Iki Island - Extermination of Dolphins

Extermination of Dolphins

During the 1970s, fishermen experienced a decline in their catch and they suspected dolphins were the cause. The fishermen began shooting and harpooning dolphins, but though they killed a few, the effort was ineffectual. In 1977, they adopted the oi komi dolphin drive, a technique used by fishermen in other parts of Japan who hunt dolphins for food. When dolphins were sighted, the fishermen formed their boats, each of them made of white fiberglass and roughly thirty feet in length, into a huge horseshoe on one side of the dolphin pod. They swung metal pipes into the water and struck them with hammers and steel rods. The clanging from a hundred boats or more around the dolphin pod in a U-shape causes the dolphins, to flee ahead of the sound. Maintaining communication through CB radios, the fishermen maneuvered the horseshoe so as to drive the dolphins into a bay where they could be confined and killed, by stabbing them with long spears.

In 1979 they rounded up hundreds of dolphins and slaughtered them on Tatsunoshima Island across the bay from Katsumoto Town. An aerial photograph of the event made its way into international syndication. In 1979 Hardy Jones brought a film crew to Iki to film the fishermen and the slaughter. The result was a film entitled Island at the Edge. The following year Jones returned and filmed the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins. The highly graphic footage, distributed through CBS News, along with still photographs, elicited protests from around the world.

Dolphin hunting largely ceased after 1980, partly because the protest caused some embarrassment to Japan, but perhaps also because dolphins stopped showing up in great numbers off Iki. The reasons for the dolphins' absence is unknown, and has been attributed to depletion by the drive hunt or because of prey species' migration.