Voices in the Ocean Read online

  If you’ve seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, you’ve had a glimpse of what happens in Taiji. This pretty seaside town of 3,500 people is up to some very ugly business: catching, killing, and selling dolphins. Before they hunted dolphins, the Taiji fishermen hunted whales. Their whaling history dates back to 1675, but their dolphin hunt, which began in 1969, is relatively recent. It is also mercenary, environmentally disastrous, and exceptionally brutal, and it has drawn worldwide howls of protest. In response, the town is hostile to outsiders. To the Taiji dolphin hunters—and the local people who support them, the politicians who protect them, the dolphin traffickers and yakuza gangsters who profit from them, the marine parks that buy dolphins from them—anyone coming to protest the hunt falls somewhere on a sliding scale between irritant and terrorist. This is demonstrated clearly in The Cove: in Taiji, the film’s main character, American activist Ric O’Barry, is regularly followed, screamed at, ejected from public places, and threatened. “They’d kill me if they could,” O’Barry says.

  O’Barry, now seventy-five, is a famous crusader against dolphin injustice. He has a unique résumé: he is Flipper’s former trainer. Throughout the sixties, O’Barry taught the five female bottlenoses who played Flipper to perform the dazzling feats that made the TV show such a hit. Before that, he collected wild dolphins for the Miami Seaquarium, scooping up more than a hundred animals around Florida and the Bahamas. O’Barry caught dolphins for captivity and looked after dolphins in captivity and trained dolphins in captivity, and he lived large while he was doing it, cruising around Coconut Grove in a Porsche, entertaining models and rock stars who dropped by to hang out with Flipper, pulling down a hefty salary. There was only one problem. Working with the dolphins, O’Barry began to have the same weird feeling that John Lilly had described: “About halfway through the TV series I really started having second thoughts about captivity. But I didn’t actually do anything. Things were going too well to ruin the party.” The turning point came in 1970 when his favorite dolphin, Kathy, died in his arms in a seemingly intentional way—looking up at him and simply refusing to take another breath. “She was really depressed,” O’Barry recalled. “I could feel it. I could see it.” The dolphin, he believed, had committed suicide. The next day, O’Barry switched careers. For the past forty-three years he has dedicated his life to dolphin welfare, roaming the globe doing everything he can to help them.

  It was O’Barry who had invited me to Taiji. Each year on September 1, opening day of Japan’s six-month dolphin-hunting season, O’Barry and his group, the Dolphin Project, hold a vigil in the cove, and then every day after that they track the hunters’ movements, documenting everything that occurs. “I will keep returning to Taiji until they stop or I drop,” O’Barry told me. I had instantly agreed to come, though I knew the trip would be disturbing. I wanted to experience the place for myself. Emotions run hot around dolphins wherever they are, but in Taiji everything is taken to an extreme.

  I flew to Osaka on August 30, but at the last moment O’Barry was summoned to appear in court on a dolphin-related matter and had to delay his arrival. It was decided the rest of us would push on to Taiji as planned; O’Barry would join us two days later. Along with me there were thirty others on the bus, an international mix of activists mostly in their twenties and thirties, three translators, plus Palmer and Berman. Both men were associate directors at Earth Island Institute, the environmental organization in Berkeley, California, that worked with O’Barry; both had plenty of experience dealing with wrathful fishermen and fraught politics and smiting rage aimed in their direction, all of which we were likely to encounter.

  As we approached the town’s outskirts, Berman, sitting next to me, leaned back in his seat, shook his head glumly, and crossed his arms, as if battening down his personal hatches. “We’re about ten minutes away from the cove,” he said. “Once you get there you just feel really sick.” I nodded, though it was hard to imagine Berman buckling that quickly. During the six-hour drive from Osaka I had heard stories of his exploits and decided that if I ever needed to do something highly unpopular and unpleasant, I’d call Berman for advice. His nickname is the Berminator.

  With his wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair, and small build, Berman looks more like a high-school math teacher than the seasoned eco-streetfighter that he is. At Earth Island he heads the Dolphin Safe tuna monitoring program, a watchdog initiative started in 1990 to prevent fishing fleets from snaring dolphins in their catch. In this role Berman must enforce strict regulations on even the most piratical operators, none of whom give a damn about dolphins but all of whom cannot afford to have their tuna boycotted by dolphin-loving consumers. Wielding this economic threat does not always make him an excess of friends. Berman has been lunged at by Solomon Islands tribesmen, assaulted by a fishing crew in the Philippines, and told by a Thai businessman, “You know, people like you can disappear very easily.” None of it seemed to faze him. “I grew up as a Jew with curly hair in the deep South in the sixties,” he said, explaining his dauntlessness. “That was pretty rough.”

  Through the bus windows I could see a hillside tumble of closely packed houses with brown and beige and rust-colored roofs, somber earth tones rather than happy seaside pastels. We drove by a tsunami warning sign, a yellow triangle filled with ominous black waves, and then we crossed over a bridge that was topped by a dolphin statuette. The dolphin was the size of a garden gnome, and its mouth gaped open as though it was yelling for help. We passed beneath full-scale models of a humpback whale and her calf, impaled on steel pillars so they appeared to be flying through the air.

  In Taiji central we were greeted by the Kyo Maru I, a dry-docked whaling ship. The 800-ton vessel was painted battleship gray and dull red, with the word research splayed boldly across its hull. Not long ago it had chased whales in Antarctica; now it was sidelined, raised up on concrete blocks like a monument. The world had acted on behalf of the great whales, banning commercial whaling in 1986, but small whales were not specifically included in the agreement. Taiji and several other Japanese towns kill up to 20,000 dolphins each year, taking advantage of this omission.

  In general, there is a fervent difference of opinion between Japan and other nations about whether any cetaceans deserve protection. Japanese fishery officials have openly described killing dolphins and whales as something akin to a public service; one spokesman referred to them as “the cockroaches of the sea.” In their upside-down equation, fewer cetaceans add up to more fish. In truth, the ocean is more complicated than that, and removing predators from its waters disrupts an intricate balance. Scientists now know that cetaceans not only help maintain healthy fish populations, they play an essential role in creating them.

  Whale and dolphin meat—illegal to eat in most countries under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)—is an entrenched part of Japan’s national cuisine. In Taiji, the Kyo Maru I sits as a proud emblem of the country’s whaling expertise; to me it was a haunting reminder that we almost harpooned the animals out of existence. I looked past the ship to the Pacific, tranquil and glassy in the early evening light, and then we rounded one last corner and the cove lay in front of us.

  It was smaller than I’d realized, maybe two hundred yards long and sixty across, U-shaped and studded with rocks, lined on both sides by steep, thickly forested bluffs. From the road you could look down onto the cove’s pebbly beach and into its shallow green waters. The place was eerily still, without even a breath of wind. A white buoy line stretched from one side to the other, though nobody was swimming. A picnicking pavilion stood deserted. The streets were empty; the seaside walkways were blocked by heavy chain-link and barbed wire fencing with signs that said: NO TRESPASSING. DANGER. FOR A FALLING ROCK and THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA. At the cove there were no children playing with toy boats, no Frisbee-chasing dogs, no summer ice cream vendors, no couples enjoying the sunset. If you didn’t count the forty policemen standing across the street, in fact, there was no
one here at all.

  Our bus driver turned into a parking lot, and stopped beside some lonely-looking palm trees. This was the cove’s new police station, built the previous year. Altercations between dolphin activists and dolphin hunters could get heated, and the number of people who showed up here each September 1 kept rising. Lately, ultra-right-wing nationalists and yakuza had come around spoiling for a fight; neither was a threat to be ignored. In past months, protesters from the group Sea Shepherd had been tailed and harassed; there had even been an attempted abduction. Responding to the ratcheting tensions, the federal police had become a constant presence in Taiji. O’Barry’s groups were always peaceful and law-abiding, but even so, the police wanted to interview us individually before we could check in to our hotel.

  Palmer stood up again. “We’ll go in two at a time,” he said, as the bus doors opened.

  “Be pleasant. That means you, Berman.” He chuckled dryly. “And remember, if you don’t understand what they’re saying, just smile and nod.”

  “I ask you some questions so please.” The policeman was businesslike. He sat behind a desk wearing a neat navy uniform and a poker face. His English was halting but workable. Opening my passport, he examined it for what seemed like a very long time, making careful notes as he flipped through its pages. After a while he leaned over to another policeman sitting next to him and pointed to one of my visa stamps. The two men began to speak in rapid-fire Japanese. I smiled and nodded.

  The first policeman turned back to me. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Uh…” Was there a right answer? I decided to go for diplomacy: “I’m here to learn.”

  “Ohhhhhhh.”

  “I observe.”

  “Mmmmmm. Demonstration is here tomorrow. Do you take part in this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh oh oh oh oh. Tell me about one thing. Have you ever heard of the conflict right wing nationalists?”

  “I heard something.”

  “They are waiting in the next town,” he said, shaking his head and looking grave. “They can be dangerous. They are gonna come here tomorrow, many. Say bad things. So please be careful.”

  “I will. I will be careful.”

  “Please ignore.”

  “I will, definitely.”

  “And don’t push anyone.”

  “No, no. I don’t push.”

  He handed back my passport and motioned for the next person to come in. Nodding arigato, I went outside to join the others. Veronica, a graceful Bolivian who had traveled here with her daughter, was staring at the cove, crying. Two Australian girls, Yaz and Britt, both from Perth and just shy of twenty, stood next to her. “I can’t take it all in,” Britt said, looking stricken. She was no lightweight in the compassion department: at fourteen, she had saved up her money and flown to Nepal to work at Mother Teresa’s mission.

  A young Californian named Arielle walked by, dripping saltwater with every step. She had waded into the cove and dunked herself and now she was ready to answer their questions. Her soaking wet clothes clung to her small frame; mascara ran down her cheeks. Arielle had a long shag haircut and a round, knowing face. She was a singer and planned to perform tomorrow during the demonstration. On the bus I had watched her lovingly tuck her guitar into its case; the front of the instrument was coated with fluffy white feathers. As Arielle opened the door to the police station, Berman exited. He did a double take as she passed. “Oh man,” he said. “That takes some guts. To get in that water.”

  We all knew what he meant. It’s the rare seaside cove that doesn’t invite dipping, but splashing around in here would be like picnicking in an abattoir. Even worse than the knowledge that tens of thousands of dolphins have died in this spot are the specifics of how they were killed. When the dolphins are driven into the cove, they’re disoriented and terrified. Sometimes they are left in there for days without food or hydration (like us, dolphins need fresh water; they extract it from the fish they eat). When a slaughter begins, the pod can hear one another’s cries. They know exactly what is going on. Clandestine footage of past hunts reveals a breathtaking amount of casual cruelty from the fishermen—dragging the dolphins out of the ocean by their tails, piling wounded dolphins on top of each other, stepping on the dolphins—laughing and smoking while they’re doing it.

  Recently, the Taiji fishermen introduced a new technique for killing dolphins—which they claim is far more efficient and humane—and it involves severing the animals’ spines while they are alive, spiking metal rods into their blowholes, and then plugging them with wooden dowels. Death is far from instant: first the dolphins endure paralysis, then they die gradually of shock, hemorrhage, drowning, or asphyxiation. This practice is so merciless that a group of scientists and veterinarians in Britain and the U.S. released a paper analyzing the resulting trauma; they concluded that “this killing method…would not be tolerated or permitted in any regulated slaughterhouse process in the developed world.”

  Interrogation over, we drove to the Kayu hotel. It was a blockish but well-situated affair, only a stone’s throw from the cove. We were spending a single night at this hotel; for the rest of the week we would stay in Kii-Katsuura, the neighboring town, five minutes away. As our luggage was unloaded, I asked Berman why we had to move. He grimaced. “Staying in Taiji is really not fun,” he said. “They don’t want us here. They’ll take our money, but they really don’t like us.” “Oh, they don’t like us at all,” a slender blond woman standing next to him added. “Kii-Katsuura is bigger and the hotel there has better security.”

  The woman’s name was Carrie Burns, and she spoke from experience. Carrie and her husband, Tim, had been regulars in Taiji for the past three years, flying from their home in St. Petersburg, Florida, and often staying for weeks at a time. Like everyone else in the group, they were propelled here after seeing The Cove. “We watched it on Netflix,” Carrie said, “and that same night we were online, researching the price of tickets to Japan.” Once alerted, the Burnses did not commit themselves halfway. Carrie had learned the hunt’s every machination, down to the quotas for each dolphin species, and could discuss any aspect of it with encyclopedic recall. Tim ran O’Barry’s cove-monitor program, making sure that each morning at five o’clock when the dolphin-hunting boats left the harbor, someone was perched at a hillside lookout with a set of binoculars and a camera with a long lens. Whenever dolphins were driven into the cove, the monitors took pictures and video, counted the captured animals, surveilled everything that was happening, and then broadcast it all through social media.

  As images streamed out of the cove’s water stained red with blood, of fishermen hacking at dolphins with spears and knives, and dolphin trainers wading in to select the youngest and prettiest of the captives—as the outside world began to get an eyeful of what was going down in this place—the town had attempted to cut off the sightlines, erecting barricades, blocking paths, and obscuring the water with huge tarps, but there were still a few angles left. None of them were ideal or easy to get to, and often the monitors would show up at a formerly accessible spot only to find it suddenly “closed for repairs,” cordoned off and under guard.

  Despite the hazards and impediments, the monitors persevered, they were resourceful, and they always found a way. But their work was emotionally taxing. Watching hundreds of dolphins fight for their lives—and lose—was not a job for the fainthearted. Tim, a good-natured guy with a fullback’s build, radiated steadiness, but the cove still took its toll. After witnessing an especially bloody day, Carrie told me, Tim would often be unable to talk.

  Palmer had asked everyone to drop their stuff and then meet in his room to discuss tomorrow’s schedule. Traipsing through the hotel, I had the paranoid sense of being watched through keyholes or by hidden cameras. When I arrived at Palmer’s doorway I ducked in, relieved. Everyone was gathered around a Canadian man named Jack, who was pouring red wine into paper cups. “Alright,” Palmer said, quieting us. Though he never sought t
he spotlight, Palmer was a natural at commanding a room. Tall and affable, usually clad in a baseball cap, he had an easy way with people and with language. At sixty-one, Palmer had spent his career in service to the environment. He had founded and led the Endangered Species Committee of California, lobbied in Washington, D.C., served as a Sierra Club chairman and vice president—for decades he had worked to save wild animals and wild places in countless ways, in hundreds of campaigns, in his own laid-back, humor-filled, get-it-done style.

  “Let’s begin with the subject of danger because it has been raised,” he said. “What we usually do is throw Berman into the cove and if he makes it back, we know we’re okay.” People laughed, tension defused. Palmer continued: “Apparently there are extreme groups here—the police should keep them away from us. You don’t want to go near them. By all means, do not get into a shoving match. There is always the possibility that you will be arrested along with the nationalist guy who was shoving you.”

  Getting arrested, everyone knew, was a particularly bad idea in Japan. You could be held for a month without being charged, and you would definitely be ejected from the country and not allowed to return. In 2007, a group that included the actress Hayden Panettiere had paddled into the cove on surfboards, placing themselves among a group of pilot whales the hunters were in the process of slaughtering. The protesters were jostled and screamed at and prodded with gaffs, and they exited the water quickly. It was a brave act and it drew some media attention, but they had to flee the country to avoid getting fined and detained. While it is naturally tempting to take an emotionally charged run at the cove, cutting the nets or otherwise interfering, the reason O’Barry doesn’t advocate monkey-wrenching in Taiji is because it doesn’t work. In his e-mails to the group, he stressed the importance of restrained, respectful behavior. Over the years he’d seen that haranguing the hunters just made them more determined to continue. Instead, he takes a different tact. He points out a jarring truth: that dolphin meat is about as palatable as industrial waste.