Two Japanese documentary filmmakers emailed me while I was in Tokyo in the early 2000s. I met with them at my favorite coffee shop in Shibuya where there are some private rooms upstairs for business meetings. I was interviewed for one film for my role in stopping the American anti-whaling movement. The other was my role in postponing the American anti-Japanese campaign against Japanese dolphin killing. Both filmmakers had discovered my role from Japanese sources.
There are two blogs, one on each documentary.
This first on whales. (an earlier blog is here)
It all began in my role on the board of Point Foundation, the foundation based on the revenue from the Last Whole Earth Catalog. A fellow board member encouraged me to grant funds to Joan McIntryre, an anti-whaling activist. She lived in Bolinas, North of San Francisco. She named her organization Project Jonah.
Two years later I met her in Japan and was surprised to find she disliked Japanese people. I can find no record of her since then. I heard she married a native Polynesian around that time after writing a successful anti-whaling book.
That meeting with Joan in Japan led to a conversation at a party in San Francisco with a Harvard biologist. I asked her about the issue of whaling populations. She made a quote I’ll never forget. ‘If there were any problems with the endangered data my Jewish friends at Harvard would have known about it.’
I’m a Jew and a statistician. So I took the challenge. I spent a few days in the library and made several discoveries. There are about 38 species of whales of which four were declared endangered by the International Whaling Commission. One of the endangered species was the Sei whale, primarily hunted by Inuit and Canadian native tribes. None were hunted by whaling countries. Many of the remaining species had female populations over 500,000.
I then wrote an article for the Co-Evolution Quarterly, a leading environmental magazine, titled “The Anti-Whaling Movement is Racist Against Japanese.” I argued that several Scandinavian nations and the USSR were whaling nations but completely ignored by the anti-whaling movement. There were no pickets at the Bolshoi Ballet.
A few months later, I pointed out the article to my friend Jerry Brown who is an environmentalist and was then governor of California. He called a meeting in his office with all the leading environmentalists and asked them if my article was accurate. If it was, he told them to call off their campaign.
That was pretty much the end of the American anti-whaling movement.
My role in that was the subject of the Japanese documentary a quarter-century later.