The 2002 IWC (International Whale Commission) conference has just wound up in Shimonozeki, a small x-whaling community located on Japan's southern island of Kyushu.
It's an x-whaling community because Japan has been forbidden to hunt whales commercially since 1987 even in its own domestic waters.
As a way to counteract this ban, Japan has not so quietly adopted a scientific whaling program, a program that the greater international scientific community has denounced as a sham.
And at this years conference, Japan raised the bar one step further by denying American and Russian aboriginal peoples the right to hunt whale in their own waters citing the hardships of its own domestic industry.
Whether the commercial whaling ban is backed by solid scientific fact is a perennial debate.
This years conference once again proved that those for and against whaling just don't want to listen to each other regardless of how convincing their respective positions.
Iceland stomping out of meeting like a badly behaved child on the second day provided a wonderful window on the rather stubborn mentality of both sides.
But noticeably absent from this debate is a much bigger question:
Why is the Japan's government involved in a money losing business funded by taxpayers which ultimately should be in the domain of private enterprise?
Here then is a brief synopsis of why Japan's unelected, under-educated and highly corrupt bureaucrats in the Ministry of Fisheries and Foreign Affairs combined to produce a really great horror show at Shimonozeki!
While there are numerous ways to see both sides of the 'to whale or not to whale' debate, one thing that is not debatable is the fact that Japan's whaling program is deeply in the red and costing Japanese taxpayers millions every year.
With current talk of cost cutting nearing a deafening pitch throughout Japan's political world, two questions arise which directly pertain the continuation of Japanese whaling:
1) Why is whaling allowed to continue when it is losing so much money?
2) Where does the money come from in the first place?
But before we get into the gory details, a little background on 'The Grooming of a Japanese Bureaucrat':
Japanese bureaucrats are basically cloned at mediocre four year programs in the department of law at Tokyo or Kyoto University where they complete a single graduation term paper in their 4th year and that's it!
They enter the bureaucracy basically as unskilled and under-educated: just the way their superiors want them!
They then go through a highly cloistered, introverted process of grooming to be arrogant, class conscious, obedient followers!
The reward for all this is that by the time they are forty, they are taking in over $6,000 dollars a month combined with bonuses in the summer and winter of $18,000 and $24,000 respectively.
In order to justify their rather expensive existence, bureaucrats must constantly create new make-work programs, hopelessly in the red and often a complete waste of taxpayer money.
To back-up these rather elaborate monolithic bureaucratic structures, these same bureaucrats create government institutes attached to their ministry.
Upon retiring from their ministries at the very ripe age of 55, these same bureaucrats parachute down (in Japanese "amakudari" or "descend from above") into their self-created institutes to even cushier jobs with higher salaries, again paid by the Japanese taxpayer.
This basic model when examined more closely explains why:
a) Japan is almost bankrupt
b) Japanese bureaucrats refuse to give up on a good thing regardless of whether it is financially responsible
c) Japanese taxpayers are finally beginning to question the whole system, albeit rather late in the game!
The Japanese whaling program is yet another bureaucratic make-work program, hopelessly in the red (approx $160,000,000 last year) and it's sister body, the Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) sucking up huge amounts of tax dollars, manned by a fleet of 'amakudari' warriors protecting their sacred turf.
These veterans of deceit, have woven an elaborate web to justify their existence falsifying research to justify the so-called scientific hunting of whales and then reselling this same whale meat at a loss on the open Japanese market through highly shady organizations. All of the above monitored by yet another 'amakudari' institute called JARPA with it's leadership made up of retirees from the Fisheries Agency.
If you haven't got the idea yet: it's all a bit incestuous! The obvious questions to ask are:
a) Why is a money losing Japanese government bureaucracy allowed to plunder taxpayer money on something that is clearly a very expensive hobby which only the very few can enjoy (perhaps only the relatives of the 'amakudari')! The cost of whale meat in Japan is absolutely prohibitive for most.
b) Given the above: where does the grant money come from to allow elementary schools in Japan to serve whale meat in box lunches? The answer: from yet another bureaucracy, and the one that helped create a system to train their own kind: the Ministry of Education who again plunder taxpayer money to feed children with potentially highly toxic whale meat ( a recent Japanese study from Shimonozeki University has indicated that whale meat may be the most toxic of all animals we could possibly eat!)
c) And just down the road in Kamigaseki in Tokyo, we find yet another not so honorable member at our bureaucratic party: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently in the news for falsifying bills for buying race horses, purchasing great bottles of vintage wine at $200 a pop and throwing outrageous parties all on taxpayer money! And now these same noble bureaucrats are giving away ODA funds to third world countries such as land locked Mongolia to vote with Japan as a block to once again start commercial whaling.
What common denominator do we find here?
1) All three ministries are using taxpayer money to fund a commercial industry that can not survive on its own!
2) They are using taxpayer money to maintain their own jobs regardless of whether it is to the benefit of the greater Japanese population whom they are supposed to be serving as public servants. Proof of this comes in a recent survey by the Asahi Shimbun which found that 38% of respondents were against the hunting of whales.
3) And they are doing this in concert with right wing groups (read 'fascist') with ties to organized crime (read 'yakuza')! The Shimonozeki conference had these groups clearly moving in front of police and government monitored areas to antagonize anti-whaling demonstrators.
Shimonozeki was indeed a true horror show produced by the Ministry of Fisheries, backed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and covertly supported by the Ministry of Education.
All at the expense of one person: the Japanese taxpayer!
