5/2/2018 Who can criticize whaling?

Japan has been criticized for her whaling. This problem has several interesting points. When discussing it, we must recognize first that no animal can live without killing living things. Many animals including most of us need to kill other animals.
Whaling is undertaken not only by Japan but also by Norway, Denmark, Russia, and so on. However, only Japan has been criticized. I wonder why the movie The Cove does not criticize Norway which kills more whales than Japan does. There is a similarity between this case and that of comfort women.
Anti-whaling groups receive money for their activities from large corporations which compete with Japanese corporations. The former corporations expect the groups to create bad images for Japanese products or to organize boycotts against them. Thus anti-whaling is means for the anti-whaling people to earn a living and for those corporations to meet competition successfully. What is important to them is not whales but money. This suggests one reason why only Japan has been criticized.
Another reason is that the anti-whaling groups together with a few supporting countries want to create bad images for Japan. They want to claim that Japan deserves the A-bomb attacks by the USA because her people are cruel enough to kill whales.
A reason often cited for anti-whaling is that the whale is a higher animal close to human beings. Such an animal is considered to experience greater pain before death. The anti-whaling people assert that the Japanese are cruel since they kill higher animals. If the Japanese are cruel enough to kill higher animals, so are Americans and Australians because the latter also killed many whales in the past. When they assert that the Japanese are cruel, they are admitting that they themselves are cruel.
Americans killed so many whales that large whales once went almost extinct in the Northern Hemisphere. However, they never thought whaling was cruel. This can be seen in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Thus, cruelty is a reason contrived to condemn the Japanese.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Japan recently and told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to stop whaling. However, Australia is a country which was once deeply involved in whaling. Moby-Dick says that whaling ships gave birth to and saved Australia. Though Australians blame Japan for whaling in the Antarctic Ocean, their ships used to whale near Japan. Their commercial whaling continued until 1970s. Why are they so eager to stop Japan’s whaling after they stopped theirs?
I think that Australians want to be considered uncruel enough to protect whales. This desire springs from the fact that they killed millions of aborigines for sadistic pleasure. They want to distract attention from this sinful fact by condemning Japan's ‘cruelty.’ Australians killed not only many whales near Japan but also much more humans in their country. Why is Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull qualified to tell Japan to stop whaling? It is very childish to employ such blatantly hypocritical diplomacy. Aren’t there any Australians who point this out?
You can see pictures of the Canadian seal slaughter on the internet. I do not think it is less cruel than whaling. I wonder why those who made The Cove had not documented the seal slaughter by their neighbor before documenting whaling by people very far away.
You can see videos of cow slaughter on the internet. I think it is much crueler than whaling. The cow’s face is more similar to ours than the whale’s is. I wonder why those who made The Cove had not documented cow slaughter in their home country.
How many cows are slaughtered in pain in the USA and Australia every day? I wonder if this question is ever asked by those who made The Cove and those who praise the movie. Some people say that their religion allows them to kill cows, but religion is devised so as to justify doing some things that make human beings feel painful. It is worth mentioning that military chaplains had given some words to those who dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki before they started flying.
It is extremely childish to see what is wrong with other people but not what is wrong with oneself. We cannot avoid doing things that are not so desirable or beautiful, including killing animals. We need to realize it and minimize the undesirable effects. Aspersions are often cast shamelessly on particular people through movies under the disguise of justice. The Cove is an example. Other examples are Planet of the Apes, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and James Bond films.

Comments and questions are welcome.
Kazuhiro Arai’s English twitter:        https://twitter.com/araikazuhiroe88
Kazuhiro Arai’s Japanese blog:         https://araikazuhiro.blogspot.jp/
Kazuhiro Arai’s Japanese twitter:      https://twitter.com/araikazuhiro88
Kazuhiro Arai’s Japanese home page:   http://araikazuhiro.world.coocan.jp/





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