Media Attention
Western media attention regarding Japan's whaling industry has increased. Animal Planet's television series, Whale Wars, places a camera crew on board the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activist ships to document the annual interference with Japan's Antarctic whaling program. Japan has denounced the program as deceptive and supportive of eco-terrorists to increase ratings. Animal Planet has made requests to also film from the perspective of Japan's whaling fleet but the requests were denied.
The animated series South Park lampooned both Japan's whaling traditions and the anti-whaling activists featured on Whale Wars in the episode "Whale Whores".
A 2009 Oscar winning documentary, The Cove, focused entirely on Japan's dolphin drive fisheries, mercury content of dolphin meat and the whaling town, Taiji. The film also concentrated on the difficulty in observing Taiji fishermen at work due to obstruction from the local community, police and inaccessible locations.
Peter James Bethune received a 2 year suspended sentence after boarding the ship which collided with his, the Ady Gil.
The New York Times reported the whaling town of Ayukawa, in Ishinomaki, Miyagi was badly damaged by the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami. After the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in 2011, radioactive cesium was found in two minke whales caught off the coast of Hokkaido.
Read more about this topic: Whaling In Japan
Famous quotes containing the words media and/or attention:
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren’t a little flower somebody sewed on.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)