One recent piece of international maneuvering that has been overshadowed by issues of far more immediate and widespread import -- potential nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, continued violence in the Holy Land, and the Bush administration's apparently successful campaign to redefine public inquiry into its gross pre-September 11 oversight -- was the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, held from May 19 to 24 in Shimonseki, Japan.

After World War II, the consumption of whale helped Japan avert famine, and nearly half of the meat eaten there came from whales. As late as the early 1960's, whale accounted for nearly one-third of Japan's meat consumption.

Since then, whale meat has occupied a progressively less prominent role in the national diet. According to an April poll by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, more than half of Japanese people aged 20 to 24 do not eat whale at all, and only four percent of all those polled eat whale even "sometimes." Today, whale accounts for a mere fraction of one percent of national meat consumption, and reached unprecedentedly low levels last year, when thirty percent of Japan's 725-ton harvest went unsold.

The shrinking of Japan's whaling industry, which despite its small size possesses considerable political clout and is a symbol of intense national pride, is mostly the result of strict international regulations on commercial whaling. Japan's current whaling industry is a nominally scientific project, overseen by the Institute for Cetacean Research, in which the meat of whales killed for study is sold on the open market. Unsurprisingly, their "research" reveals that restrictions on whaling are not needed. Since 1986, Japan has unsuccessfully sought to end the worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, and have increasingly framed the issue in nationalist terms.

"Some antiwhaling countries say eating whale is barbaric, but I consider such a stance 'cultural imperialism,'" said Shunichi Suzuki, a Liberal Democratic Party member and leader of pro-whaling Parliament group. Outside the IWC meetings in Shimonseki, thousands of right-wing nationalists wearing paramilitary uniforms and waving flags arrived in buses with PA systems broadcasting World War II fight songs, demanding that Japan be allowed to hunt whales without foreign intervention.

Inside the meetings, after their requests to lift the moratorium were again denied, Japan's delegates embarked on a course of shocking meanness. With the aid of pro-whaling Caribbean nations whose support Japan is purported to have purchased, Japan successfully engineered a last-minute vote to forbid the aboriginal subsistence whaling of Alaska's Inuit and Siberia's Chukchi peoples.

The move was stunning, given the natives' near-total dependence on the miniscule number of whales taken in their hunts. According to Inupiat mayor George Ahmaogak, "More than 10,000 people depend on those whales. It's 80 percent of our diet. We need the blubber to keep our blood thick in the winter. Without it, we're in trouble."

"It was the most unjust, unkind and unfair vote ever taken in the 56 years of I.W.C. history," said Rolland A. Schmitten, the U.S. commissioner.

Japan's response was as cold as an arctic wind. "America should feel the same pain that Japan has felt for fifteen years," said Masayuki Komatsu, spokesman for the Japanese delegation. "They talk about Inuit needs. What about the needs of our whaling communities?"

Fortunately, recourse exists for the Inuit and Chukchi. They will likely continue their harvests with or without international blessings, and pro-whaling nations could seek another vote through a special meeting or mail ballot prior to next year's conference. Japan's bizarre and vicious stance will have been reduced to posture; the Inuit and Chukchi will not starve, nor be reduced to dependence on government charity. All will end reasonably well, and be only a footnote to the more pressing issues of the day. But it is still worthwhile to pay attention to this particular example of international politics.

While the debacle in Shimonseki does not cast much light into the arcane mechanisms of global governance, of which both supporters and opponents often possess little practical understanding, it illustrates the spirit that often prevails beneath globalism's gilded rhetoric. We see disadvantaged peoples used as pawns by the world's great economies, compromised for the sake of political expediency, clawing each other down like drowning rats. And at the I.W.C. meeting it was all the more poignant because the victims were a handful of the remnants of those societies doomed by imperialism both Eastern and Western, physical and cultural.

In Shimonseki, America took the side of common decency. They placed human well-being before short-term profits. It is surely optimistic to believe this will serve as an example to other corporate and government leaders -- but we can hope.

Brandon Keim is a reelance writer & graphic designer, born in Maine, currently residing in Boston. brandonkeim@mindspring.com
www.djinnetic.org/blog

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