Voices in the Ocean Read online

  Maxwell went to get the tickets. Berman and I lurked out of sight, hiding ourselves behind a hedge. I looked down and noticed that I was standing on a ceramic tile painted with dolphins. Earlier, I’d walked across metal plaques sunk into the pavement, etched with splashing whales and dolphins and the words WELCOME TO TAIJI.

  Everywhere you turned in this town, there were cetaceans. Whales were plastered on buildings; dolphins were pretzeled into neon signs. They ushered you to the bathroom and saluted you at storefronts and pointed you down streets. I don’t think I have ever been surrounded by as many finned creatures as I was in Taiji, an irony that was difficult to process. WE LOVE DOLPHINS! a prominent road sign exclaimed. It was like being in the Twilight Zone, with flippers. It didn’t seem like the town could get any more schizophrenic, but then Maxwell appeared with the tickets, we pulled on our hats and sunglasses and made our way into the museum, and I realized that every bizarre experience I’d had until now was only a warm-up for this.

  Inside, four whale skeletons hung from the ceiling, enormous mobiles of bone. A model of a live whale dangled up there too, pursued by a boat filled with a dozen men hurling spears. Below, there was a puppet show depicting how the animals were killed: you could press a button and watch the fleet attack a whale that popped up from a hole. Harpoons of all shapes and sizes and vintages were on view, along with maps of celebrated whale-hunting grounds. But if the first floor was a history lesson, the second floor was all about biology.

  The first thing I saw at the top of the stairs was a glass case that contained the head of a striped dolphin. The head was pinkish, suspended in pale yellow fluid. Its eyes were open, which made it disturbingly real, two unseeing orbs staring out for eternity. The dolphin was smiling, as all dolphins do, proving with finality that this feature of their anatomy does not mean they are always happy. Lined up near the head were four cylinders filled with dolphin fetuses in various stages of development. They were squashed in, so their tails curled under them and their beaks tilted skyward. I was startled to see that their fledgling fins looked exactly like arms. Like us, their heads are large throughout their gestation, so there were odd echoes of humanity in the bobbing creatures, even with their comma-shaped bodies and pointy faces.

  The whole floor was a gallery of specimens: a floating bottlenose brain, a pickled humpback whale embryo, tissuey slices of…something. Maxwell walked down the row, reading off the contents of glass bottles and jars: “Whale penis, dolphin penis, whale heart, whale tongue, whale anus, whale spleen. And, oh! This one is an orca.”

  It was hard not to be shocked by the sight of a stillborn killer whale lying on its side in a liquid-filled case with its ropey umbilical cord still attached. You could just barely make out its coloration, a whisper of difference where black met white. The orca’s small body was so smooth it glistened, as though it were made of pristine, flesh-colored custard. Looking at it, Berman let out a long breath, shook his head, and walked away.

  We retreated downstairs and through the gift shop, past the freezer filled with dolphin and whale meat, the cans of dolphin stew stacked next to the dolphin plush toys and T-shirts and key chains. Outside, swelling muzak signaled the start of the dolphin show. We took our seats at the top of the bleachers so we could watch the audience as well as the show. Behind us, a blue whale skeleton hovered like a spaceship, its back end hoisted as though it were diving. It was hardly a packed house, mostly parents with children. The day was intolerably muggy, and a few toddlers were screaming in the heat. Mothers fanned themselves; fathers looked stoic and bored. Berman and I were the only smuggled-in Westerners in the joint.

  A squad of six uniformed trainers took up their positions—young women in tangerine polo shirts and navy Bermuda shorts—and the show began in an area like the cove, except this one was walled off from the open ocean by a bulky cement barrier. There was no tidal flow in here, no exchange of fresh seawater with the waves, no wayward fish. The enclosure was still and stagnant and hot. One of the trainers blew her whistle and a Risso’s dolphin erupted from the water, followed by a pilot whale who had to be fifteen feet long. A third over-size dolphin flipped onto his back and began to swim by us, waving his pectoral fins. Berman looked deflated. “That’s a false killer whale,” he said. “A very pelagic deep water animal. He won’t last long here.”

  I was still stuck on the Risso’s dolphin. He was the most unusual dolphin I’d ever seen—a Cy Twombly dolphin, his gray-blue body covered in fantastic scribbles. He looked like an adorable alien. Actually, they all did. The pilot whale’s jet-black head was almost perfectly round; the false killer whale still bore traces of the dolphin’s earliest incarnation as a sleek, wolfish creature. All three dolphins were magnificent, absolute marvels of the ocean, and by all rights they should have been out in the Pacific, doing what 55 million years of evolution had designed them to do in the most important ecosystem on earth, instead of in here, leaping to the beat of cheesy pop songs.

  As I watched, sweat trickled down the back of my neck, but something else was rising: anger. The show was soul-crushingly stupid. It was plainly and inanely stupid—all of this was stupid, everything that went on at the cove, the entire arrogant, selfish relationship we had with these animals and with all of nature, as though every bit of life existed only for our purposes. We behaved as though we were gods, deciding the fate of everything, but we weren’t. We were just dumb. I felt a wave of despair wash over me.

  Berman slumped forward. “These trainers,” he said. “How can they possibly live with themselves? They treat these animals as pets but they watch while the others are slaughtered. It’s mind-boggling.” He wasn’t alone in this sentiment. Over his years observing the cove, O’Barry had seen trainers wading in to grab dolphins by their tails, trainers riding in dolphin-hunting boats, trainers colluding in every way. One time he had even seen a trainer point out an escaping pilot whale so the hunters could recapture it.

  The performance ended. I was in a dark funk and would have loved to leave, but Berman wanted to check on the bottlenoses in the indoor tanks. They were in a circular white building at the far end of the dolphin pens. Inside, it reeked of chlorine. There was a stuffy, listless quality to the air, as though its main goal were suffocation. Three bottlenoses were crammed in a shallow tank that arched over a walkway, its windows dirty and cloudy and scratched. One dolphin swam up to Berman and hung in front of him, looking him directly in the eye. Berman touched his hand to the plexiglass. “You want to go home, don’t you, buddy?” he said softly.

  The walkway ended in a murky aquarium, lit by buzzing fluorescent tubes. One shoebox of a tank contained three spotted porcupine fish, a species I especially love, and as I watched them fluttering hopelessly my mood sunk further. No effort had been made to include coral or any kind of ocean features; an electrical cord encased in plastic was the tank’s only décor. The overall effect was of a fifties-era mental hospital for fish.

  Depressed, we headed for the exit, and passed a trainer feeding the false killer whale and the pilot whale. The animals spy-hopped in front of her, their heads out of the water and their mouths open. The trainer had short hair and a cheery round face. She had barely cleared her teens. “Hello,” she said.

  “Oh, do you speak English?” Berman said, stopping abruptly. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  The girl examined Maxwell warily and replied in Japanese.

  “She won’t let you take video,” Maxwell reported, “but you can ask her some questions.”

  “You know they hunt dolphins here?” Berman asked, wasting no time.

  The girl paused. Her face suddenly looked less cherubic. “Yeah,” she said.

  Berman looked at her. “So do you feel sympathy? For those dolphins?”

  The girl stared back at him. She puffed out her cheeks and crinkled her nose. “Mmmmmmmmmmm,” she said, moving the air from one cheek to the other. “Mmmmmmmmmmm.” She seemed to do this for about ten minutes, deliberating. “Sympathy?” she sa
id finally, then spat it out sharply: “NO.”

  Maxwell and I glanced at one another. A security guard, noticing the conversation, was walking briskly toward us.

  “I’m just asking your personal opinion,” Berman pressed. “Not the opinion of this place.”

  The girl inflated her cheeks again. “I’m not feeling sympathy because sometimes people hunting deer and they are hunting…cow or something. And I can’t recognize what’s the difference.” She pointed to the false killer whale and the pilot whale, who were staring so intently at us from such a close distance that they seemed to be part of the conversation. “I know it’s really intelligent,” she said, with a shrug. “But I feel that cows are also really intelligent and we are willing to eat them. And the number of dolphin species are increasing, so…”

  The security guard was upon us. He was a beefy dude and he didn’t seem pleased. “Whale-as! Whale-as!” he barked, making a shooing gesture. Rather than argue with him, we left.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone defend the dolphin hunt by accusing others of similar mistreatment of animals. But if the point of the hunt is subsistence, then simultaneously selling the animals for six-figure prices is impossible to justify. If dolphins are extremely valuable, then how can they also be completely dispensable? Not to mention that when we kill any creature for food we have ethical obligations: to do a clean, swift job of it, to avoid taking endangered species, to show respect and gratitude always, to tread as lightly as possible on the balance of life in an environment. None of these things were happening in Taiji.

  O’Barry and I met in the hotel lobby that afternoon. The Urashima’s ground floor reminded me of an airport terminal, if every traveler who passed through it were wearing a yukata—a kimono-like cotton bathrobe—and rubber flip-flops. There were at least ten onsens—hot spring baths—sprinkled throughout the property, so many buildings and wings and tunnels and corridors that if you weren’t armed with a map you could be lost for days. As a helpful guide, the hotel had painted colored lines on the floor: take green for the cave baths, orange for the lava-rock baths, yellow for the shrines, red for the buffet halls.

  I hadn’t eaten in a while—the combination of stress, heat, and murderous conflict is not very appetizing—so we decided to have lunch at a restaurant O’Barry liked in Kii-Katsuura. As we crossed the street, a car caught my eye. It was a black Infinity sedan, parked between two nondescript buildings. Yesterday I’d seen it cruising the cove. The men in the car were yakuza, Palmer had pointed out, part of Japan’s organized crime. They tended to insert themselves into lucrative industries, and dolphin trafficking apparently qualified. I had noticed the Infinity as we’d exited the bus—it stood out among the subcompacts and battered loudspeaker vans—and I’d gotten a close look at the men inside it. They were dressed differently than the nationalists: instead of rising sun T-shirts and polyester track pants, they wore hipster sunglasses and understated dark clothes. They all had shaved heads. Even the police had avoided them.

  “Hey,” I said, nudging O’Barry. “I think those guys were at the cove yesterday.” The two men sat in the front seats eyeing us coldly. When you describe someone as “a person you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley,” these were the type of people you meant—and here they were right now, in a dark alley.

  O’Barry turned to look. “I know him,” he said, pointing to the man in the passenger seat. “Last year that guy threatened to kill me on camera. I’ll send you the footage. He is screaming into the camera, ‘I’m gonna kill you, O’Barry! I kill you!’ Oh yeah, he’s a yakuza.”

  “He seems pretty scary,” I said.

  “He’s a nut-job!” O’Barry studied the car. “That’s why I’m a little afraid of him, because people who aren’t rational—you know, they have a little too much sake and anything could happen.”

  I was disturbed by the fact of unhinged criminals having tailed us to our hotel, but O’Barry seemed to take it in stride. For him, being menaced was part of the job. “If you can get a dolphin in the right place, you can make a million dollars a year off that one dolphin,” he had calculated, a fact that exposed him to all kinds of dangers when he showed up and proposed to set that dolphin free.

  Not long ago in Jakarta, O’Barry had been advised by police to wear a bulletproof vest after successfully lobbying to shut down a traveling dolphin show—a vile production in an underground parking garage that featured dolphins jumping through hoops of fire. Later during that same trip a gang of thugs interrupted a talk he was giving, hosted by the U.S. embassy. Also, he had awoken in the night to the sounds of someone trying to break open his hotel room door. While it was never easy to pry dolphins away from people who profited from them, some situations were more perilous than others. O’Barry had recently been told about the desperate plight of two dolphins in the mountains of Turkey, and he planned to go there soon to see what he could do. “But it’s going to be very difficult,” he told me, “because the owner is part of the Russian mafia, and he has the dolphins in his swimming pool.”

  O’Barry is involved in so many dolphin affairs, so many protests and rescues and initiatives, that it is hard to keep track of them. He has come to dolphins’ aid in the Bahamas, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Haiti, Indonesia, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Britain, Egypt, Israel, China, Canada, and the Faroe Islands, among other locales. “I never planned on being an activist,” O’Barry said. “But one thing leads to another. Now, if there’s a dolphin in trouble anywhere on this planet my phone will ring.”

  One of the hairiest stops on O’Barry’s circuit is the Solomon Islands, an archipelago just east of New Guinea, one of the poorest countries on earth and also one of the roughest. In rural communities, which comprise most of the place, dolphin teeth are used as currency. Because of this, dolphin hunting is practiced in even the smallest villages; dolphin trafficking has also sprung up, with turbulent consequences. “There are problems all over that place,” O’Barry told me, his voice freighted. “Life is very cheap there.” Earth Island’s Solomon Islands director, a man named Lawrence Makili, had been beaten within an inch of his life. Makili, who happens to be north of six feet and 200 pounds, fought back and managed to escape, though with terrible injuries. Two other colleagues of O’Barry’s had not been so lucky. They were both murdered while trying to stop dolphin trafficking. Jane Tipson, an outspoken activist in St. Lucia, was shot in the face at point-blank range; in Israel, another, Jenny May, was strangled with her own belt. No one was arrested for either crime.

  We boarded the dolphin ferry and set off across the bay. Kii-Katsuura was a mellower town than Taiji, bigger and more sophisticated, and in the businesses and streets there was less free-floating animosity. Still, I noticed a lack of enthusiasm about our presence, store clerks suddenly becoming very preoccupied when we approached, turning their backs or vanishing entirely.

  For O’Barry the distaste wasn’t mutual. He detested the doings at the cove, but after spending so much time here he’d come to appreciate everything else. “This town reminds me of Miami in the fifties,” he said. As we walked, he pointed out a bakery he visited each morning, and a toy shop that didn’t bother to lock up at night: “There isn’t even a door!” He nodded admiringly. “There’s a lot that’s right about this place and these people.”

  O’Barry stopped in front of a restaurant that displayed models of its menu items in the windows, molded out of plastic. “I usually pick what I want here,” he said, gesturing at the shellacked dishes. We went in and sat at a banquette. When the waitress approached, O’Barry greeted her warmly in Japanese. In the background, unlikely accordion music was playing. After she took our orders I filled O’Barry in on our trip to the Whale Museum, an institution he battled constantly. On one tense occasion its manager, a trim businessman named Hiromitsu Nambu, had waved a samurai sword at him. The two men were long-time nemeses. Upset that the museum’s dolphins suffered from blistering sunburn, O’Barry had asked
if he could pay for an awning to shade the outdoor tanks. Nambu had agreed to let him. “That was six years ago and he still hasn’t done it,” O’Barry said in a sardonic tone, leaning on words for emphasis. “And he’s not going to do it because he doesn’t care about dolphins. And he’s a Buddhist!” He rolled his eyes. “Theoretically.”

  “Have you ever seen a Risso’s dolphin?” I asked, still fixated. “They’re incredible-looking creatures.”

  O’Barry nodded wearily. “Yeah,” he said. “They kill a lot of them here.”

  Sometimes when O’Barry talks about the cove, he just seems tired. Tired of fighting, tired of watching dolphins die, tired of the media’s short attention span, tired of schlepping here. But at other times something unusual happens: his whole persona both hardens and melts, in the manner of an expert martial artist. His eyes become intense but his body remains relaxed, and all of his energy streams into the moment. He isn’t fearless—that would be silly—but he is ready, in a quietly defiant way, to face his opposition. It is a resilience, I figured, that he’d developed over time, the way you’d build a muscle. In Taiji, the town was malefic and the people could be horrid, but the cove’s most demanding challenges were personal ones: How do you survive your own sadness?

  “What’s it like when a bunch of dolphins are in there?” I asked. O’Barry looked down and rubbed his hands together. I noticed the dolphin tattoo near his left thumb, its edges faded by saltwater and time. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, from somewhere deep in his chest. “Because you know what’s going to happen. I’ve seen as many as three hundred dolphins in there—pilot whales, false killer whales, bottlenose—all in one day! Yeah, when you’re actually seeing it up close and personal it’s much more…it’s not like watching it in a movie. You can hear them, and at a certain angle you can sometimes see them throwing themselves onto the rocks, trying to escape.” He paused again, struggling for words. “You know, it’s…anguishing. ‘Anguish’ is the one where you can’t do anything.”