日本捕鲸文化英文版.docVIP

Thank you very much for inviting me to the “International Whale Symposium” at Ulsan, the Republic of Korea. My name is Hisashi Hamaguchi. I teach cultural anthropology at Sonoda Women’s College, Amagakai, Japan. I have studied the whaling cultures of Japan and Bequia, a small island in the Caribbean Sea. Today, I would like to present a brief summary of the “history of whaling in Japan and whale meat in Japanese food culture.” My presentation is divided into three parts, as this slide shows. 1) History of whaling in Japan, 2) Whaling in contemporary Japan, and 3) Whale meat in Japanese food culture. I will then present my conclusions. Let us begin with a brief history of whaling in Japan. Cetaceans are generally divide into large and small based on their length. Large ones (over 3-4 meters) are called “whales”, and small ones (less than 3-4 meters) are called “dolphins/porpoises.” Compared with whales, it is easy to catch dolphins/porpoises. So we think the dolphin/porpoise hunting was developed first. A lot of dolphin bones (e.g. Pacific white-sided dolphins, short-beaked common dolphins) and stone spear points were found at the Mawaki site, Ishikawa Prefecture. This shows that the dolphin hunting was conducted in the Early Jomon period (4000-3000 B.C.). So we have a history of dolphin hunting for over 5000 years. How about whaling of the large cetaceans? We think people used stranded whales at first. It was easy to use the stranded whales, and was not necessary to have the elaborated skills associated with hunting. Those who had known a large quantity of meat and blubber from a stranded whale started active whaling as the next step. This was because there was no guarantee of another stranded whale. The large cetaceans, such as right whales and gray whales, used to migrate in the neighboring waters of Japan. It was easy to catch them because they swam slowly. That is why people went out to hunt these whales. In the 1570s, a whaling method called “Tsukitori-hou” (w