Whaling Annotations

Kagawa-Fox, Midori. "Japan's Whaling Triangle - The Power Behind The Whaling Policy." Japanese Studies 29.3 (2009): 401-414. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Nov. 2011.

This author is from the University Of Australia and is writing on the debate surrounding Japan’s Whaling actions. Australia is primarily an anti-whaling country and so it is likely that this author has some bias. The whaling triangle that the author writes about refers to a close relationship between Japan’s government bureaucrats, politicians, and big businesses based around common interests. The text describes how each of these components of the triangle relates to whaling and how they are influential in gaining support from other pro-whaling countries. In order to write an exploratory paper on the issue I need to first understand how the issue became what it is today. The author goes into a lot of detail about the history of Japan in relation to whaling and that is very useful to me.

Hamazaki, Toshihide, and Dai Tanno. "Approval Of Whaling And Whaling-Related Beliefs: Public Opinion In Whaling And Nonwhaling Countries." Human Dimensions Of Wildlife 6.2 (2001): 131-144. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Nov. 2011.

The first author is a fish and wildlife researcher from New Mexico and the second author is in the department of economics and is from Japan. These authors together provide a look at whaling from a scientific and economic standpoint as well as provide views from different regions of the world. The research they performed was on the public opinion of whaling in both whaling and non-whaling countries. What they found was that approval of whaling was positively correlated with approval of consumption of whale meat. This means that countries that approve of whaling also approve of the consumption of whale meat. What is most interesting, however, is that they found in both whaling and non-whaling countries approval of whaling was not correlated with knowledge about population of whales. This shows that the public from both whaling and non-whaling countries are unaware of the danger of the extinction of whales. This information is useful to me because it shows that the citizens of Japan and Norway who support whaling are supporting something they know very little about. There may be a chance that if the public is informed about the dangers of whaling that they would no longer support it.