Revenge of the dolphins

Taiji officials: Dolphin meat 'toxic waste' | The Japan Times Online

Letting nothing get between them and a school of fish, the Japanese residents of Taiji kill hundreds of dolphins each year in a particularly gruesome fashion. Foreign Correspondent had a story about it in 2005. It was noted there that some of the dolphin meat is eaten locally.

The Japan Times story at the top says that this is a bad idea, because testing indicates it contains a very high level of mercury. All very unfortunate for the local school kids too, who have had dolphin meat put in the school supplied lunches.

The Japanese Fisheries bureaucracy remains hard to convince. God forbid that anything, even human health, should stop them killing and munching on whatever sea creature they like:

Tetsuya Endo, a professor and researcher at Hokkaido Health Science University's faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, affirmed the other doctors' condemnation of small-cetacean food products.

In a terse e-mail sent to this correspondent, Endo said, in reference to dolphin meat, "It's not food!"

In 2005, Endo published the results of a three-year study on random samples of cetacean food products sold throughout Japan, and concluded all of it was unhealthy because of high levels of mercury and methylmercury.

However, Hideki Moronuki, deputy director of the government's Far Seas Fisheries Division of the Resources Management Department, in an interview with The Japan Times, maligned Endo's study, calling it "misleading information." When pressed, though, he failed to substantiate his accusation.

The Japanese obsession with fish is a problem. As another Foreign Correspondent report (this one on massive Japanese overfishing of tuna off Australia and elsewhere) noted:

Japan has only two per cent of the world’s population yet Japanese eat a chunky ten per cent of the global fish catch. The national appetite seems almost insatiable.