Japan’s withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission was a natural decision to break with racists who disguised themselves as anti-whaling activists.
Through Takayama Masayuki’s sharp prose, this essay vividly portrays the white-centered prejudice behind the whaling issue, The Asahi Shimbun’s servility, and the depth of Japanese civilization from which the world has long learned rationality, aesthetic sensibility, and wisdom.

2019-07-01
This withdrawal is a declaration that Japan will no longer associate with racists who borrow the name of anti-whaling.
That is a good thing, but even here Asahi editorial chief Nemoto Kiyoki flatters white people and condemns the withdrawal.

This is a chapter posted on 2019-01-11 under the title, Minke whales and the like, the cockroaches of the sea, are increasing, and precious marine resources are in a critical state.
Yet there are no proper marine resource specialists in the current whaling commission.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s famous column “Henken Jizai” published in the recent issue of Shukan Shincho.
The Japanese people and the world will clearly come to know that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and also the true nature of The Asahi Shimbun.
Fill the earth with knowledge.
In the United States, the well-known female journalist Paula Span recently carried a column in The New York Times titled “Babies Are Listening Properly.”
Its content was along the lines of this.
“Sometimes one suddenly hums a tune one should never have heard before.
That is actually because one firmly remembered songs sung by one’s mother or grandmother when one was a baby, at a time when one had thought one had no consciousness at all.”
A veteran journalist, she teaches young students aspiring to become reporters at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism what the way of the journalist is.
So to put it simply, she is America’s best-informed auntie.
She says this.
Research over the past several decades has shown that babies actually watch their parents’ behavior intently, feel their mother’s heartbeat, and are wounded by stress.
A five-month-old baby can distinguish both the rhythm and melody of songs the mother hums and imprints them in the brain.
That is why, when one becomes an adult and holds one’s five-month-old grandchild, one suddenly recalls it and hums it naturally.
However, apparently she did not know of the debate a few decades before that, between Chief Nurse Mathison of the GHQ Public Health and Welfare Bureau and Nurse Tanaka Tatsu.
Tatsu criticized the American style of separating mother and child immediately after childbirth.
“When a mother hears her baby’s voice, her milk comes out more easily, and the child too is reassured by the mother’s heartbeat.”
Mathison crushed Tatsu’s claim by saying, “Babies are in a vegetative state for about the first year and a half after birth, and co-sleeping is dangerous and meaningless” (Akiyoshi Yamamura, GHQ no Nihon Senno), and imposed separate rooms for mothers and babies on Japanese society.
Only after more than half a century did Americans finally learn Japanese wisdom.
There are mountains of things they learned from Japan.
In the early Meiji period, the British missionary Henry Faulds came to Japan and was astonished to learn that Japanese used thumbprints for personal identification.
When he reported that, he became the discoverer of “the world’s first fingerprints.”
Europeans who saw ukiyo-e were astonished by their free and unrestrained compositions, utterly different from realism, and many painters came to Japan to learn.
Van Gogh, who had no money for travel, became a great painter by repeatedly copying ukiyo-e.
Perry was astonished that Japanese enjoyed bathing every day, even though bathing was taboo in Christianity.
Moreover, public baths were shamelessly mixed.
In Narrative of the Expedition to Japan, he exhausted every word of condemnation, saying that “the Japanese are licentious.”
Recently, when I was soaking in a mixed open-air bath in Niseko, a completely naked Australian girl jumped in.
She was beautiful.
It seems they have finally come to understand Japanese bathing culture.
These days, there is a noisy tattoo controversy at such hot springs.
Foreigners tattoo every part of their bodies without discrimination, and it is vulgar and filthy.
“To receive one’s body, hair, and skin from one’s parents and not dare to injure them is the beginning of filial piety” is the only sensible thing the Chinese ever said.
Japanese think so too.
But there are foolish Japanese as well.
The Asahi Shimbun uses its editorials and articles to say that white people, even emperors and kings, have them, and that they also have artistic significance.
So is it right to shut them out from public baths and hot springs just like gangsters.
Can they not be accepted as culture, it says.
Japanese are not shutting them out as an anti-gang measure.
They are saying that barbaric practices that cannot be called culture, such as slavery or smoking, should be abandoned.
The sense Japanese taught them was not only an aesthetic eye.
Japan also taught them that taste includes the concept of “delicious.”
I believe the backward world should honestly learn the rationality that Japanese cherish as well.
The Japanese government recently decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission.
Minke whales and the like, the cockroaches of the sea, are increasing, and precious marine resources are in a critical state.
Yet there are no proper marine resource specialists in the current whaling commission.
Activists driven by jealousy toward the “non-Christian, non-white Japanese” are buying representative posts from countries and volunteering for them.
This withdrawal is a declaration that Japan will no longer associate with racists who borrow the name of anti-whaling.
That is a good thing, but even here Asahi editorial chief Nemoto Kiyoki flatters white people and condemns the withdrawal.
Saying, “It is fine even if we do not eat whales.”
That is not the point.
Can you not feel the kindness of making them aware of the ugliness of their jealousy, and at the same time teaching them the deliciousness of whale tail meat?