By Christopher Carr
The Cove, a 2009 documentary directed by former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos, boasts an enviable collection of awards and critical acclaim. The film won audience awards at Sundance, Hot Docs, Silver Docs, Sydney, and Maui, Golden Space Needle in Seattle, Best Feature Documentary in Galway, Best Theatrical and Best in Festival at Blue Ocean, Truly Moving Picture at Heartland, Best Feature Film and Best Storytelling in Nantucket, Winner at Newport Beach, Jury Award in Traverse City, and was selected Best Documentary by the National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics, and New York Film Critics Online. The Cove has a 95% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 82 on Metacritic. It has been shortlisted for a Best Documentary nomination for the 2010 Academy Awards. In the words of Metacritic, that is "universal acclaim."
The film's subject is dolphin hunting in Japan: a group of American activists sneak into a private cove used by local fishermen to trap migrating dolphins and film the subsequent slaughter. Yes—that’s right—the Japanese hunt and murder/death/kill cute little baby genius dolphins like Darwin from Seaquest. While South Park devoted an entire episode to ripping the documentary, Michelle Orange of Movie Line puts it best:
How much of this (The Cove) should we believe? As a piece of propaganda, The Cove is brilliant; as a story of ingenuity and triumph over what seems like senseless brutality, it is exceptionally well-told; but as a conscientious overview of a complex and deeply fraught, layered issue, it invokes the same phrase as even the most well-intentioned, impassioned activist docs: Buyer beware.
Japanese consumption of whale and dolphin meat and Japan's general spurning of International Whaling Commission resolutions are extremely complex issues that should be examined soberly. Unfortunately, the activists in The Cove—like many of the louder, more self-righteous environmentalists—skip the part where they take time to consider the multifaceted, layered issue and rush blindly in convinced the world is comprised of evil, greedy men for them to battle. Even more unfortunately, this attitude turns off many naturally skeptical people (the support of which the environmental movement sorely needs) from real and important causes.
From the Japanese perspective, whales and dolphins are not particularly special. There is a significant body of scientific evidence to support the Japanese position: while cetaceans do have large, complex brains, much of their neurons are devoted to the maintenance of large bodies and energy-intensive sonar lobes. Much of dolphins’s charm is attributable to their “smile”—an accident of evolution—and the fact that they live in the ocean: limited encounters with human beings (who historically have killed most animals they came across) has made dolphins noticeably social and docile.
In certain parts of Japan, dolphins are food, just as cows are food in America but not in India. Imagine if a group of devout Hindus snuck into a Chicago Jurgis Rudkus-style slaughterhouse and pieced together a documentary about how Americans were a bunch of savages for murdering holy cows, complete with graphic shots of cows's heads being cut off, spliced Michael Moore style with out-of-context footage of slaughterhouse workers laughing, complete with a Samuel Barber soundtrack. When the ensuing mob crowds the slaughterhouse and attempts to shut down business, the humble meatpackers would surely be perplexed.
Much of Western Civilization’s image of dolphins as superbeings originates in the work of John C. Lilly , a 1960s counterculture physician convinced that LSD was a magical drug capable of enhancing consciousness. Lilly, who described himself as a psychonaut, used to drop acid and swim with dolphins then write “research papers” on the ensuing awesome spiritual journeys and the wisdom bequeathed by the noble cetaceans. It should come as no shock that most of the rest of the world does not have the same mystical perspective of dolphins as westerners.
Hayden whatever gets arrested by the evil Japanese.This is not to say that the comparison of dolphins with cows is fair. Cows are bred specifically for consumption: they wouldn't even be alive if there were not human demand for their milk and their meat. If cows went extinct, it might even be good for the environment. Dolphins, on the other hand, are part of the natural ecosystem. Hunting them at large scales interferes with the natural ecological order and inevitably brings about unanticipated consequences.
Nor do the dubious origins of research into dolphin intelligence imply that dolphins are not intelligent. There are plenty of comprehensive studies on the abilities of dolphins and whales to communicate and recognize patterns—enough for the world outside of Japan to conclude that for the time being, there should be a moratorium on killing them. However, it is important to note here that the IWC only covers large cetaceans and the ban on whaling is for ecological—not humanitarian—reasons. There are no arguments based in international law to indict the Japanese.
Brendan O’Neill of Spiked goes so far as to describe the film as racist:
The Japanese are depicted as suppressed and unquestioning: we’re shown speeded-up footage of hordes of Japanese people walking through garishly-lit, buzzing city centres, their travels to work or home crudely reduced to pointless, super-fast marching through the streets, and we’re told that there’s a saying in Japan that ‘if a nail is sticking up, pound it down’ – in other words, Japanese culture is stultifyingly automaton. Where old racist America depicted the Japanese as rats, contemporary countercultural America depicts them as members of a rat race. The Taiji fishermen – sorry, the hook-wielding crazy killers of beautiful dolphins – come off the worst. The film dehumanises them to an alarming degree.
While I sympathize with O'Neill's premise, I disagree with him on several points. The filmmakers interview many people in Tokyo, all of whom are unaware of the dolphin-slaughter. Ric O’Barry, the activist hero of The Cove, remarks in response: "how can an activity be traditional if no one knows about it?" As a counterpoint, consider that no one in America knew about helicopter wolf-hunting until Sarah Palin ran for Vice President. Cajun food is undoubtedly an American tradition—one of the oldest—but ask people in Chicago if they know how to cook it or even what the ingredients are, and you'll get a lot of blank stares as well.
Tokyo is a busy city where young people go to pursue successful careers and social climb. Very few people in Tokyo would be aware of a small group of fishermen in a small village hundreds of kilometers away hunting an animal without any cultural mystique in Japan. The contention that public ignorance and lack of outrage implies some government coverup doesn't make the filmmakers racists so much as it makes them morons cum manipulative assholes. Furthermore, Japanese civilization is populous and diverse. The idea that something traditional in one part of Japan must be traditional throughout the country betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers.
However, although it is unrelated to the central thrust of the documentary, I do think the filmmakers have a point in this regard: Japanese culture is undoubtedly suppressed and unquestioning, although this is a relatively recent development. The Japanese school system is nationally standardized and largely based on that of the Second Reich (we know where that lack of instruction in critical thinking and skepticism led). All students must wear the same clothes, eat the same lunch, and do the same work, regardless of individual ability or interest. Many elementary schools even manage a logbook of what the child did outside of school time, including with whom the child played. Schools assign students friends and often sever organic friendships if they think they are unproductive.
Social engineering in Japan realized the goal of creating obedient, hard-working factory workers and paper-pushers to fuel the economy long ago. To criticize this creativity-sapping ideal of uniformity is not racist, nor is it necessarily a product of chauvinistic American countercultural thinking; but it is a moral imperative for anyone who cares about the future of Japan.
Nevertheless, The Cove's analysis of the issue-at-hand—Japanese consumption of dolphin meat—misses the mark entirely. The typical Japanese response to Western efforts to stop whale and dolphin killing relies on asserting whaling and cetacean consumption as an indispensable part of Japanese culture. The Cove postulates that consumption of cetaceans is, in fact, not a part of Japanese culture, but rather the effect of recent government propaganda. The truth is that the Japanese have been eating whale and dolphin meat for hundreds of years, and it is undoubtedly a part of their culture, but so what?
Whaling was a huge part of American culture, too—as anyone who’s been to New Bedford or Nantucket or read the great masterpiece of American Literature, Moby Dick, knows. Slavery was also a huge part of American culture for a very long time. Decapitating Chinese prisoners with samurai swords and suicide-bombing was part of Japanese culture before and during World War II, but the Japanese don’t do that anymore, and Americans do not have slaves.
This is because societies change their practices as they become more civilized. Whaling was originally banned in the United States because we hunted whales to near extinction. In 1986, western countries convinced the IWC to ban the practice worldwide, in no small part due to a public zeitgeist which acknowledged that cetaceans may possess not insignificant intelligence. The idea that something cannot be stopped because it is a part of one's culture is laughable (and perhaps the inevitable product of a school system that ignores the development of critical thinking skills).
The Japanese response to the IWC ban was to halt "commercial whaling", but begin publically financing the slaughter of whales for “scientific research” such as weighing and measuring the length and width of dead whales. Since the whales are already dead for scientific reasons, their meat is sold to the highest bidder or donated to the school system, to prevent waste. Whale is regularly available to eat in Japan despite international bans on commercial whaling. I've eaten it. It's not very good. And before the ban whale was the cheapest "fish" available.
The more conservative elements of the older generation often lament the increased price of whale meat due to international bans and the limits of the Japanese government’s ability to defy them and still keep face. Their solution has been to indoctrinate youth via mandatory whale school lunches. In Japan, all students must eat the same thing for lunch. This may sound ridiculous to Americans who have not experienced military training or fraternity hazing, but ordering people to do illogical, pointless things is a proven method of effective social engineering. Thus, Japanese schoolchildren are forced to eat whale and then told it’s a part of their culture. This way, the myth is perpetuated.
More importantly, donating whale meat to the school system in exchange for subsidies allows fishermen to keep their jobs, and conveniently circumvents the “commercial” part of the IWC’s ban on commercial whaling. The absurd waste of the Japanese government's subsidizing the killing of whales to feed children food they don't want to eat demonstrates the vacuousness of Japan's argument.
Japan should stop whaling because the resources of the seas do not belong to it, the Japanese take more than their fair share of common marine resources, and almost every other nation considers the practice of whaling outmoded and barbaric. Since the seas and their inhabitants are property common to every nation, Japan should respect international resolutions and cease defying them with pathetic excuses designed to allow for the exchange of subsidies for donations.
When the cultural and scientific research arguments fail, the Japanese delegation at the IWC often spuriously argues that whales and dolphins are depleting world fisheries. This is the same argument used to justify the slaughter of large carnivores such as wolves, bears, and tigers that has led many of them to become endangered species, if not altogether extinct. The real agent driving world fisheries to exhaustion is doubtlessly people, and the nation consuming the largest share of fish is Japan.
global distribution of fish catchThis brings up a good point which the film briefly touched on but would have been better served as the focal point: the world’s fisheries are indeed being rapidly depleted, and the Japanese, and increasingly, their numerous and sushi-loving Chinese neighbors play no small role. If the Japanese were honestly basing their consumption of whales and dolphins on a desire to save the world’s fisheries, they would stop eating sashimi twice a day.
A final point of note is that whale and dolphin meat contain unsafe levels of mercury. The Cove focuses on this to a large degree, and it is a public health issue that is largely ignored in Japan: a nation with a long history of ignoring public health issues. Many elderly Japanese consume tuna sashimi everyday. As with chronic smokers, the attitude towards hydrargyria (inorganic mercury poisoning from consuming too much large fish resulting in irreversible peripheral nerve and brain damage) is that, “I’ve been eating tuna everyday for years and I have no problems. I love tuna. It’s too late to cut down.”
Ironically, methyl-mercury has a short half life of about 50 days, and if there are no symptoms of disease, mercury levels can be dramatically reduced in a short time-span. Furthermore, mercury levels increase via bioaccumulation: thirty years ago, mercury poisoning was not really an issue. Now, it is starting to become one, and in the future—if there are still any tuna left—they will doubtlessly be far less fit for consumption than they are today. So, the argument that one has been eating tuna for years with no problems falls apart: the tuna of thirty years ago was a different animal entirely.
bioaccumulation of mercuryWhile hydrargyria is a serious problem that is likely to become a major public health concern in the future, the filmmakers disingenuously compare it to Minamata Disease, which results in severe birth defects, insanity, sudden blindness, deafness, paralysis, coma, rapid deterioration of the mental faculties, and painful slow death. Hydrargyria is a result of chronic exposure to trace levels of mercury accumulated in the world’s oceans, whereas Minamata Disease results from sudden exposure to very high levels of mercury. Minamata Disease originally occurred as a result of the Chisso Corporation dumping large amounts of toxic mercury into Minamata Bay over a period of sixty years dating from 1908, during which the company paid off local fishing lobbies and continued to dump even well after disease broke out. The Japanese government did nothing to stop it, nor did it begin to compensate victims until 2001. While Minamata Disease was, and continues to be, a terrible episode in Japanese history, it is not quite at the same level as the Japanese government allowing or promoting the consumption of whale and dolphin meat.
Nevertheless, dolphin meat does contain five times the international standard for safe consumption. It is grossly irresponsible and morally repugnant to both encourage its consumption and to force schoolchildren to eat it in the spirit of some strange, stubborn nationalism. Yet, eating large amounts of whale and dolphin has been characterized as quintessential Japanese culture, and to oppose their consumption is seen, of course, as another form of western cultural imperialism imposed on a nation that has already lost so much to provincial Americanization and is in the midst of a cultural reassertion. Western activists assuredly face an uphill battle, especially if they plan on continuing to stereotype and insult the Japanese.
The problem is not that killing dolphins and whales is inherently immoral. The makers of The Cove seem to take this as fact and jump right into a Joseph Campbell-esque good vs. evil narrative. In the process, the filmmakers unfortunately repulse many thoughtful, potentially sympathetic viewers. The real problem with Japanese consumption of whale and dolphin meat is that the Japanese are taking more than their fair share of a resource that belongs to everybody despite unanimous censure as well as humanitarian, ecological, and public health concerns. Their reasons for doing so are poorly articulated and spurious. The consumption of cetaceans deserves treatment as a serious issue, not as the sensationalistic propaganda for which the environmental movement is sadly notorious.
UPDATE: 9/5/2010 - I would kindly ask all readers to read this: http://theinductive.squarespace.com/blog/2010/9/4/everything-on-the-cove.html before commenting. Thanks!
Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 1:41AM 
Last week, the best rapper in the world went to prison for a year. In his honor we're reviewing the last truly titantic rap album- with all apologies to Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Part II. Good luck Weezy.
set a standard for Southern Rap that hasn't even been approached since, but five years after that was the last time we got a new Outkast album (ignoring Idlewild, which you probably did already). 
featured Dre and Big Boi solo albums instead of Outkast - and then six years, and counting, of silence. Outkast certainly didn't lose their mojo after Aquemini, Stankonia is arguably as good and Speakerboxxx/the Love Below had moments of transcendence, but this was the last time that they were a southern rap group. 
, their third and best album, is a work of delicate balance, the protagonists are old hands in a game that does not reward weakness, but that brutal existence inspires sentimentality if not an iota of vulnerability. 