Japan’s withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission was not merely a fisheries policy decision.
It marked a declaration of independence from anti-whaling movements driven by racial bias and Western ideological dominance.
By examining how Japanese culture, aesthetics, and rationality have influenced the world, this essay argues for Japan’s need to defend its own values and sovereignty.

January 11, 2019
This withdrawal is a declaration that we will no longer associate with racists who hide behind anti-whaling rhetoric.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s famous column “Henken Jizai” published in the recent issue of Shukan Shincho.

Both the Japanese people and the world will clearly recognize that he is a truly unique 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 published a column in The New York Times titled “Babies Are Listening.”
It described how people sometimes find themselves humming tunes they believe they have never heard before, only to realize they had firmly remembered songs sung by their mothers or grandmothers during infancy, even when they seemed to have no conscious awareness.
A veteran journalist, she teaches aspiring reporters at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism what it means to pursue journalism.
In other words, she is America’s most knowledgeable grandmother figure.
She says:
In recent decades, research has revealed that babies carefully watch their parents’ behavior, feel their mothers’ heartbeats, and are affected by stress.
Five-month-old infants can distinguish and imprint the rhythm and melody of songs sung by their mothers into their brains.
Thus, when they later hold their own five-month-old grandchild as adults, they suddenly recall and naturally hum those same tunes.
However, she apparently did not know about the debate decades earlier between GHQ Public Health and Welfare Bureau head nurse Mathison and nurse Tats Tanaka.
Tanaka criticized the American practice of separating mother and child immediately after birth.
“When a mother hears her baby’s voice, her milk flows more easily, and the child finds comfort in the mother’s heartbeat.”
Mathison dismissed her argument, saying, “Babies remain in a vegetative state for about a year and a half after birth; co-sleeping is merely dangerous and meaningless” (Akiyoshi Yamamura, GHQ’s Brainwashing of Japan), and imposed the separation-room system on Japanese society.
More than half a century later, Americans finally learned the wisdom of the Japanese.
There are countless things they have learned from Japan.
In the early Meiji era, British missionary Henry Faulds was astonished to learn that Japanese people used thumbprints for personal identification. Reporting this allowed him to become the discoverer of the world’s first fingerprint method.
Europeans who saw ukiyo-e were amazed by its free composition entirely different from realism, and many painters came to Japan to learn.
Van Gogh, who lacked travel funds, repeatedly copied ukiyo-e and became a great painter.
Perry was astonished that Japanese people enjoyed daily bathing, something taboo in Christianity.
Moreover, public bathhouses were shockingly mixed-gender.
He condemned the Japanese as “immoral” in Narrative of the Expedition to Japan.
Recently, while soaking in a mixed outdoor hot spring in Niseko, a completely naked Australian girl jumped in.
She was beautiful.
It seems she finally understood Japanese bathing culture.
Lately, there has been heated debate about tattoos at hot springs.
Foreigners cover their bodies in tattoos, which are vulgar and unsightly.
“From our parents we receive our bodies and hair; not to damage them is the beginning of filial piety” is perhaps the only sensible phrase ever uttered by the Chinese.
Japanese people feel the same way.
Yet foolish Japanese also exist.
The Asahi Shimbun uses editorials and articles to argue that even the Emperor and white elites have tattoos with artistic significance.
Therefore, is it right to exclude them from bathhouses and hot springs like organized crime members?
Should they not be accepted as culture?
Japanese people are not excluding them as an anti-gang measure.
We are simply saying that barbaric customs like slavery or smoking cannot be called culture and should be abandoned.
The sensibilities Japan taught the world are not limited to aesthetics.
We also taught them the concept of “umai” — deliciousness.
The world, still behind, should honestly learn the rationality that Japanese people value.
Recently, the Japanese government decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission.
Minke whales and others — the cockroaches of the sea — have increased, putting precious marine resources in critical condition.
Yet there are no serious marine resource experts in the current IWC.
Activists driven by jealousy toward “non-Christian, non-white Japanese” buy representative positions from their governments.
This withdrawal is a declaration that we will no longer associate with racists who disguise themselves as anti-whaling activists.
It is a good decision, but even here Asahi editorial chief Kiyoki Nemoto criticizes the withdrawal in deference to white elites.
“We don’t need to eat whales,” he says.
That is not the point.
Should we not kindly help them recognize the ugliness of their jealousy — and at the same time teach them the deliciousness of whale tail meat?