Tsuji offers no advice on evaluating whale meat. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a great loss as far as I was concerned. As an especially self-righteous teenager growing up in the UK in the seventies and eighties, there were two indisputable certainties in my world. The first was that Margaret Thatcher was evil incarnate; the second was that killing whales was as bad as, if not worse than, killing human beings.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which, you’ll recall, Kirk and his crew kidnap a pair of humpback whales to communicate with aliens, merely bolstered my argument with hard facts. I can remember marching on Downing Street at some point in the early eighties to protest some unspecified Nordic people who were either harpooning whales or clubbing seals, and working myself up into a right old lather. So I hesitated for a brief moment when Emi, a Japanese friend who had been helping me set up some meetings and interpreting, popped by our apartment to plan the next week’s activities (it was now late September, and we were about to leave for Hokkaido) and asked if we would all be interested in grabbing a bite of whale for lunch. Admittedly, it was only a brief pause. Like all foodies, I am prone to silly boasting about eating rare or exotic foods. (“Kangaroo? Pah! Of course I’ve tried it. But have you tried crocodile? Oh, but you must; it is rather like chicken, you know.”) I am always looking for the next food thrill, and the more it makes girls squeal, the better. Nevertheless, I still had qualms about eating a creature that makes soft, mournful noises and could outthink me in a plankton-herding contest.
In the end, I said yes, but Lissen wrinkled her nose. Asger and Emil looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and, I have to admit, their horror did make me hesitate once more. But who was I to judge the Japanese? In my time I’d eaten a fair few battery chickens, drugged-up cows, and plenty of cute bunnies, tiny, fragile quails, and frogs whose legs had most likely been rendered from their bodies without anesthetic. I know whales are supposed to be really smart, but pigs are no fools either.
Of course there are rather more chickens, cows, frogs, and quails in the world than there are whales. Japan, Iceland, Greenland, and Norway stand alone as whale-eating nations these days, circumventing or simply ignoring the recommendations of the International Whaling Commission. Of the three, Japan is by far the most rapacious in its consumption of all kinds of fish, eating around a tenth of the world’s catch overall. On average, a Japanese person will consume almost 154 pounds of seafood per year, compared to a global average of 35 pounds. Much of the whale meat harvested by Norwegians and Icelanders goes straight to Japanese tables.
Wherever fish are being caught in the world, there will be Japanese middlemen waiting with their wallets open and a large box of ice. In remote parts of the southern Philippines, I have seen huge Japanese fishing harbors supporting entire local economies with their demand for tuna and bonito, while over half of the tuna ranched in the southern Mediterranean ends up at the end of Japanese chopsticks. Wild Mediterranean and Atlantic tuna stocks are at perilously low levels, perhaps as low as 10 percent of the levels they were at in the sixties, a state of affairs for which the Japanese must take a good portion of the blame.
But if you ask ordinary Japanese about either the threat of tuna extinction or whales, they will regard you quizzically. This is genuinely news to them and certainly not a pressing issue in the domestic media. What is an issue, from time to time, is foreign interference in what they see as the essential traditions of Japanese cuisine. The Japanese usually claim that they only really started eating meat as a nation in 1872, after the emperor casually announced he had eaten beef for dinner—signaling a Liberty Hall for Japanese carnivores. Until that point, it was technically illegal, and although the law was widely ignored, it is true that the Japanese historically ate far more fish than meat—they still obtain more than a third of the protein in their diet from fish. It is one of the reasons, of course, for their general good health.
Today, the Japanese still kill around seven hundred to eight hundred whales a year “for scientific research,” a figure surpassed only by the Icelanders, who kill around a thousand, many of them, as I’ve said, ending up in Japan anyway. The Japanese have long been calling for more quotas following reported gains in the populations of some species, such as southern right whales and humpbacks, which have now been removed from the endangered list. Every year at the annual assembly of the International Whaling Commission, Japan presses to be allowed to commence unrestricted hunting again. “We’ve been eating whale since 300 B.C.,” they complain. “This is culinary imperialism.”
Despite the national conversion to Buddhism in the eighth century, consumption of whale was always permitted because whales were categorized as fish, not mammals (this pragmatic approach to food classification saw wild boars renamed “mountain whales”). By the 1820s, whale cuisine had become so refined that there were recipes for up to seventy different cuts—the Japanese even cooked with whale feces. Mmm, no? With the food shortages following World War II, whale became a vital source of nourishment for the Japanese, providing an important protein and omega-3 oil source. Indeed, today most adult Japanese remember whale meat with nostalgia from the time when it was a regular item on school lunch menus. The Japanese continue to eat whale, albeit in smaller quantities, rather like we might eat venison. They claim—and to be fair, I don’t think this is a disputed point—that its meat is extremely healthy, with proven antiaging properties.
So I accepted Emi’s invitation and met her outside Shinjuku Station. From there, she led me deep into the shimmering maze of girlie bars and karaoke joints of Kabukicho to a doorway at the side of a shop. Up some flights of stairs we climbed until we came to the entrance to Taruichi, the whale restaurant.
The room was packed. Countless paper menus hanging from the ceiling, each decorated with large kanji characters, some with delicate pen-and-ink drawings of fish, lent it a festive air. Aside from the beautiful illustrations of frolicking whales on the screens and doors, it could have been any normal Japanese restaurant, assuming one could ignore the giant dried whale penis hanging from the ceiling like some obscure alpine wind instrument. Which I couldn’t.
We set about the menu with Emi translating. There was whale bacon, tongue, ovary, brain, skin, testicles, penis, internal organs, and various cuts of meat, but sadly no droppings. You could have whale raw as sashimi, on sushi, deep-fried, or as a steak. We ordered a little of everything, and soon the plates began to arrive from the dark, hole-in-the-wall kitchen behind us. First was a bowl of glistening, chewy, beige blubber, not unlike tripe. Not nice, although Emi, who had grown up on whale meat at school, tucked in happily. A tinfoil-covered plate came next. Underneath the foil was a large, stiff, brown leaf, as big as half the table, covered with thin cuts of whale bacon and sashimi, all slightly different, with a smudge of mustard and yellow chrysanthemums for decoration. Some were edged with pink, others looked like air-dried ham, some were gray and quite unappetizing (this was skin, Emi said). The sashimi looked similar to Japanese beef, with rampant marbling and purple-red flesh. Some was challenging to chew, most of it had a fatty mouthfeel with a not-unpleasant, faint beefy flavor. I wouldn’t rush to sample any of it again, particularly the deep-fried cubes of whale meat, which I struggled to break down into digestible chunks, but neither did I gag, and some of it, like the sashimi, was very good indeed. The whale ice cream was green with small chunks of whale where you might ordinarily hope to find chocolate chips. I wouldn’t care to revisit that.
On our way out we met the chef, Hiroyoshi Gota. I asked what breed of whale we had been eating. He pointed to a wall chart depicting all the different types of whale, singling out the minke, caught mostly in the Antarctic. Which was the best eating? This one: he pointed with a sigh at the picture of the blue whale, not, I suspect, out of pity for its plight, but because he had no ready supplier. As we made to leave, he gave me a whale’s tooth, like a giant, brown, frilly fingernail, to take with me as a souvenir.
Whale might be the largest sea creature eaten by the Japanese, but fortunately it was by no means the tastiest. This we would encounter at our next destination, the northern island of Hokkaido, famed for its abundant fish and shellfish.