Exploding Wests and Japan's whales

On 15 March 1820, Maine became the 23rd state of the US and on 24 April and the Land Act of 1820 reduced the price of land in the Northwest Territory and Missouri Territory, establishing favourable conditions for Americans and others to settle in the west. Demand grew for goods such as oil for lamps and lubrication, soap and baleen (from the Baleen whales) which was used in the days before plastics. Combs, umbrellas and, famously, corsetry which was becoming fashionable at the time were also based on whale products. Exponential growth of population and economies followed, a process referred to as ‘Exploding Wests’ in James Belich’s (2009) description of the boom and bust cycle which accompanied the settling of North America. Edo Japan remained closed to the outside world but it didn’t stop a growing frustration from whalers.

In 1831, 11 years after whaling began around Japan and 20 years before Matthew Perry was to arrive, Bourne Russell, an English-born Australian mariner arrived in Japan from Sydney (Jones, 2008). Russell’s actions to gain cooperation from resistant Japanese on Hokkaido, while lacking diplomacy, were decisive, single-minded and evidence of a right which he regarded as universal and one which must be understood by the Japanese. He claimed to come in friendship but also in great need, and relations turned aggressive when government troops labelled Russell and his party as ‘the enemy’. This is hardly surprising when the letter he intended for The Emperor states ‘I burnt their villages, and took what 1 wanted... 1 hope all my countrymen will do the same, burn and destroy all your towns and villages that refuse that Hospitality which is due to every Man’ (Jones, 2008). Russell threatened that all his countrymen were well capable of this and that even ‘your City of Jeddo’ (Japan’s capital of Edo - present day Tokyo) would not be exempt. He then stated that his intended purpose was to procure an order from the Emperor to permit foreign ships to, ‘enter any of your Ports, and be supplied with such refreshments as they want, and they will pay for all they get, and should it be mutually advantageous to Trade, you must allow your subjects to do so’ (Jones, 2008). In his letter to The Emperor, dated 15 April 1831, Russell offered conditional respect, signing himself as ‘Your Obedient Servant an Englishman’; this ‘obedience’ is consistent with the way Western whalers came to Japan.

The increasingly besieged and isolated Japanese found their supply of whales being diminished by a multinational fleet estimated to number 760 ships (Ellis, 1999) which operated in the Japan Ground in this period. In particular, the grey whales along the Korean and Japanese coasts were decimated (Ellis, 1999: 244) As Russell’s account demonstrates, the ‘inconvenience’ of operating without access to Japan was rewarded with a relatively short but obviously fruitful period for Western Whalers. Japanese mariners were increasingly the meat in the sandwich, which caught between the outside world and Edo Japan policy, was fast becoming a whaleburger with the lot, and diplomatic, economic, industrial and cultural clashes were inevitable.

In his history-based fictional account Harpoon set in the 1840s, Nicol (1988: 15) writes that the whalers of Taiji have observed a western whale boat on their coast. 'Are there no whales on their own shores? The Barbarians must never learn these waters’. The Taiji people knew little or nothing of how the whale migrations worked beyond their shores and could not have imagined how widespread the depletion of whale stocks was in other regions (Maury, 1853); and in Harpoon, a young man is convinced the western technique with large ships must be superior, but the wisdom of the ‘Tuomi’, the Taiji whalers’ look out and operations observer, retorts:

No Shinsuke, our way has evolved to be the best and only way for us. Let the foreigners do what they do, their way, but for us it is not only stupid, but dangerous to dream about copying them.

(Nicol, 1988: 57)

By the 1840s, Western pressure was building to open Japan. James Biddle made the first official attempt by the US to negotiate with the Japanese at Edo Bay (Tokyo) in July 1846 but failed (Blumberg, 1985: 20). Also by 1840, the Japan Ground was exhausted. America and Europe redirected their whaling efforts to the Sea of Ohthosk north of Japan and back to the Southern Hemisphere. The years 1847 to 1865 witnessed 1391 voyages to the Sea of Okhotsk. 426 whales were taken including 341 Right Whales (the prized species in Taiji). The other species taken were Bowhead whales and these were almost totally eliminated during this period. The total voyages to the Bering Sea at the same time were much higher. The Bering Sea was considered fished out by 1854 with the catch rate in just 2 years, 1849 and 1850, yielding 450,530 barrels of oil and 3,067 tons of whalebone. Taiji whalers relied on the migration from the North to the warmer waters around Japan. The effect of this unsustainable foreign whaling was devastating for traditional whaling towns like Taiji.