Chris Page

Yesterday I saw the film The Cove on the first day of its Japan release. Good attendance at the cinema, a small police presence, no nationalist protesters that I could see and lots of TV and print journalists cadging reactions from departing film-goers.
In case you’ve missed the b(r)oohaha, The Cove is the Oscar-winning documentary about the ongoing dolphin slaughter at Taiji in Wakayama, Japan. Wakayama is just down the road from Osaka, so this is a local story that we’ve been following in Kansai Scene — and if it weren’t local I’d be following it anyway because it is an issue with global implications.
The dolphin slaughter kills about 1,500 cetaceans every year.
Taiji the town has a thriving tourist trade built partially on its connections with whales and dolphins but never mentions the slaughter, which is conducted out of sight and in secret. Most Japanese people are unaware that this slaughter is happening as there is a near media black out on the issue. The media blackout comes from the appalling collusion through commercial interests between corporate and institutional Japan and the private media, which constitutes a de facto censorship system.
The Taiji fishermen will round up hundreds of dolphins and herd them into a particular cove. Tourists will gather to watch the spectacle of the cute animals being brought together and see buyers from aquariums and film studios choosing the animals to be shipped alive to the US, Europe, etc. The remaining dolphins and pilot whales are then herded into another cove out of sight of tourists or media and speared to death. Their meat is sold and any unwanted carcasses are dumped offshore. The meat of dolphins is highly toxic, another point of potential interest to the Japanese people that is kept from them. Being on top of the food chain, mercury accumulates in the body of dolphins. The concentrations of mercury are unsafe for humans and a threat to the health of the animals. The mercury comes from human industrial activities and leads to a crippling and fatal condition known as Minamata disease.
The dolphin meat is re-labelled as whale meat and sold to unsuspecting customers in supermarkets. The mayor of Taiji  has been donating free dolphin meat to schools up and down the country as a PR stunt, ensuring that children everywhere are getting a good dose of heavy metals in their lunch.
Film crews and anyone investigating the slaughter in Taiji are blocked, harassed, threatened and intimidated by the fishermen, suspected rightist/yakuza members, the local authorities and the police. Protesters and activists have expressed a fear for their lives. The makers of The Cove went to extraordinary lengths to secretly film the killing.
The film was released last year in the free world but has only just been made available in Japan. With the news of its release here, nationalist groups and pro-whaling activists sent threats to and picketed the domestic distributors and cinemas wanting to show the film. Most cinemas gave up  the idea of showing the film and it was only after the official release date had passed without any cinemas carrying the movie that a judge in Yokohama stepped in to grant an injunction against the goons to stop them picketing theatres. This weekend a whopping six cinemas across the country and only one in Osaka are braving the threats.
The Osaka cinema is in a district called Juso, which is well known for its local, er, colour, and community of yakuza and right-wing morons, so I was wondering whether there would be any pickets or protests. There were none that I could see, but lots of media interest.
The story of the slaughter and of the cover up highlights all sorts of issues, from the ethics of killing, to collusion between government and industry, to free speech, and to the (in)effectiveness of International Whaling Commission, making The Cove a must-see event.
I must warn that anyone in an emotionally vulnerable state is in for a rough ride and the footage of the slaughter is harrowing.
As a documentary, I wonder whether we needed all the cloak and dagger stuff about how the film was actually made, but if it brings in the punters and helps to provoke a debate on the issues, who cares?
Defenders of this slaughter and whaling in general defend their practices in all sorts of ways.
It’s tradition, they say. Bollocks. Traditions change, a process known as progress. Once upon a time it was tradition in Japan to practice euthanasia by dumping old and infirm people on mountains. I wonder if the whalers would like to go back to that. Perhaps they’d like to give up the internal combustion engines on their boats and electricity in their homes. The killing is about money and nationalism. It has nothing to do with tradition or survival or anything else. The fishermen of Taiji get $150,000 for a live dolphin sold to an aquarium and $600 dollars for the meat of a dead one. One thousand five hundred cetaceans are killed in Taiji every year. You do the maths.
It is also a matter of raw, fascist nationalism. The chumps who hunt the whales and dolphins and the national institutions that protect the practice are basically saying ‘fuck off foreigners’. I am not exaggerating. They see foreign interference in all walks of Japanese life, and the issue of cetaceans has become symbolic, a fact that the rest of the world has failed to grasp, and which is probably (and properly) beyond the comprehension of most rational minds. In Britain we have the paranoid imbeciles of UKIP, the BNP and the Countryside Alliance barking at every noise from Brussels (but not Washington, you hypocrites). In Japan we have the whalers and their rightist pals barking at every noise from the rest of the world and every living thng in the ocean.
I would like to point out that the dolphin killing is not a local or national issue. The natural world is of importance and relevance to everyone who lives in it, not just the people who happen to live next door to a particular bit of it.
The authorities also say that killing dolphins is “pest control”. Their words, not mine. Wonderful footage of the response of delegates at the IWC to Japan’s presentation of the same point to justify whaling. “It’s impossible to take that presentation seriously,” said one bewildered Australian. “Without a shred of scientific credibility”, said another chap.
The local authority spokesman said that dolphin meat may be toxic, but it was legally toxic and anyway contained some useful nutrients. Bananas have useful nutrients, why do we need dolphin vitamins?
Westerners eat cows, what’s the beef about eating cetaceans? Well, not all westerners eat meat, and there is a vigorous debate in the real world about the ethics of raising, butchering and eating animals of all kinds.
The ethical issue, is indeed engaging. What is the difference between eating cow and dolphin? Many anti-whalers and opponents of dolphin slaughter cite the intelligence of cetaceans as reason for not killing them. Despite the obvious intuitive appeal of this argument, it does not work for many reasons. How do you gauge animal intelligence without being anthropocentric and where, anyway, would you draw the line between dumb enough to kill and smart enough to live? IQ tests in the lobby of the abattoir, anyone? Having said that, the compelling part of the intelligence argument is that you can apply it  to humans, thus allowing the cow to butcher the butcher, or chickens to slaughter the fishermen of Taiji.
If we swap the word ‘intelligence’ for ‘sentience’, we have a more compelling argument. We generally don’t kill other people (well, we do, but you know what I mean) and we refrain partly out of a sense of enlightened self interest. We also refrain through empathy; we are aware that other people are self-aware. (Note how in times of war propaganda will try to dehumanize the enemy to make killing palatable.) Dolphins are sentient. Even by the standards of any anthropocentric test, they are self-aware. A friend yesterday made me aware of the useful and exciting distinction between run-o-the-mill sentience and sentient sentience; sapiens sapiens as opposed to just sapiens. In other words the awareness of being aware, or in yet more other words, the ability for reflective, creative thought. Dolphins are without doubt sapiens sapiens. I find it hard to justify the killing of any sentient creature (and there are good arguments for not killing non-sentient ones) and impossible to justify killing reflectively aware creatures.
I would like to add as an aside that hundreds of species are ‘demonstrably’ sentient, including most or all cetaceans and primates, and common sense tells me that sentience is the norm rather than the exception in the animal world, contrary to  traditional assumptions.
If anyone out there can justify killing sentient creatures, especially sentiently sentient ones, I would like to hear from you because that is an urgent debate I would like to engage with.
As for the response of Japanese people to this film. So far it seems to be: we didn’t know about the slaughter of the dolphins, that we were being sold toxic meat and both have got to stop, but what are you foreigners doing coming here and telling us things about ourselves we didn’t know? I believe there has been some mockery of the film’s dramatic presentation of getting the footage (commando-style ops with camouflage and wotsit heat seeking camera things).
Next, there is talk of celebrity campaigners from Hollywood descending on Taiji this September to protest the slaughter (the fisherfolk might usefully turn their harpoons on them).
The town of Iki was once notorious for killing cetaceans in a similar manner and they stopped — but only when they ran out of dolphins to kill. I hope and believe the slaughter at Taiji will stop before we get to that point and this film will be part of the process of progress.

An American scientist claims to have created synthetic life. I am sorry, but there’s nothing new in this. Synthetic life has been with us for decades and decades. Ever been on a commuter train, worked in an office, gone to a shopping mall, visited a theme park or watched TV? That’s both seeing and living synthetic life; this is life at its furthest remove from authenticity.

Illustration by Chris Page

If I had voted Liberal Democrat I think I would be well pissed off that my democratic choice had been converted into a vote for the Tories. In fact, I’d have my hat and ire on and be on my way to the polling station asking for my vote back.

When it comes to seeing commercial advantage in nicking the customs or superstitions of other cultures no one does it better than Japan. In fact, probably no one other than Japan does it. Hence the annual Christmas hysteria and Halloween horror. This time of year it is Valentine’s Day and anyone with anything to sell has seized on the theme as if were a matter of social obligation (which it might well be in this country). Being a day of officially prescribed romanticism, couples are encouraged to get out and about and be couples and, more to the point, spend money while doing so.

One of the top romantic spots is Hollywood theme park Universal Studios Japan (USJ) in Osaka. What could be better than a synthetic plastic simulacrum of a fantasy in which to spend quality time with your special other? USJ have been advertising energetically for weeks already. Here’s a detail of the poster that has been all over the trains and subway since January. A merry lass vaults a big, rounded heart … is it just me or does that heart suggest a glans? And does the lady’s posture with legs like that suggest an imminent straddling event? And what about that dreamy, blissy look on Pink Panther’s face as he hovers over his own glans object? What is that about?

And in a further expedition into hyperreality, there seems to be a conflation of the experience of going to USJ and the experience of sex.

I very much like the irony, the disjointedness (the narrative fracture?) of an institution that sells itself on family/kiddy values suddenly promising bouncy sex in its ads.

In another dollop or irony, the appearance of USJ itself has a striking resemblance to the absurd and whimsical designs of Japan’s love hotels. (Or is it the other way round?)

I also like this ad for Valentine chocolate, a huge, backlit screen in the Hankyu department store/railway station — more suggestiveness with a stick. And what’s with the broom otherwise? How did Halloween get into Valentine’s Day?

Or I am embarrassing myself, seeing sexual innuendo where it doesn’t exist. Perhaps I simply need to up my dosage of bromide.

Footnote: USJ’s page in Wikipedia tells us that the site is built directly on top of a toxic waste dump and that ET maimed one of the customers.

A chicken

“Eggs come from sheep, crisps are made of plastic and butterflies produce cheese” — so begins this article on a survey of where British kids think their food comes from.

Quoting the article again, some kids believed: “beef burgers came from McDonalds or Burger King, that yoghurts were made using turkeys or ducks, ham came from the Co-Op, bacon from horses, goats or peacocks and cheese originated from butterflies, rats or mice.”

Apparently crisps come from rabbits, plastic or sheep rather than potatoes, and ice cream comes from cheese, air, fish or potatoes.

The kids surveyed were aged between six and eight which may make the whole survery utterly pointless. Nor do the authors of the survey seem to take into account the possibility that fun-loving British kids faced with a po-faced and apparently inane questionnaire might be inclined to mercilessly take the piss (Where does cheese come from? Duh! Moon mines, of course! Tee hee hee.).

But the last laugh is definitely on the people that conducted the survey, because the bizarre responses the kids gave are all possible correct answers.

In this age of chemically enhanced, processed, synthesised, factory farmed, steroid-packed, genetically modified, artificial, irradiated foodstuff, in which vat-grown animal protein is a real technology, where flavour and colour additives come from crude oil, where fresh food is converted into a simulacrum of itself, who is to say that eggs don’t come from sheep or cheese from butterflies or cream from cats or bananas from mynah birds or sugar from fairies or soy protein from the bodies of dead people?

It is a very brave retail outlet that expresses its true feelings in conservative Nara, Japan.

A new blog to promote the novel Weed and short stories of Chris Page. And aren’t you all just sick of hearing about this.