Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (27 page)

I kicked in the direction of my divers, whose eyes were still wide from the encounter, only to have them signal me to stop and turn around. Until this moment, the whole experience had been phenomenal, but I could explain it. Now, the moment turned magical.

I turned and saw her slowly gliding toward me. With barely an effort, she approached me and stopped, her wing just touching my head. I looked into her round, dark eye, and she looked deeply into me. I felt a rush of something that so overpowered me, I have yet to find the words to describe it, except a warm and loving flow of energy from her into me.

She stayed with me for a moment. I don’t know if it was a second or an hour. Then, as sweetly as she came back, she lifted her wing over my head and was gone. A manta thank-you.

I hung in midwater, using the safety-stop excuse, and tried to make sense of what I had experienced. Eventually, collecting myself, I surfaced and was greeted by an ecstatic group of divers and a curious captain. They all gave me time to get my heart started and to begin to breathe.

Sadly, I have not seen her since that day, and I am still looking. For the longest time, though my wetsuit was tattered and torn, I would not change it because I thought she wouldn’t recognize me. I call to every manta I see, and they almost always acknowledge me in some way. One day, though, it will be her. She’ll hear me and pause, remembering the giant cleaner that she trusted to relieve her pain, and she’ll come. At least that is how it happens in my dreams.

Jennifer Anderson

A New Dawn for Whaling in Taiji

Whaling in Japan goes back to prehistoric times, when villagers along the coast would butcher dead whales that washed up from the sea. An old Japanese proverb says, “A whale on the beach is wealth for seven villages.”

In 1606, Japanese whalers went out and killed their first great whale. Working from tiny boats, using nets and hand-thrown harpoons, they were like Cro-Magnon men taking down a mastadon.

Later in the same century, whales became scarce in Japanese coastal waters because of the industrial whaling of the Americans and Europeans offshore. Japanese whalers borrowed their competitors’ techniques and expanded into large-scale whaling. During the 1940s, facing food shortages during and after World War II, the Japanese turned to whale meat to fill their diet.

During the early post-war years, the International Whaling Commission was formed to address the depletion of the whale populations. At the same time, new technologies made it possible to study whales in their habitat, to learn their social structures and to hear their songs echoing across the deep.

Conservationists began to protest the killing of the whales, and one by one, the world’s nations stopped whaling, with Japan remaining as one of the few holdouts.

Throughout these centuries, Taiji, a little town on the southern coast of Japan, has occupied a central place in the whaling story. It was from Taiji, in 1675, that Japan’s first large-scale, organized whaling expedition was launched. Even now, more than 90 percent of the town’s people work in the whaling industry, and they see whale hunting as part of their cultural heritage. The ongoing slaughter has brought whaling, and specifically Taiji whaling, under attack.

Into this charged climate, in the mid-1980s, Taiji’s town leaders invited me to their community. They hoped that an artist, even a whale-loving artist, would listen to their concerns about what they saw as the destruction of their heritage. If I could hear them out, they thought, I might help turn aside the international criticism directed against them.

I walked through this beautiful little town, perched on steep, forested hillsides and surrounded by the sea. Out in the bay was a lot of activity.

A small fleet of fishing boats, working in tandem, closed a gap in a bay just below the town hall. I knew enough about Taiji’s whaling methods to guess what I was seeing, but I had to ask.

I was right. What I was seeing was a group of whalers herding a pod of pilot whales into the tiny bay. When they finished the roundup, they would secure a net across the opening of the bay and then slaughter the whales the next day.

Pilot whales travel in groups of as many as fifty, and the kind of kill I was seeing can wipe out a whole generation, along with the young. It’s hard for the whales to come back from that kind of devastation.

All through the discussions with the mayor and the town officials, I kept thinking about what was going on outside the window. They said that even though they killed the whales, they still honored and respected them.

I told them that whale watching is taking hold in other countries, and it’s becoming a bigger industry than whaling ever was. Taiji’s officials were open to that, but they still wanted to hang on to their tradition of hunting.

The town officials took me out to show me around. We walked around the bay, where the whales broke the surface of the water and disappeared, while the whalers shouted from boat to boat, coordinating their movements as they set the net in place.

On down the cove was the town whaling museum, decorated with a tile mural of a right whale. It wasn’t bad, but it was abstract, and it didn’t bring the viewer any closer to what the whale really is. But the museum had a big blank wall that would be perfect for a mural. I talked to the officials about what I could do with that wall. I knew that if I could paint a wall there, it would show living whales as an object of beauty and not just a commercial product.

The officials liked the idea, and when I left, I truly respected them, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the whales and the herding boats. I was going to catch a plane the next morning, and I tried to put the scene out of my mind and sleep.

I woke with a start sometime after midnight, knowing that I had to do something. I shook awake Kevin Short, my translator and traveling companion, an American who worked for the
Japan Times.
I told him, “We’ve got to go down and help those whales.” Kevin and a Canadian photographer who was traveling with us and I all went down to the cove.

We stood on the rocks beside the bay, listening to the waves lapping against the beach. By a sliver of moonlight, we could see the thirty adult whales circled protectively around the big dominant male. It was a very spiritual thing to see these animals, so peaceful and harmless, so vulnerable. What kept ringing in my mind was that the next morning they were going to be cut up and sent to restaurants all over Japan. As we watched, the whales would surface at times, clearing their blowholes with a wet sigh.

When I went down to the water, I didn’t know what I intended to do. I didn’t go to that town to be a radical. I had earned the respect of the fishermen and had met the mayor, and I had an invitation to create a mural in their town. Yet as my mind constructed the gory slaughter of the next morning, I had no choice but to go into the water. I took all my clothes off, down to my BVDs, dove in and swam with those whales.

At first, the whole pod drew back from me. But then the group opened up and invited me inside its circle, letting me swim in their midst. One whale actually pushed me toward the net, knowing that I had hands and could help them. As I moved toward the net, carried by the force of the whale’s nudge and this inner compulsion, I saw a baby with its mother. Whale calves are rare, and it was wrenching to know that even if this baby survived tomorrow’s slaughter, it would not survive the loss of its mother.

I found myself at the opening of the bay with my hands on the imprisoning net. I began to untie it.

Kevin Short had lived in Japan for fifteen years, had found a place in Japanese culture, and understood and respected Japanese ways. When he saw what I was doing, he dove into the water and physically dragged me away from the net.

“What are you doing?” Kevin shouted.

“I can’t bear to see these whales being killed,” I said, shaking loose from his grip.

“You know, Wyland,” Kevin came back, “that’s a great, noble thing you want to do, but if you do that, you will set what you have tried to do back fifty years.”

Dawn had begun to color the eastern sky, and at the horizon of audibility was the hum of the whaling-boat engines.

“You’ve already painted one Whaling Wall in Japan,” Kevin continued. He was in the water, standing between me and the net. I didn’t want to listen to him, but he just kept talking. “People are beginning to understand the living whale because of your work, because of the power of your art. If you do this, you’ll kill the very thing that you’ve set out to do.”

The sun came up, and the whaleboats began to come in. I could have released the whales. I’d have gotten arrested, but that didn’t bother me. What stopped me was that I now had a chance to paint a mural that the townspeople would see every day, a chance that would be gone if I untied the rope.

The question came down to this: Do I try to save these thirty whales, which the whalers would probably have herded up again anyway, or do I continue to paint murals on public walls and museums and inspire people in a positive way?

As I scrambled out of the water and got into my clothes, I tried not to see the whalers loading up their harpoon guns. But I couldn’t hide from my own sense of betrayal. I was torn apart inside, and on the train back to Tokyo, I
cried with grief, rage and frustration.

The guilt stays with me today. It’s terrible to think about the slaughter, but I know Kevin Short was right.

I did go back the next year and paint a mural on the wall of Taiji’s whaling museum. A fisherman there told me it was the first time he had seen a living whale swimming. Before that, he had thought of whales only as dead meat.

The Japanese find the whales’ eyes on the mural very powerful, especially the right whale, which makes eye contact with every passerby.

After many years and four Whaling Walls in Japan, whale watching is beginning to take hold there. Young people are turning against whaling, looking for their heritage somewhere else, and calling for an end to whaling in Japan. We may be seeing a new dawn for the whales of Japan.

Wyland

Fighting for Their Lives

G
reat things are done when men and mountains
meet.

William Blake

In my nightmares I saw the lifeless bodies of marine mammals washing up on shore. Our nonprofit organization, Save the Whales, was trying to prevent the United States Navy from performing “ship shock” tests in the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary, a biologically sensitive area off the coast of California. The waters were home to endangered blue, sperm, fin and humpback whales, as well as dolphins, seals and sea lions. If the navy went ahead with its plan to test the hull integrity of its new cruisers by detonating 270 underwater explosives—some as large as 10,000 pounds—over the next five years, hundreds of thousands of these beautiful animals would die. The detonations would kill many animals outright. Others would face a slow lingering death from damage to their internal organs and hearing.

As time went on, we were joined at public hearings by numerous organizations, celebrities, scientists and citizens who agreed that the navy’s testing proposal didn’t ensure the safety of the marine mammals around the Channel Islands. All of these written statements were supposed to be taken into account before the federal agency in charge of marine mammal protection made a decision. After the last hearing I asked an agent when we could expect a decision. He told me to call the next week, but something in his voice seemed to imply that a decision had already been made.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.

He smirked. “I can’t discuss it.”

That expression, that we didn’t stand a chance against the government, infuriated me. When I told him I would see him in court, he started laughing, as if I had made the most ludicrous statement in history. His reaction was just another example of the uphill battles we faced.

Our legal team had managed to arrange a few meetings with naval officials. Each time we asked the navy to consider alternate tests in areas less populated with marine mammals. On the day our last request was refused, I joined my mother for dinner. Neither of us felt like eating. “What else can we do?” my mother said. She had supported me throughout this fight against the government, and I could see that it had taken its toll on her. No one had ever stopped the navy from performing these kinds of tests before. Even other environmental organizations said that it was hopeless. “You will never stop the navy!” they said. I always replied, “How will you ever know if you don’t have the courage to try?”

But we were running out of time.

The first test was scheduled in less than a month. Our legal case to block the tests required the declaration of an expert scientist in the marine mammal field who specialized in bioacoustics. All of the experts we contacted were unwilling to speak out against the testing because their research was funded by the U.S. government. “We need to find an expert independent of government funding,” I told my mom. She looked skeptical. “We’ve tried everyone in the country,” she said. “Who else is there?”

The answer came from Paul Spong, Ph.D., in British Columbia. Dr. Spong told me that we had no other option than to look outside the United States.

I cried, “I can do that?”

“An expert is an expert,” he replied.

With less than two weeks before testing began, Hal Whitehead, Ph.D., a Canadian, and the world’s foremost authority on sperm whales, agreed to testify. His testimony revealed in gripping detail how the naval tests would deprive these marine mammals of the very senses they depended on to survive in the wild. Soon other experts joined the struggle. The hearing lasted five days. At its conclusion, the presiding judge, Stephen V. Wilson of the United States District Court, Central District, ruled in our favor. He said that the navy had failed in its obligation to protect marine mammals, that it hadn’t prepared a full environmental impact statement, and that it hadn’t investigated all reasonable alternative sites and properly mitigated the impact of detonations on marine life. The exception was that one detonation would be allowed farther offshore with observers, of our choice, and instruments to help detect deep-diving marine mammals.