Whaling Town Destroyed by Tsunami
The New York Times’ Martin Fackler has filed a report from Ayukawahama, an area of Ishinomaki city that was once a whaling town but is now a wasteland of wrecked buildings:
“There is no Ayukawa without whaling,” said Hiroyuki Akimoto, 27, a fisherman and an occasional crewman on the whaling boats, referring to the town by its popular shorthand.
Japan’s tsunami seems to have succeeded — where years of boycotts, protests and high-seas chases by Western environmentalists had failed — in knocking out a pillar of the nation’s whaling industry. Ayukawahama was one of only four communities in Japan that defiantly carried on whaling and eating whales as a part of the local culture, even as the rest of the nation lost interest in whale meat.
So central is whaling to the local identity that many here see the fate of the town and the industry as inextricably linked.
“This could be the final blow to whaling here,” said Makoto Takeda, a 70-year-old retired whaler. “So goes whaling, so goes the town.”
The damage was particularly heavy here because Ayukawahama sits on the tip of a peninsula that was the closest land to the huge undersea earthquake 13 days ago. The resulting tsunami tore through the tiny fishing towns on the mountainous coastline, reducing Ayukawahama to an expanse of splintered wood and twisted cars. Three out of four homes were destroyed, forcing half of the town’s 1,400 residents into makeshift shelters.
Although all the employees of the town’s small whaling company survived the tsunami, its offices and factories were destroyed and its ships were damaged. Without government support in the rebuilding effort, it is unlikely that the company will be able to recover.
Related link: Here’s a Sea Shepherd propaganda article from 2009, which referred to the whalers from Ayukawahama as “mad dog killers” and “criminals” who were part of the “Yakuza controlled Japanese whaling industry.”
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