November 30, 2009
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — In 2001, a fledgling Internet company named Google opened its first overseas office in Japan, eager to tap a huge technology market.
But after eight years, Japan is one of a few major countries Google has yet to conquer. The Web giant still trails far behind Yahoo Japan, the front-runner here, operated by the Japanese telecommunications giant Softbank.
In a reversal of the rivalry in the United States, Yahoo Japan dominates Japan’s Web search market with 56.5 percent of all queries, according to the Internet research company, GA-Pro. Google, at 33.7 percent, is a distant second.
Unaccustomed to being second, Google is bending some of its most time-honored traditions in a renewed push into the Japanese market. Earlier this year, Google’s splash page for Japan abandoned the company’s classic spare design and added links to YouTube, Gmail and other services — an attempt to lure Japanese users who favor sites decorated with a cacophony of text and graphics.
And in a first for Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., it initiated branding ads for Japan and staged attention-grabbing publicity stunts, including one in which it invited passers-by to float into the air with the help of 2,500 balloons.
Google’s dogged interest in Japan has partly to do with sheer size. Japan is one of the world’s most wired countries, with more than 90 million regular Internet users — of which three-quarters use fast broadband connections and two-thirds also log in from cellphones.
And despite a sluggish economy, Japan’s 6.6 trillion yen ($77 billion) advertising market remains the world’s second-largest, one that an increasingly global advertising force like Google cannot afford to ignore.
“Japan is absolutely a key market for Google,” said Koichiro Tsujino, president of Google Japan. Every day, for example, Japanese view 10 million clips on YouTube, Google’s video-sharing site — and that is just from their cellphones, making them the world’s most avid adopters of video on-the-go. “Japan leads the world in many ways,” he said.
That Japanese propensity to try new things is the other reason Google is intent on staying put in Japan. Over the years, Japan has become a testing lab for many of the Web giant’s cutting-edge new ideas, especially in mobile technology. Google’s Tokyo-based programmers, immersed in Japan’s mobile and Web culture, have become a valuable source of ideas for the entire company.
Overseas markets now account for half of Google’s revenue, and the company is becoming more keenly aware of the need to tailor its services to local markets, as well as the advantages of absorbing ideas from outside the United States, company executives say. “Japan made us realize that non-U.S. ideas can go global,” David Eun, a vice president for Google, said on a recent trip to Japan, where he closed deals with two Japanese broadcasters to allow YouTube to run some of their content.
Google Japan’s offices occupy several floors in a skyscraper in Shibuya, a Tokyo neighborhood popular with start-ups that is also a hangout for the city’s hippest teenagers. Minutes away from where Google developers work, young Japanese perch on sidewalks, playing with their Web-enabled cellphones, thumbs flying and eyes glued to the tiny screens.
But most of those trendsetters do not regard Google as being very Japanese — a big headache for the company. Google has never been able to overcome Yahoo’s advantage as the first Web-based search engine. And although 35 percent of Yahoo Japan is owned by Yahoo in Sunnyvale, Calif., it is viewed as a local company.
“Yahoo Japan is a Japanese company, and most of their employees are Japanese people who fluently understand how the Japanese mind-set and business work,” said Nobuyuki Hayashi, a technology analyst. “But Google’s still a foreigner who’s learned how to speak some Japanese.”
Popularizing Google in Japan has been fraught with 21st-century versions of the cultural mishaps that have long plagued American companies here. In May, Google was forced to reshoot its entire “Street View” image stock in Japan — with a camera positioned to capture views 15 inches lower — after intense criticism that the service peeked over fences and into people’s homes, invading privacy. The narrower width of Japan’s roads made the service especially intrusive, bloggers fumed.
Google Earth also came under fire after posting historical maps that detailed locations of former communities of an “untouchable” caste, still a sensitive topic in Japan. Human rights advocates were furious that the maps could be used to identify families that had lived in the low-caste neighborhoods.
But Google keeps trying. After studying feedback from Japanese users, developers designed Google’s maps service here so that a query led users to the town’s train station or bus terminal, not the center of town as it would in the United States, reflecting the way the Japanese, heavily reliant on public transportation, think of their personal geography.
Programmers based in Tokyo have proposed and developed a line of services and functions, including “emoticons” for Gmail — a particular Japanese obsession — and a function allowing users to add photos to Google Maps. It created “Spellmeleon,” to correct misspelled queries. It took developers based in Tokyo to realize that non-native English speakers, who might not be very good spellers of English words, could use a little help with queries.
“Part of our job is to think specifically about the Japanese market,” said Kentaro Tokusei, group product manager at Google Japan. “We find whatever we build works globally, too.”
Some services in Japan offer a glimpse into the future. The Japanese version of Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa, offers quick response, or Q.R., bar codes that contain Web address information. Scanning a Q.R. bar code with a Japanese cellphone takes the user to a Web site to view an online photo album.
Japan has been an especially important market for YouTube, with viewers here making up the site’s biggest audience outside the United States. The site’s big presence in Japan has put developers here at the forefront of crucial projects — for example, a recently announced feature that will bring text captions to many videos on the site, linked with automatic translation into 51 languages.
The captions will go a long way toward helping videos go viral across language divides, said Hiroto Tokusei, YouTube product manager in Japan and Kentaro Tokusei’s younger brother. (The Tokusei brothers, both Stanford graduates with experience in Silicon Valley, were brought to Google Japan with an eye to localizing Google’s products while keeping Google at the cutting edge of innovation.)
Next month YouTube will also start a mobile version of its “Click-to-Buy” feature, which identifies songs used in video clips, then lets users download them to their cellphones for use as ring tones.
“To have an audience so obsessed with video and TV, and with access to broadband, means Japan is the perfect place to experiment,” Mr. Tokusei said.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Failure Offers Lessons Japan Would Rather Forget
September 6, 2009
By PETER S. GOODMAN
FOR Americans, failure tends to be accepted as an intrinsic feature of an economic system in which risk-taking often brings great reward. If necessity is the mother of invention, then failure is the unfortunate progeny of often-lucrative adventuring.
Failure is, of course, wrenching. Yet the American narrative is littered with examples of heroes’ transcending past calamities, their failures worn as badges of resilience.
In Japan, by contrast, failure traditionally carries a deeper stigma, an enduring shame that limits the appetite for risk, in the view of many of the nation’s cultural observers. This makes the Japanese far less comfortable with choices that increase the prospect of failure, even if they promise greater potential gains.
Recent Japanese governments have sought to inculcate greater tolerance for failure — often at the urging of American officials — to inject new life in a long-stagnant economy. The Tokyo government even chartered an Association for the Study of Failure, which aimed to “turn failure experience into knowledge at the society, corporation and individual levels.”
But last week, the differing cultural conceptions of the United States and Japan snapped into view, as Japanese voters emphatically dismissed the party that had ruled almost uninterrupted for more than half a century. In so doing, they offered up a palpable message: Enough with the failure thing already. And enough with Americans offering up pain as the cure for what ails Japan.
In the two decades since Japan devolved from a supposedly indomitable economic juggernaut in the 1980s into a stagnant economy mired in a Lost Decade, the country tried myriad reforms in the name of reinvigorating its economy. It took stabs at rooting out bad loans from the banking system and ending the inside dealing that had long defined Japanese business culture. It sought to pare down government-financed public works projects, a major source of jobs.
Yet all the while, Japan remained an economic laggard, a shadow of the nation that had previously occasioned overheated talk of Japanese global dominance. Despite the pain of reform, Japan never seemed to get the gain.
Many economists argue that Japan never shook off the hangover of speculative excesses on real estate that fueled the 1980s because it never genuinely reformed. Money-losing “zombie” companies were allowed to keep drawing fresh credit and survive. Insolvent banks were spared from collapse because they were deemed “too big to fail.”
Regardless, among ordinary people, the sense took hold that the reforms were both harsh and ineffective. Despite its capitalist trappings, Japan has sometimes been referred to as the world’s most successful socialist economy, a land in which life-long job security seemed a birthright. Amid the attempts to rein in government spending and pressure banks to cut off money-losing clients, Japanese workers learned the humiliation of unemployment; Japanese companies confronted the embarrassment of going out of business. More than an economic event, this tore at the fabric of Japanese life.
In 2003, I visited Kushiro, a port city on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, which had for decades been sustained by government-led construction. Japan’s reformist prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was then rolling back public works spending and pressuring banks to clean up their books.
The president of the Kushiro Credit Association complained that the new policies were effectively forcing him to inflict his customers with the stigma of failure.
“We can’t just cut them off,” he said. “Everyone would know about it. It would be very difficult for people who failed to live here.”
From the perspective of everyday Japanese life, shock treatment seemed both cruel and unnecessary. Japan had become a much darker place than in the 1980s, when the elixir of wealth seemed at hand, yet it was nothing like crisis-wracked Indonesia or Argentina, where people rioted in the streets as life savings vanished. It was a slow slide from a comfortable perch.
Tokyo never failed to shimmer with modernity. The national rail system was as efficient as any on earth. Even as ordinary Japanese gained economic anxiety and ratcheted down aspirations, most still had decent homes and cars, health care financed by the state, and a world-beating array of gadgets.
Many Japanese seemed perplexed by the dire talk that accompanied the push for reform. In Nagano, a city that had boomed with construction during the 1980s, suspicions about the reform trajectory were intense as Mr. Koizumi pushed to cleanse the banks of bad loans. Newspapers and television were full of grim talk about the corporate failures this would entail.
“I don’t really see how the economy will get better if you just close a big company and fire people,” said a 37-year-old housewife whose husband worked at the electronics giant Fujitsu. His pay had been cut by one-fifth. The local work force had been slashed by half. But she said she was more inclined to hang on to what they had — a 10-year-old Honda sedan, outdated kitchen appliances — than risk his paycheck in a bid for what seemed an abstraction: a healthy financial system.
By the time Japanese voters went to the polls last week, they must surely have noticed that, when crisis afflicted the United States, Americans seemed no more eager to ingest the medicine Washington once dispensed for Japan. Faced with soaring joblessness and financial calamity, Americans propped up their auto industry, saved banks deemed too big to fail, and unleashed nearly $800 billion in government spending to spare jobs. (Moreover, Americans have come to wish they had been a little more afraid of failure.)
Japanese voters did not appear to be approving a coherent economic policy so much as rejecting a seemingly bankrupt one. The new ruling Democratic Party of Japan gained votes with vague promises of subsidies and job protections.
Ultimately, the vote seemed to signal Japan’s verdict that the embrace of failure had, in the end, proven a failure, opting instead for the comfort of trying to muddle through.
Peter S. Goodman, a reporter for The Times, spent nearly a decade reporting from Asia. He is the author of “Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
By PETER S. GOODMAN
FOR Americans, failure tends to be accepted as an intrinsic feature of an economic system in which risk-taking often brings great reward. If necessity is the mother of invention, then failure is the unfortunate progeny of often-lucrative adventuring.
Failure is, of course, wrenching. Yet the American narrative is littered with examples of heroes’ transcending past calamities, their failures worn as badges of resilience.
In Japan, by contrast, failure traditionally carries a deeper stigma, an enduring shame that limits the appetite for risk, in the view of many of the nation’s cultural observers. This makes the Japanese far less comfortable with choices that increase the prospect of failure, even if they promise greater potential gains.
Recent Japanese governments have sought to inculcate greater tolerance for failure — often at the urging of American officials — to inject new life in a long-stagnant economy. The Tokyo government even chartered an Association for the Study of Failure, which aimed to “turn failure experience into knowledge at the society, corporation and individual levels.”
But last week, the differing cultural conceptions of the United States and Japan snapped into view, as Japanese voters emphatically dismissed the party that had ruled almost uninterrupted for more than half a century. In so doing, they offered up a palpable message: Enough with the failure thing already. And enough with Americans offering up pain as the cure for what ails Japan.
In the two decades since Japan devolved from a supposedly indomitable economic juggernaut in the 1980s into a stagnant economy mired in a Lost Decade, the country tried myriad reforms in the name of reinvigorating its economy. It took stabs at rooting out bad loans from the banking system and ending the inside dealing that had long defined Japanese business culture. It sought to pare down government-financed public works projects, a major source of jobs.
Yet all the while, Japan remained an economic laggard, a shadow of the nation that had previously occasioned overheated talk of Japanese global dominance. Despite the pain of reform, Japan never seemed to get the gain.
Many economists argue that Japan never shook off the hangover of speculative excesses on real estate that fueled the 1980s because it never genuinely reformed. Money-losing “zombie” companies were allowed to keep drawing fresh credit and survive. Insolvent banks were spared from collapse because they were deemed “too big to fail.”
Regardless, among ordinary people, the sense took hold that the reforms were both harsh and ineffective. Despite its capitalist trappings, Japan has sometimes been referred to as the world’s most successful socialist economy, a land in which life-long job security seemed a birthright. Amid the attempts to rein in government spending and pressure banks to cut off money-losing clients, Japanese workers learned the humiliation of unemployment; Japanese companies confronted the embarrassment of going out of business. More than an economic event, this tore at the fabric of Japanese life.
In 2003, I visited Kushiro, a port city on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, which had for decades been sustained by government-led construction. Japan’s reformist prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was then rolling back public works spending and pressuring banks to clean up their books.
The president of the Kushiro Credit Association complained that the new policies were effectively forcing him to inflict his customers with the stigma of failure.
“We can’t just cut them off,” he said. “Everyone would know about it. It would be very difficult for people who failed to live here.”
From the perspective of everyday Japanese life, shock treatment seemed both cruel and unnecessary. Japan had become a much darker place than in the 1980s, when the elixir of wealth seemed at hand, yet it was nothing like crisis-wracked Indonesia or Argentina, where people rioted in the streets as life savings vanished. It was a slow slide from a comfortable perch.
Tokyo never failed to shimmer with modernity. The national rail system was as efficient as any on earth. Even as ordinary Japanese gained economic anxiety and ratcheted down aspirations, most still had decent homes and cars, health care financed by the state, and a world-beating array of gadgets.
Many Japanese seemed perplexed by the dire talk that accompanied the push for reform. In Nagano, a city that had boomed with construction during the 1980s, suspicions about the reform trajectory were intense as Mr. Koizumi pushed to cleanse the banks of bad loans. Newspapers and television were full of grim talk about the corporate failures this would entail.
“I don’t really see how the economy will get better if you just close a big company and fire people,” said a 37-year-old housewife whose husband worked at the electronics giant Fujitsu. His pay had been cut by one-fifth. The local work force had been slashed by half. But she said she was more inclined to hang on to what they had — a 10-year-old Honda sedan, outdated kitchen appliances — than risk his paycheck in a bid for what seemed an abstraction: a healthy financial system.
By the time Japanese voters went to the polls last week, they must surely have noticed that, when crisis afflicted the United States, Americans seemed no more eager to ingest the medicine Washington once dispensed for Japan. Faced with soaring joblessness and financial calamity, Americans propped up their auto industry, saved banks deemed too big to fail, and unleashed nearly $800 billion in government spending to spare jobs. (Moreover, Americans have come to wish they had been a little more afraid of failure.)
Japanese voters did not appear to be approving a coherent economic policy so much as rejecting a seemingly bankrupt one. The new ruling Democratic Party of Japan gained votes with vague promises of subsidies and job protections.
Ultimately, the vote seemed to signal Japan’s verdict that the embrace of failure had, in the end, proven a failure, opting instead for the comfort of trying to muddle through.
Peter S. Goodman, a reporter for The Times, spent nearly a decade reporting from Asia. He is the author of “Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
U.S. film puts Japanese town on defensive for dolphin slaughter
'The Cove' offers a rare look at the kills in Taiji, which sought to keep them off limits. Some residents are unmoved by global outrage over the bloody practice. 'We are who we are,' one says.
By John M. Glionna
September 13, 2009
Reporting from Taiji, Japan
Keiko Hirao sits on pebbly Whale Beach in the late morning sun, taking in this town's main summertime attraction -- two playful dolphins swimming alongside tourists in a picturesque cove.
The creatures flap their tails and perform acrobatic jumps as dozens of delighted children tread water in the aquatic petting zoo. But Hirao is troubled. She knows something that many other tourists here don't.
"When I found out," the Osaka resident said, "I cried."
Each September, Whale Beach is closed to swimming. That's when the dolphin slaughter begins.
Taiji is one of the few towns worldwide where the mammals are legally herded from the sea and killed in groups so their meat can be sold at market, experts say.
Over seven months, 2,300 of the dolphins are steered into a hidden cove, where the choicest specimens are selected for sale to dolphin parks for $150,000 each. The rest are speared by fishermen in a frenzy of blood and thrashing fins.
Officials of the isolated town of 3,500 residents on Japan's southeastern coast have long blocked outsiders from observing the kills. Now a controversial U.S.-made film documenting the carnage has unleashed worldwide outrage over the practice and led the fishermen to say they will release 100 dolphins from the year's first catch (while making no promises about cutting back on future kills).
"The Cove," winner of the 2009 Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, portrays Taiji as a charming burg with a darker self, a place where Norman Rockwell meets Norman Bates.
To foil efforts to block their access, the filmmakers used divers with sophisticated underwater equipment, aerial drones, as well as surveillance and military-style thermal cameras. The result is part graphic horror flick, part suspense thriller and part "gotcha" movie, its dramatic scenes of determined undercover police giving chase to cameramen ending with chilling footage of churning water stained red.
Ric O'Barry, the documentary's human protagonist, is a dolphin trainer-turned-activist who has traveled to Taiji for 15 years to crusade against the hunt.
Once the dolphin trainer for the 1960s TV series "Flipper," the 68-year-old now feels partially responsible for people's fascination with captive-dolphin shows.
"In my life, I have watched dolphins give birth and have nursed them back to health when they were sick. I've captured and trained them," he said. "When I go to this cove and see the slaughter, it sickens me.
"It's just over the top in terms of cruelty. It has kept me awake at night for 15 years. Once you see it, you can't un-see it."
Officials here say dolphin hunts have long been a part of Taiji's fishing culture. Although many have seen segments of "The Cove" on the Internet, most would not discuss the issue.
"If you want to talk about dolphins, it's very difficult to have a conversation," said one town official who declined to give his name.
In a rare interview, one fisherman defended the cove's restricted status.
"In the West, the places where you kill the cows and pigs are always off limits," said Shuichi Matsumoto, who has gone on the dolphin hunt for years.
Joining 25 other fishermen on specially equipped boats, he bangs a long submerged pole with a hammer to create a wall of sound that drives the acoustically sensitive mammals toward shore, where they are killed the following day.
"We don't want to show this to anyone."
In a park overlooking Taiji's majestic coastline, residents gather each April 29 at a statue of a large right whale to pray for the souls of the creatures taken from the sea.
The local catch once was mostly large cetaceans, a practice that goes back centuries here, and Taiji prides itself as the birthplace of Japanese whaling. But ancient scrolls show that dolphins were also hunted here, say officials at the Taiji Whale Museum.
These days, the town is dominated by symbols of the catch. There are whale statues, whale-tail fountains and a dolphin-themed resort. Public buses are promoted by cutesy whale cartoon figures.
O'Barry first came to Taiji in 1993, guiding journalists interested in writing about the dolphin kills. He was harassed by supporters of the hunt and soon resorted to disguises involving wigs, hats, sunglasses and even dresses.
Louie Psihoyos, the director of "The Cove," first thought O'Barry was paranoid but soon saw that Taiji meant business about its privacy.
"They told us they treated the dolphins humanely, like relatives," Psihoyos said of his initial meeting with local officials. "Then they threatened us. They said it was dangerous for us to be there."
The filmmakers say many Japanese outside Taiji still don't know about the dolphin kills, and they plan to release a Japanese version free on the Internet if they don't find a distributor here.
For years, Japan has faced worldwide protests over its whaling industry. After the International Whaling Commission instituted a commercial whaling moratorium in the mid-1980s, the country announced that it would continue to harvest a small number of whales for scientific purposes.
Japan insists that dolphins, whose meat is served mostly in the countryside, and other small cetaceans are not covered by the moratorium.
The Japanese kill about 20,000 dolphins a year, most harpooned in the open sea. Taiji is the only place where the creatures are herded to shore and then killed, said Shigeki Takaya, an official with the Fisheries Ministry. He said the government monitors the dolphin kills.
"Most reporters tell one side of the story," he said. "They are prejudiced, so I usually don't comment on this. We have to respect our own culture. But why do you only focus on Taiji?
"We are not the only nation that kills dolphins," he said, pointing out that Canada, the Faeroe Islands and Denmark also hunt several species of dolphin. "Why not report about that?"
Yet some Taiji residents are conflicted.
"I know people think we are all barbarians," Councilman Hisato Ryono said. "There has to be another way to kill these creatures without making them suffer. But I don't know what it is."
Concerned about dangerous levels of mercury in the animals, Ryono helped persuade the town to pull dolphin meat from school lunches. Officials are also conducting tests among residents for mercury levels.
Ryono, who supports the dolphin hunt, said he first had doubts about the practice on a kayak trip when he paddled alongside the highly intelligent mammals and felt what he called a sense of peace and healing.
That night, at a barbecue where dolphin meat was being served, he asked whether anyone else felt strange eating such a wonderful animal. None did.
He said dolphin fishermen worry that "The Cove" might cause enough gaiatsu, or outside pressure, to force them to stop. But 48-year-old fisherman Matsumoto, chain-smoking during a two-hour interview, said no amount of gaiatsu would end the practice.
He believes filmmakers enhanced the documentary to make the cove seem bloodier. He also said that the fishermen changed their killing technique five years ago and believes the makers of "The Cove" used footage of old kills to mislead viewers.
"Killing in groups, we often missed our marks right behind the dolphin's head," Matsumoto said. "They died more slowly. There was too much blood. It didn't look good, and the meat didn't taste as good."
Now dolphins are separated and killed individually. Like a matador, he said, he can hit his mark "99.9%" of the time. "I know the spot," he said.
"I can make a kill in 10 seconds."
He defended Taiji and his neighbors.
"This is not an evil town. Nice people live here," he said. "But we are not going to stop this practice. We are who we are."
john.glionna@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
By John M. Glionna
September 13, 2009
Reporting from Taiji, Japan
Keiko Hirao sits on pebbly Whale Beach in the late morning sun, taking in this town's main summertime attraction -- two playful dolphins swimming alongside tourists in a picturesque cove.
The creatures flap their tails and perform acrobatic jumps as dozens of delighted children tread water in the aquatic petting zoo. But Hirao is troubled. She knows something that many other tourists here don't.
"When I found out," the Osaka resident said, "I cried."
Each September, Whale Beach is closed to swimming. That's when the dolphin slaughter begins.
Taiji is one of the few towns worldwide where the mammals are legally herded from the sea and killed in groups so their meat can be sold at market, experts say.
Over seven months, 2,300 of the dolphins are steered into a hidden cove, where the choicest specimens are selected for sale to dolphin parks for $150,000 each. The rest are speared by fishermen in a frenzy of blood and thrashing fins.
Officials of the isolated town of 3,500 residents on Japan's southeastern coast have long blocked outsiders from observing the kills. Now a controversial U.S.-made film documenting the carnage has unleashed worldwide outrage over the practice and led the fishermen to say they will release 100 dolphins from the year's first catch (while making no promises about cutting back on future kills).
"The Cove," winner of the 2009 Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, portrays Taiji as a charming burg with a darker self, a place where Norman Rockwell meets Norman Bates.
To foil efforts to block their access, the filmmakers used divers with sophisticated underwater equipment, aerial drones, as well as surveillance and military-style thermal cameras. The result is part graphic horror flick, part suspense thriller and part "gotcha" movie, its dramatic scenes of determined undercover police giving chase to cameramen ending with chilling footage of churning water stained red.
Ric O'Barry, the documentary's human protagonist, is a dolphin trainer-turned-activist who has traveled to Taiji for 15 years to crusade against the hunt.
Once the dolphin trainer for the 1960s TV series "Flipper," the 68-year-old now feels partially responsible for people's fascination with captive-dolphin shows.
"In my life, I have watched dolphins give birth and have nursed them back to health when they were sick. I've captured and trained them," he said. "When I go to this cove and see the slaughter, it sickens me.
"It's just over the top in terms of cruelty. It has kept me awake at night for 15 years. Once you see it, you can't un-see it."
Officials here say dolphin hunts have long been a part of Taiji's fishing culture. Although many have seen segments of "The Cove" on the Internet, most would not discuss the issue.
"If you want to talk about dolphins, it's very difficult to have a conversation," said one town official who declined to give his name.
In a rare interview, one fisherman defended the cove's restricted status.
"In the West, the places where you kill the cows and pigs are always off limits," said Shuichi Matsumoto, who has gone on the dolphin hunt for years.
Joining 25 other fishermen on specially equipped boats, he bangs a long submerged pole with a hammer to create a wall of sound that drives the acoustically sensitive mammals toward shore, where they are killed the following day.
"We don't want to show this to anyone."
In a park overlooking Taiji's majestic coastline, residents gather each April 29 at a statue of a large right whale to pray for the souls of the creatures taken from the sea.
The local catch once was mostly large cetaceans, a practice that goes back centuries here, and Taiji prides itself as the birthplace of Japanese whaling. But ancient scrolls show that dolphins were also hunted here, say officials at the Taiji Whale Museum.
These days, the town is dominated by symbols of the catch. There are whale statues, whale-tail fountains and a dolphin-themed resort. Public buses are promoted by cutesy whale cartoon figures.
O'Barry first came to Taiji in 1993, guiding journalists interested in writing about the dolphin kills. He was harassed by supporters of the hunt and soon resorted to disguises involving wigs, hats, sunglasses and even dresses.
Louie Psihoyos, the director of "The Cove," first thought O'Barry was paranoid but soon saw that Taiji meant business about its privacy.
"They told us they treated the dolphins humanely, like relatives," Psihoyos said of his initial meeting with local officials. "Then they threatened us. They said it was dangerous for us to be there."
The filmmakers say many Japanese outside Taiji still don't know about the dolphin kills, and they plan to release a Japanese version free on the Internet if they don't find a distributor here.
For years, Japan has faced worldwide protests over its whaling industry. After the International Whaling Commission instituted a commercial whaling moratorium in the mid-1980s, the country announced that it would continue to harvest a small number of whales for scientific purposes.
Japan insists that dolphins, whose meat is served mostly in the countryside, and other small cetaceans are not covered by the moratorium.
The Japanese kill about 20,000 dolphins a year, most harpooned in the open sea. Taiji is the only place where the creatures are herded to shore and then killed, said Shigeki Takaya, an official with the Fisheries Ministry. He said the government monitors the dolphin kills.
"Most reporters tell one side of the story," he said. "They are prejudiced, so I usually don't comment on this. We have to respect our own culture. But why do you only focus on Taiji?
"We are not the only nation that kills dolphins," he said, pointing out that Canada, the Faeroe Islands and Denmark also hunt several species of dolphin. "Why not report about that?"
Yet some Taiji residents are conflicted.
"I know people think we are all barbarians," Councilman Hisato Ryono said. "There has to be another way to kill these creatures without making them suffer. But I don't know what it is."
Concerned about dangerous levels of mercury in the animals, Ryono helped persuade the town to pull dolphin meat from school lunches. Officials are also conducting tests among residents for mercury levels.
Ryono, who supports the dolphin hunt, said he first had doubts about the practice on a kayak trip when he paddled alongside the highly intelligent mammals and felt what he called a sense of peace and healing.
That night, at a barbecue where dolphin meat was being served, he asked whether anyone else felt strange eating such a wonderful animal. None did.
He said dolphin fishermen worry that "The Cove" might cause enough gaiatsu, or outside pressure, to force them to stop. But 48-year-old fisherman Matsumoto, chain-smoking during a two-hour interview, said no amount of gaiatsu would end the practice.
He believes filmmakers enhanced the documentary to make the cove seem bloodier. He also said that the fishermen changed their killing technique five years ago and believes the makers of "The Cove" used footage of old kills to mislead viewers.
"Killing in groups, we often missed our marks right behind the dolphin's head," Matsumoto said. "They died more slowly. There was too much blood. It didn't look good, and the meat didn't taste as good."
Now dolphins are separated and killed individually. Like a matador, he said, he can hit his mark "99.9%" of the time. "I know the spot," he said.
"I can make a kill in 10 seconds."
He defended Taiji and his neighbors.
"This is not an evil town. Nice people live here," he said. "But we are not going to stop this practice. We are who we are."
john.glionna@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
In response to some of your questions, here is how I hope this day will work:
September 20, 2009
Tuna Town in Japan Sees Falloff of Its Fish
By MARTIN FACKLER
OMA, Japan — Fishermen here call it “black gold,” referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars.
The cold waters here once yielded such an abundance of bluefin, with such thick layers of tasty rich fat, that this tiny wind-swept seaport became Japan’s answer to California’s Napa Valley or the Brie cheese-producing region of France: a geographic location that is nearly synonymous with one of its nation’s premier foods.
So strong is the allure of Oma’s tuna that during the autumn fishing season, tens of thousands of hungry visitors descend on this remote fishing town, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. On a recent Sunday, dozens of tourists, filmed by no fewer than three local television crews, crowded into an old refrigerated warehouse on a pier where Oma’s mayor presided over a ceremony to slice up a 220-pound bluefin into brick-size blocks for sale.
“This is a pleasure you can only have a few times in your life,” said Toshiko Maki, 51, a homemaker from suburban Tokyo, as she popped a ruby-red cube of sashimi into her mouth.
But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations.
Just a decade or two ago, each boat here could routinely catch three or four tuna a day, fishermen say. Now, they say Oma’s entire fleet of 30 to 40 boats is lucky to bring in a combined total of a half-dozen tuna in a day.
The problem, they say, is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or China. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks. According to local newspapers, there have been repeated incidents of small fishing boats from Oma and other ports intentionally cutting such trawl lines.
“I’m furious at Tokyo’s bureaucrats for failing to protect our tuna,” said Hirofumi Hamahata, 69, the president of the Oma fishermen’s co-op, who has worked as a commercial fisherman since age 15. “They don’t lift a finger against the industrial fishing that just sweeps the ocean clean.”
Such flares of temper are rare in normally reserved Japan, and especially in conservative fishing communities like this one. But this is a town fiercely proud not only of its tuna, but also of how it catches them: in two-man open boats, using hand-held lines and live bait like squid.
Mr. Hamahata described catching tuna in this traditional way as a battle of wits against a clever predator that he called “the lion of the sea.” After hooking one, the contest becomes a battle of strength: he said it typically took one or two hours to pull a big tuna close enough to the boat that it could be stunned with an electric charge.
In one Hemingwayesque battle, Mr. Hamahata said he fought for 12 hours with a huge bluefin that finally broke free.
Despite such difficulties, Oma’s fishermen said they preferred their generations-old fishing method because it allowed them to catch just large, adult fish, leaving the smaller young ones to sustain local stocks.
Fishing experts say the overfishing is a result of a broader failure by the Tokyo authorities to impose effective limits on catches in its waters. Indeed, Japan, which consumes some 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of top-grade tuna caught worldwide, has lobbied hard against efforts to limit tuna catches, such as are now being proposed by European countries for the Atlantic Ocean.
“There are too many entrenched interests whose objective is maximizing profit, not sustainable use,” said Masayuki Komatsu, an expert on the fishing industry at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
In Oma, catching a big tuna has become rare enough — and the market price high enough — to be cause for celebration. On a recent evening, family members rushed to the pier to greet one boat that had caught a 410-pound bluefin, whose tear-shaped body had to be hoisted off the boat’s deck with a forklift.
Moving quickly to gut and ice the fish to preserve its value, workers from the fishing co-op presented the footlong dorsal fin as a trophy to the captain’s wife, who said it was the first catch in 10 days. The workers said the fish would fetch more than $10,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.
“Catching a tuna is like winning the lottery,” said another fisherman, 23-year-old Takeshi Izumi, who said his boat had yet to catch a tuna this season.
To maximize prices, Oma has registered its name as a trademark that can be used only with tuna brought ashore here. This has made Oma a brand that is gaining recognition even outside Japan. In March, a sushi chef from Hong Kong paid some $50,000 to buy half of a 280-pound Oma bluefin.
The prices can be even higher: In 2001, a Japanese buyer paid a record $220,000 for a 444-pound Oma bluefin.
One unfortunate side effect, said the town’s mayor, Mitsuharu Kanazawa, was that few of Oma’s 6,200 residents can now afford their own town’s tuna. However, he said the fish have been a boon to the town’s economy, pumping in some $15 million a year from fishing and tuna-related tourism.
After a popular 2000 TV drama featured Oma, the town increased tourism by starting a three-day tuna festival every year in mid-October, which now draws 15,000 visitors a day, as well as hordes from the Japanese media, Mr. Kanazawa said.
“We Japanese have a weakness for brands,” said Ryuko Nishimura, 43, a homemaker from Kuroishi, a three-hour drive away. “It makes the tuna taste two or three times more delicious.”
But with tuna now in danger of perhaps disappearing, the mayor said the town was struggling to find another local product to keep the tourists coming.
“We tried kelp and abalone,” Mr. Kanazawa said, “but nothing has the appeal of tuna.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Tuna Town in Japan Sees Falloff of Its Fish
By MARTIN FACKLER
OMA, Japan — Fishermen here call it “black gold,” referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars.
The cold waters here once yielded such an abundance of bluefin, with such thick layers of tasty rich fat, that this tiny wind-swept seaport became Japan’s answer to California’s Napa Valley or the Brie cheese-producing region of France: a geographic location that is nearly synonymous with one of its nation’s premier foods.
So strong is the allure of Oma’s tuna that during the autumn fishing season, tens of thousands of hungry visitors descend on this remote fishing town, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. On a recent Sunday, dozens of tourists, filmed by no fewer than three local television crews, crowded into an old refrigerated warehouse on a pier where Oma’s mayor presided over a ceremony to slice up a 220-pound bluefin into brick-size blocks for sale.
“This is a pleasure you can only have a few times in your life,” said Toshiko Maki, 51, a homemaker from suburban Tokyo, as she popped a ruby-red cube of sashimi into her mouth.
But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations.
Just a decade or two ago, each boat here could routinely catch three or four tuna a day, fishermen say. Now, they say Oma’s entire fleet of 30 to 40 boats is lucky to bring in a combined total of a half-dozen tuna in a day.
The problem, they say, is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or China. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks. According to local newspapers, there have been repeated incidents of small fishing boats from Oma and other ports intentionally cutting such trawl lines.
“I’m furious at Tokyo’s bureaucrats for failing to protect our tuna,” said Hirofumi Hamahata, 69, the president of the Oma fishermen’s co-op, who has worked as a commercial fisherman since age 15. “They don’t lift a finger against the industrial fishing that just sweeps the ocean clean.”
Such flares of temper are rare in normally reserved Japan, and especially in conservative fishing communities like this one. But this is a town fiercely proud not only of its tuna, but also of how it catches them: in two-man open boats, using hand-held lines and live bait like squid.
Mr. Hamahata described catching tuna in this traditional way as a battle of wits against a clever predator that he called “the lion of the sea.” After hooking one, the contest becomes a battle of strength: he said it typically took one or two hours to pull a big tuna close enough to the boat that it could be stunned with an electric charge.
In one Hemingwayesque battle, Mr. Hamahata said he fought for 12 hours with a huge bluefin that finally broke free.
Despite such difficulties, Oma’s fishermen said they preferred their generations-old fishing method because it allowed them to catch just large, adult fish, leaving the smaller young ones to sustain local stocks.
Fishing experts say the overfishing is a result of a broader failure by the Tokyo authorities to impose effective limits on catches in its waters. Indeed, Japan, which consumes some 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of top-grade tuna caught worldwide, has lobbied hard against efforts to limit tuna catches, such as are now being proposed by European countries for the Atlantic Ocean.
“There are too many entrenched interests whose objective is maximizing profit, not sustainable use,” said Masayuki Komatsu, an expert on the fishing industry at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
In Oma, catching a big tuna has become rare enough — and the market price high enough — to be cause for celebration. On a recent evening, family members rushed to the pier to greet one boat that had caught a 410-pound bluefin, whose tear-shaped body had to be hoisted off the boat’s deck with a forklift.
Moving quickly to gut and ice the fish to preserve its value, workers from the fishing co-op presented the footlong dorsal fin as a trophy to the captain’s wife, who said it was the first catch in 10 days. The workers said the fish would fetch more than $10,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.
“Catching a tuna is like winning the lottery,” said another fisherman, 23-year-old Takeshi Izumi, who said his boat had yet to catch a tuna this season.
To maximize prices, Oma has registered its name as a trademark that can be used only with tuna brought ashore here. This has made Oma a brand that is gaining recognition even outside Japan. In March, a sushi chef from Hong Kong paid some $50,000 to buy half of a 280-pound Oma bluefin.
The prices can be even higher: In 2001, a Japanese buyer paid a record $220,000 for a 444-pound Oma bluefin.
One unfortunate side effect, said the town’s mayor, Mitsuharu Kanazawa, was that few of Oma’s 6,200 residents can now afford their own town’s tuna. However, he said the fish have been a boon to the town’s economy, pumping in some $15 million a year from fishing and tuna-related tourism.
After a popular 2000 TV drama featured Oma, the town increased tourism by starting a three-day tuna festival every year in mid-October, which now draws 15,000 visitors a day, as well as hordes from the Japanese media, Mr. Kanazawa said.
“We Japanese have a weakness for brands,” said Ryuko Nishimura, 43, a homemaker from Kuroishi, a three-hour drive away. “It makes the tuna taste two or three times more delicious.”
But with tuna now in danger of perhaps disappearing, the mayor said the town was struggling to find another local product to keep the tourists coming.
“We tried kelp and abalone,” Mr. Kanazawa said, “but nothing has the appeal of tuna.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
November 24: This Day in History: U.S. B-29s raid Tokyo
November 24, This Day in History: U.S. B-29s raid Tokyo
On this day in 1944, 111 U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers raid Tokyo for the first time since Capt. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid in 1942. Their target: the Nakajima aircraft engine works.
Fall 1944 saw the sustained strategic bombing of Japan. It began with a reconnaissance flight over Tokyo by Tokyo Rose, a Superfortress B-29 bomber piloted by Capt. Ralph D. Steakley, who grabbed over 700 photographs of the bomb sites in 35 minutes. Next, starting the first week of November, came a string of B-29 raids, dropping hundreds of tons of high explosives on Iwo Jima, in order to keep the Japanese fighters stationed there on the ground and useless for a counteroffensive. Then came Tokyo.
The awesome raid, composed of 111 Superfortress four-engine bombers, was led by Gen. Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, piloting Dauntless Dotty. Press cameramen on site captured the takeoffs of the first mass raid on the Japanese capital ever for posterity. Unfortunately, even with the use of radar, overcast skies and bad weather proved an insurmountable obstacle at 30,000 feet: Despite the barrage of bombs that were dropped, fewer than 50 hit the main target, the Nakajima Aircraft Works, doing little damage. The upside was that at such a great height, the B-29s were protected from counter-attack; only one was shot down.
One Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded as a result of the raid. It went to Captain Steakley.
On this day in 1944, 111 U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers raid Tokyo for the first time since Capt. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid in 1942. Their target: the Nakajima aircraft engine works.
Fall 1944 saw the sustained strategic bombing of Japan. It began with a reconnaissance flight over Tokyo by Tokyo Rose, a Superfortress B-29 bomber piloted by Capt. Ralph D. Steakley, who grabbed over 700 photographs of the bomb sites in 35 minutes. Next, starting the first week of November, came a string of B-29 raids, dropping hundreds of tons of high explosives on Iwo Jima, in order to keep the Japanese fighters stationed there on the ground and useless for a counteroffensive. Then came Tokyo.
The awesome raid, composed of 111 Superfortress four-engine bombers, was led by Gen. Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, piloting Dauntless Dotty. Press cameramen on site captured the takeoffs of the first mass raid on the Japanese capital ever for posterity. Unfortunately, even with the use of radar, overcast skies and bad weather proved an insurmountable obstacle at 30,000 feet: Despite the barrage of bombs that were dropped, fewer than 50 hit the main target, the Nakajima Aircraft Works, doing little damage. The upside was that at such a great height, the B-29s were protected from counter-attack; only one was shot down.
One Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded as a result of the raid. It went to Captain Steakley.
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