortifications. Nearly 80 Allied warships were destroyed or had to be scrapped due to enemy action - a good number of them victims of kamikaze attacks. The Allies lost 12,513 lives; the Japanese military lost an estimated 66,000. Well over double that number of civilians also died.

"In the very last days of the fighting, I was told to infiltrate behind the enemy's lines and to persuade local people to rise up against the US," Mr Ota said. Indoctrinated not to surrender, he managed to evade the Americans and made his way with other stragglers to the rugged northern jungles of Okinawa. In small bands, they lived rough and scrounged from the Americans' dumps to survive.

On one occasion, he was among a group that chose to run instead of surrendering and was chased into the sea. After losing consciousness, he was washed ashore and found himself surrounded by the corpses of his colleagues.

Teaming up with another soldier one day, they came across a US magazine that proclaimed the war was over, yet it was not until a former officer in the Okinawa General Headquarters made his way to their hideout with a manuscript signed by the emperor that they decided to surrender.

"When I read that the war was over, I was not disappointed that Japan had lost," said Mr Ota. "I was more sad that I was so ignorant I could not read the magazine because English was the language of the enemy."

It was at this point that he decided to educate himself to help the people of his native island. Okinawa was once the independent Ryukyu kingdom and still has many cultural differences with the country that effectively annexed it in the early 1600s. The Japanese military regarded islanders with suspicion and hostility, while local people hated being ordered to revere the emperor and to sacrifice themselves for the homeland.

In the years since the end of the conflict, research has indicated that between 800 and 1,000 Okinawan civilians were killed by the Japanese military during the campaign, although the chaos that enveloped the islands in the summer of 1945 makes it almost impossible to prove the vast majority of the cases. In cases that have gone to court demanding recognition of the atrocities that were committed, most have failed to provide the identities of those killed, the identities of the killers and witnesses. This same problem has given more ammunition to nationalists, who say there is no proof that the Japanese military was to blame for forced suicides or murders.

"Those who are trying to change the descriptions in textbooks that are to educate the next generation of Japanese say the local people misunderstood what was happening and that the Japanese military was there to protect their lives," said Mr Ota. "But that's not true."

The Right-Wing Group Behind the Super Patriotic Japanese Textbook that Whitewashes History

David McNeill, in the South China Morning Post (April 23, 2004):

The rain beat down last week on a forest of umbrellas filing through the modern, neon-lit streets of central Tokyo, but the message coming from inside the cavernous Kudan Kaikan Hall was an oddly old-fashioned one, reminiscent of 19th-century jingoism.

"Why are we teaching our children to hate Japan?" thundered one speaker. "America, China and Britain don't teach their kids to hate their countries. We should be telling them that this is an amazing country and that they should love it with all their hearts."

Another said: "Compared with the colonial rule of the European countries and America, Japan's rule of Asia was humane. If we had not colonised Korea, America or Europe would have. We have nothing to be ashamed of."

This is the world of the Society for Textbook Reform, which organised the conference, where Japan was not the brutal aggressor in the second world war but the liberator, fighting to defend itself from the US and European powers, and free Asia from the yoke of white imperialism; where imperial troops were not guilty, as most historians suggest, of some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century, but the "normal excesses" of armies everywhere; where Japan's "masochistic" emphasis on atonement is leading to the "moral decline" of its young.

It's a message not restricted to the 1,200 mostly middle-aged men in the hall, the sort of group that might be called angry white males in the west. After eight years building a grassroots movement to radically change the teaching of history in schools, the society is aiming to go mainstream in high schools across Japan. And with friends in high places, many believe they have a good chance of success.

"We're confident we can change the teaching of history in schools here," says one of the society's leading intellectual lights, Nobukatsu Fujioka, a professor of education at the elite Tokyo University.

So, does this mean Japan should hide its war crimes? "Great Britain committed war crimes," he says. "America, too. Regrettably, many nations commit war crimes. My concern is that Japanese children are taught to hate their country. They're taught that only Japan was wrong in the war. Don't all countries use history to instil pride in students? The aim of history teaching is to prepare people for citizenship. The facts of history are limitless. We can't teach them all, so we have to make choices."

Professor Fujioka's group, led by openly right-wing scholars, dropped off the media radar three years ago after it caused a storm of protest across Asia with its New History textbook. Approved for use by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the textbook was accused of whitewashing history.

The Japanese invasion of Asia was changed to "war in Asia and the Pacific" and the word "invaded" changed to "advanced".

References to Unit 731, a bio-warfare unit that author Daniel Barenblatt recently said may have been responsible for one million Chinese deaths, were dropped.

The infamous 1937 Nanking massacre, when some historians estimate rampaging imperial troops slaughtered up to 300,000 Chinese, was changed to the "Nanking incident" and the number of casualties removed, with the strong implication that China fabricated the episode.

References to "comfort women", or an estimated 200,000 sexual slaves from across Asia forced to service imperial troops, were dropped. The comfort women, said Professor Fujioka in a famous essay, were prostitutes: "There is no need to teach children these kinds of facts."

The 2001 campaign is widely believed abroad to have ended in failure after teachers and local activists blocked the use of the textbook in all but about 10 of Japan's 10,000 middle schools, but that's not how the society or its opponents view it.

New History has sold nearly 750,000 copies commercially since its release and its popularity has forced the makers of the seven other history textbooks in use to tone down their own accounts of Japan's wartime history. The society recently once again submitted its revised textbook to the Education Ministry for approval, and it believes this time around it's got it right. "More and more people share our opposition to instilling self-hatred in our children," Professor Fujioka recently told author John Nathan. "I am confident it won't be that long until New History sets the standard."

But why has this relatively tiny organisation, run by academics and volunteers out of a nondescript building in Tokyo, had such an impact on the history debate?

Yoshifumi Tawara, who runs Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21, a group opposed to the textbook, has an answer: "The society likes to see itself as being up against a liberal establishment that controls education in Japan, but much of the establishment backs what it is doing."

The establishment includes up to 100 lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who are sympathetic to the society's goals, the chairman of Japan's largest business federation, the Keidanren, and the mass circulation Sankei newspaper. Thousands of businesses have funded the society's activities, including the free distribution of more than 700,000 copies of a nationalist history book by society member Kanji Nishio to schools across the country. Pitted against this well-funded campaign is a loose network of teachers, trade unionists and campaigners like Mr Tawara.

But the society's campaign to revise Japan's troubled past for a source of national pride has also been fuelled by the rich vein of hypocrisy many in Japan see in the actions of its staunchest post- war ally, the US. Many of its key supporters, including best-selling manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi, slam the refusal of the US to apologise for the 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo, which incinerated an estimated 100,000 Tokyo civilians, or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incidents both he and Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara (who also supports the textbook movement) describe as "racist".

Parallels have been drawn among the textbook movement's supporters to the bombing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the society's emotional message has found an increasingly willing audience among the millions disillusioned with Japan's traditional subservience to Washington.

"America cannot criticise anyone," says 32-year-old graphic designer Chiyoko Fujimoto, who regularly reads Kobayashi's comics. "They bomb and kill when they want. Why should we take all the criticism for what we did years ago?"

Mr Tawara also says there has been a sea change in the popular conscience since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's failed attempt to mend diplomatic relations with North Korea. "The Japanese media has focused strongly on Japan as the victim of crimes by North Korea, particularly the kidnapping of its citizens, so the memories of what Japan did in Asia is fading. Many young people have little idea of what went on in the past."

This growing national amnesia, which the new textbook threatens to worsen, fuels growing anti-Japanese sentiment in China, which has watched Tokyo wriggle out of hundreds of war compensation claims. "The whole trouble is that Japan has never faced up to the past the way Germany has," says Arthur Titherington, who fought and lost a compensation claim in the Tokyo courts and who is chairman of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors' Association of Britain.

"I think it's a great shame that Japan is prepared to let its children live in ignorance. They just don't know what they did."