Part I - Living with Whales, 1600–1850

1 The Whale Pilgrimage

In the late autumn of 1812, after a week of travel, the fifty-six-year-old Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757–1827) reached the sacred island Kinkazan in northeastern Japan.¹ Three days of heavy rain and rough sea almost caused Gentaku’s little pilgrimage to come to a premature end. However, when the weather cleared on the fourth day, he found a fisherman willing to bring him to the fishing village Ayukawa near the eastern tip of the Oshika Peninsula. From Ayukawa, Gentaku traversed the eastern hill to reach a little hut at the beachfront from where the misty shores of the nearby Kinkazan island could be seen. Ringing a bell at the hut summoned a small ferry. It took less than half an hour to reach Kinkazan. Before Gentaku was allowed to set foot on the sacred island, however, he had to discard his filthy straw sandals and put on new ones. After visiting the main shrine dedicated to the Goddess Benzaiten, Gentaku followed his local guide, a thirteen-year-old monk apprentice, to the 445-metre-high peak of Kinkazan mountain. From here, Gentaku had a panoramic view over the roughed coastline of the Sanriku Coast to the west and the endless Pacific Ocean to the east.

While pilgrims like Gentaku were frequently seen on Kinkazan, they were not the only visitors. Each year between March and October, thousands of whales and dolphins migrated to the Sea of Kinkazan, earning it its nickname ‘the castle of sperm whales’.² However, when Gentaku made his pilgrimage in the early nineteenth century, fewer whales were visiting the region every year. As a passionate whale enthusiast, Gentaku was always keen on seeing whales. However, he did not record any whale sightings in his travel monologue to Kinkazan. While the lack of whales might have been slightly disappointing for Gentaku, for the local fishing population, the recent disappearance of the giants from the Sea of Kinkazan was a troubling sign.

Fishing was the main occupation for the inhabitants of the Oshika Peninsula. Gentaku notes that from his high vantage point on the peak of Kinkazan, he could see hundreds of small fishing vessels from all nearby coves and villages bustling about, looking for octopus, sardines, and sea bream to hunt. The sea around the island was considered the best fishing ground in all of northeastern Japan. As Gentaku looked down, so did the fishermen always look up to the small mountain. The island’s peak, the highest elevation in the region, could be seen from far away and was believed to be the residing place of a benevolent female water dragon goddess, who protected the island goddess Benzaiten. When the local fishermen departed to the open sea to hunt bonito and other fish, they would never lose sight of Kinkazan mountain to find their way back to land. In this border zone between coast and open sea, where the fishermen could barely make out the silhouette of Kinkazan, humans entered the domain of the whales. The presence of these majestic creatures indicated to the fishermen the whereabouts of nearby fish schools. Because of this, the Oshika fishermen often thought of the whales as the helpers of the dragon goddess, who were sent to assist the humans.³ In other stories, whales were brought in association with the god Ebisu, the god of fishing and wealth, who was also revered on Kinkazan.

The yearly arrival of the whales to northeastern Japan was also religiously connotated. A popular belief was that whales, not unlike human pilgrims, were travelling thousands of kilometres to visit famous shrines and attend religious festivals, as the following source from Karakuwa, around sixty kilometres north of Kinkazan, shows:

On the fifteenth day of the first month, the Osaki Myōjin festival is held in Motoyoshi in the northern part of Karakuwa village. [I] have heard that whales come in great numbers to the surrounding sea in order to make a pilgrimage to the shrine. Until this year, I wondered about that, but on the fifteenth day of the first month in Tenpō 4 (1832), Yashichi and Matakichi from Imaizumi and Aramachi went to the shrine for a pilgrimage and saw great numbers of whales come close to the shore and play around. The two said it was undeniably very curious, and [I] listened to them attentively. [We] discussed and thought about this together, but that the whales visit the shrine on the fifteenth day of the first month every year is truly beyond human comprehension.⁴

Similar legends of whale pilgrimages also existed in western Japan, as we will explore in Chapter 2. In this first chapter, we will follow the whales on their yearly pilgrimage around the Japanese Coast, to see how the cetosphere influenced marine ecosystems and coastal communities alike. Along our way, we will meet the first Japanese whalers from the central Kii domain and how they followed the migrating whales along the Japanese Archipelago.

The Sanriku Coast

Standing together with Gentaku on the peak of Kinkazan mountain, we can see that the small island is only one kilometre off the Oshika Peninsula, a mountainous stretch of land reaching into the Pacific Ocean. Like the fishing port Ayukawa, all settlements are located in one of the many coves and bays, with no villages farther inland. To the west, the peninsula ends near the mouth of the Kitakami River, where the harbour town Ishinomaki is situated. The Oshika Peninsula is the most southern point of the so-called Sanriku Coast, which ends some 350 kilometres farther north at the cape of Same-ura near Hachinohe, another port city and the place where the anti-whaling riots would break out in 1911.⁵ The southern part of the Sanriku Coast is marked by its characteristic V-shaped ‘rias’, tubular bays with shallow depths resembling miniature fjords. During tsunamis the water level rises quickly in these bays making them extremely dangerous. On the other hand, as fish and other marine animals are often swimming into the bays, they are good places to install fixed shore nets. The fishing towns Onagawa, Kesennuma, Yamada, and Miyako are all situated inside such bays (and are often destroyed during tsunamis, the last being the 2011 tsunami). Towards the inland, the coast is disconnected from the agricultural zone and the inland cities through the Kitakami mountain range. While not notably high, the range still served as a natural boundary that limited direct contact and prevented intensive farming. Farther north, around the town Kuji, the rias coastline becomes less complex, before ending near the flat coast of the fishing town Hachinohe.

During Gentaku’s lifetime the Sanriku Coast, situated in northeastern Honshu (Figure 1.1), was politically separated into the three domains: Sendai, Morioka, and Hachinohe.⁶ Contemporaries often imagined these northern domains as backward and poor.⁷ During the summer, the yamase winds from the continent would sometimes bring wet and cold weather, destroying crops and causing famine. Nevertheless, the Sendai domain, one of the largest domains in Tokugawa Japan, was critical in producing agricultural products for the capital Edo (today Tokyo). Moreover, the Sanriku Coast itself not only connected the capital with the border region of Ezo (today Hokkaido) in the north, where the important herring fertiliser was produced, but was one of the main fish fertiliser producers itself. Especially sardines were caught in large quantities and made into fertiliser for the cash crop fields in western Japan. We will explore the importance of these fishing proto-industries in the following chapters. For now, it is sufficient to say that the Sanriku Coast is even today considered among the best fishing places in the world, producing almost 15 per cent of all fishing products worldwide.⁸

Figure 1.1 Map of the Sanriku Coast in northeastern Honshu in the Early Modern Period

The reasons for this wealth of marine resources are the geological and oceanographic characteristics of the Sanriku Coast. Coasts are ecotones, an ecological transitional zone where two ecosystems – terrestrial and oceanic – come into contact. It is the meeting place of many species that would otherwise not have contact with each other, while also hosting several species that have completely specialised to live here. Coastal ecosystems boast some of the highest degrees of biodiversity on this planet, with river systems bringing nutrients from inland and coastal upwelling bringing nutrients up from the deeper ocean.⁹ The case of the Sanriku Coast is here especially interesting: in the ocean before the coast two ocean surface currents, the Kuroshio and Oyashio, meet and intermingle, creating the perturbed region, one of the most highly biotic productive places on earth (Figure 1.2).¹⁰

Figure 1.2 Map of Early Modern Japan with ocean currents and the ‘perturbed region’

The warm but nutrient-poor Kuroshio (lit. ‘black current’) originates in the Philippines and passes Taiwan on the eastern coast and advances towards the south of the Japanese Archipelago. The smaller Tsushima Current breaks off south of Kyushu and flows in the Sea of Japan (East Sea), while the Kuroshio continues along the Pacific Coast of Kyushu, Shikoku, and southern Honshu. The Kuroshio goes offshore near the cape of Chōshi and meanders into the Pacific Ocean. Near the Sanriku Coast the Kuroshio Current not only reunites with parts of the Tsushima Current but also meets the Oyashio Current (lit. ‘parent current’) that brings cold, nutrient-rich water from the Bering Strait. The intermingling of these currents creates the so-called perturbed region. The mixing of the warm, nutrient-poor Kuroshio Current and the cold, nutrient-rich Oyashio Current allows plankton to thrive, thus attracting many marine animals, some of them using the currents for their yearly migrations.¹¹ The exact frontline of the perturbed region moves from winter to summer from Chōshi until Hachinohe and back along the Sanriku Coast.¹²

The perturbed region was the main reason for the good fish catches of the Sanriku fishing communities. However, the ocean currents also posed a considerable threat to the small Japanese fishing vessels, who easily got taken away by the currents and sometimes ended up as far away as Hawai‘i or the Bering Strait.¹³ Coupled with the shogunate’s ban of building ocean-going vessels, for most of the Edo period (1600–1867) fishing remained close to the shore and the fishermen had to wait for their prey to come to them. Poor fish catches, either caused by bad weather or changes in the fishes’ migration patterns, were a constant threat. In other parts of Tokugawa Japan, fishing communities mitigated these risks by also engaging in part-time farming in the off-season. However, due to its mountainous terrain and unreliable weather, farming opportunities were limited at the Sanriku Coast. Fishing villages had to use most of their revenue to import staple food from nearby farming villages or via officially sanctioned merchants, who as monopolists could dictate the prices. To put this into context, in the coastal community of Ryōri, an average of 83 per cent of their earnings from fishing had to be used to purchase agricultural products.¹⁴ In this way, abundant fish catches and times of relative wealth could suddenly alternate with times of poor harvest and famine.

The Cetosphere around the Japanese Archipelago

While early modern fishermen were quite successful at harvesting marine life near the shore, the more we move towards the open ocean, the less influential anthropogenic top-down pressure became. Here, the fishermen entered the realm of the whales, the ‘cetosphere’. As Jakobina Arch has rightly pointed out, our knowledge base of whale ecology and behaviour is very limited even today.¹⁵ This becomes even more of a problem when one attempts to reconstruct how the cetosphere worked before it was severely disrupted by humans in the twentieth century. It is clear, however, that the Japanese Coast was heavily influenced by the cetosphere. To understand how whales interacted with their environment during their migration along the Japanese coastline, I will refer to recent scientific debates in marine biology and ecology. As population sizes have drastically changed in the past two hundred years, and it remains unclear to what degree this has altered the behaviour and culture of particular whale species, referring to present-day observation needs to be taken with caution.

We are currently recognising ninety different species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises, which all belong in the order of Cetacea.¹⁶ Cetaceans are divided into two sub-orders: baleen whales (mysticetes) and toothed whales (odontocetes). The former includes most larger cetaceans and are characterised through their baleen plates (also called ‘whalebone’), instead of teeth. These comb-like structures are used to filter large numbers of small prey, typically zooplankton such as krill and copepods but sometimes also small fish. They are hunting in shallower depths than their toothed counterparts and are known for their long migration routes from warm-water winter breeding grounds to cold-water summer feeding grounds. This group includes right whales, the most important species hunted in western Japan, as well as the faster rorquals such as the massive blue, fin, and sei whales. Another important species in our context is the smaller minke whale.

Toothed whales include dolphins and porpoises, as well as all whales possessing teeth. With the exception of the massive sperm whales, they tend to be smaller than most baleen whales. With their sharp teeth, odontocetes hunt fish of all sizes, octopods, and in some cases even other marine mammals. Killer whales (also called orcas) are one of the few species that also attack other cetaceans. Some toothed whales are living in larger groups with a complex social organisation, leading some biologists to speculate on a non-human ‘whale culture’.¹⁷ Another characteristic is their ability to produce sounds for communication and echolocation.

While toothed whales are often apex predators, baleen whales are in a peculiar spot in the food chain. On the one hand, they are the largest animals that have ever lived on this planet and are therefore not typically prey for other predators (with the exceptions of humans and sometimes killer whales), but at the same time, they are consuming massive amounts of smaller marine life, such as zooplankton and small fish. It has been estimated that great whales (all baleen whales and sperm whales) consumed between 53 per cent and 86 per cent of the North Pacific Ocean’s net primary production before industrial whaling.¹⁸ Thus, cetaceans directly intervene at different stages of the trophic structure, with toothed whales curbing the larger marine fauna, while baleen whales put pressure on smaller marine fauna.

Today, we know of thirty-seven different species of cetaceans that are regularly visiting the Japanese waters. The behaviour between the species is extremely diverse, fulfilling different ecological roles. Typically, baleen whales such as right whales and fin whales have long migration routes along the Japanese coast. During the winter months, these whales stay in the warmer tropical water around the Philippines for calving. However, as these waters are poor in nutrients, the baleen whales live off their blubber reserve. In late winter and early spring, they would then follow the Kuroshio northwards until they reach the Japanese Coast. Here some whales follow further the branching Tsushima Current into the Sea of Japan while others continue the Kuroshio close to the Pacific Coast. Around June, the baleen whales reach the perturbed region off the Sanriku Coast, where they would for the first time in months feed on zooplankton on fish. In summer, these baleen whales would traverse the perturbed region and along the Oyashio into the Sea of Okhotsk, where they feed on the plankton bloom. In winter, the whales swim through the open ocean back to the tropics for mating and calving.¹⁹

This route is, however, not followed by all baleen whales. Sei whales, for example, stay mostly offshore and are only rarely seen in the waters around western Japan. In summer and autumn, they appear near the Sanriku Coast and eastern Ezo following the Oyashio Current. In winter, some sei whales could be found around the Ogasawara Islands (Bonin Islands), south of the Japanese Archipelago, but whale biologists are unsure whether these sei whales belong to the same population.²⁰ The situation is similar for the largest toothed whales: the sperm whales. These are also more frequently found offshore or near the northern Pacific coasts of Honshu and Ezo and only occasionally in western Japan.²¹ Smaller-toothed whales and dolphins have far less pronounced migration patterns and they live in a variety of habitats, from estuaries to the deep ocean. While they could be found along the whole Pacific coast, the Kuroshio and Oyashio warm- and cold-water fronts act as natural barriers that smaller-toothed whales would not – or could not – cross.²²

The long-distance whale migrations fulfil crucial functions in the marine ecosystem. Migrating megafauna are essentially biomass transporters of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Through feeding, they bind biomass to their body while regulating the abundance of zooplankton and small fish in the water through predation pressure. Also, as whales move in a three-dimensional space, they transport nutrients vertically through the water columns. During their dives, whales physically whirl up the water and thus bring the free-floating nutrients back to the surface. This so-called whale pump can bring more nutrients to the surface than all river systems combined. Even more significantly, whales release nitrogen-rich faecal plumes and urine near the water surface. In this respect, they ‘fertilise’ the upper water masses during their migration route along the Japanese Coast with their faeces.²³ Baleen whales are regulators of marine meta-ecosystems and distribute and exchange nutrients between partly closed systems. With their presence and feeding behaviour, they also stabilise the trophic structure of local ecosystems. Removing them from the coastal ecosystem reduces the resilience of these systems and increases the risk of an irreversible regime shift.²⁴

Early modern coastal ecosystems were not all influenced in the same way by the presence of whales. Some cetaceans visited only certain places, while not appearing at others. Even among a specific whale species, their behaviour could change depending on geographical and seasonal circumstances. Both factors – spatiality and season – massively influenced how human communities would interact with whales that appeared near their fishing grounds. During Gentaku’s lifetime, for example, proto-industrial whaling operations were conducted nearly exclusively in western Japan, while there were nearly no whaling activities in the northern region of the archipelago, despite whales being more common in the north. In the following chapters, we will investigate this peculiar circumstance in more detail.

Whale People on the Japanese Archipelago

Around 35,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, humans arrived over a land bridge in the region that would later become the Japanese Archipelago. As the shallow East China Sea and Sea of Japan did not yet exist, the migration routes of cetaceans were quite different. The early palaeolithic communities focused most likely on the hunt for terrestrial megafauna such as mammoths, and there is no evidence of them possessing boats or conducting whaling.²⁵ With the end of the Ice Age, Japan was separated from the continent and the coastal sea became part of the cetosphere.

Humans living close to the coast have likely profited from the presence of migrating cetaceans early on. Archaeological findings from the Jōmon period (14,000–300 BCE) have uncovered whale and dolphin bones in shell mounds. For the human communities, the carcass of stranded whales provided a wealth of protein and raw materials, as cetaceans were dissembled, eaten, and their bones used as tools. Unclear remains, however, in what capacity these coastal settlers were engaged in active whaling. Evidence suggests that Jōmon hunters have most likely hunted dolphins. The small size of their boats and the insufficient equipment make it unlikely, however, that larger cetaceans were hunted outside of a few opportunistic kills, for example, when a whale was already injured and disorientated. Most whale bones that have been found near their settlements are, therefore, likely gathered from beached cetaceans.²⁶

On the other hand, cetaceans could also cause distress to a coastal community. Some whale species competed for the same fish species as humans and toothed whales, like some dolphin species and killer whales have been known to disperse fish swarms.²⁷ Even more, killer whales and sperm whales might have posed a serious threat to these coastal hunters, especially when provoked. Injured or dead whales often lost large amounts of blood and grease near the coast. While these additional nutrients could prove beneficial to the coastal ecosystem as a form of marine fertiliser, as we will see later in the book, sometimes the amount of blood at one specific spot was just too large to absorb and thus killed off coastal sea grass, shells and scared off fish. In these instances, the outflowing bodily fluids of whales were perceived by the coastal communities as ‘pollution’, not unlike an oil spill. Eating spoiled whale meat also posed a serious health risk, leading to the belief of a ‘whale curse’ that would befall communities that ate whale meat without the consent of the gods of the sea. In this way, the same biomass that contributed to the fertilisation of coastal ecosystems and provided large amounts of protein to humans could also turn into a biological time bomb.

These positive and negative effects of the cetosphere on the early coastal communities have most likely influenced their religious and cultural representation of cetaceans. Unfortunately, we do not know much about these prior to the early modern period. One of the oldest cultural depictions of a whale is a 6.3-centimetre-long figurine found near Hakodate in southern Hokkaido that is dated from 4,500 years ago. It is believed to show a killer whale and might be a predecessor of the Ebisu belief.²⁸ Other artefacts, such as cave paintings depicting fishermen killing whales, or spoons made out of whale bones were found nearby. In northern Kyushu, burial mounds from the Kōfun period (300–538 CE) also contain depictions of whale hunts.²⁹ At least since the Heian period (794–1185 CE), stranded whales were not only eaten by the local population but the carcasses were also turned into whale oil for illumination. Dolphins and other smaller cetaceans were sometimes trapped into coves by communities across the Archipelago. A document from 1404 alludes to a possible whaling operation on Tsushima, an island between Japan and Korea, but it could also have been a dolphin hunt. From the same Muromachi period (1336–1573), references to whale meat have survived in cookbooks and the meat was a high-priced commodity consumed by the elite in the capital, indicating that it must have been a relatively rare dish.³⁰

While many details remain unclear, it seems that whales played an important part in the lives of coastal societies and were early on harvested on the Japanese Archipelago, even though the use of stranded whales was most likely much more important than active hunting. In this regard, early coastal communities ‘lived with’ whales in a similar way as described by Nancy Shoemaker.³¹

Following the Pilgrimage of the Whales

The seasonal arrival of whales in local waters was a highly anticipated event for many communities as a single accidental whale stranding could bring enough wealth as a whole fishing season. Eventually, some villages were no longer content with leaving this possibility to chance, or – to the grace of the whales – but began actively looking for whales to drive them into coves. It is believed that whaling as an occupation emerged around 1570 in the Ise Bay of central Japan. Whalers on seven to eight boats drove whales into coves, where they could be killed with simple harpoons. The preferred target were right whales that followed the Kuroshio Current northwards during the winter months and came close towards the coast. Once a whale was struck with a harpoon, it was hauled to the ships and brought to the beach, where the skin was removed with long blades from the underlying blubber, meat, tissue and bones in a process we call ‘flensing’.³² Eventually, the new whaling techniques were taken up by fishing communities on the Kii Peninsula, where the first whaling group (kujira-gumi) was established in Taiji in 1606. At the beginning, whaling was just one of many coastal activities conducted by the Kii fishing communities, supplementing sardines (iwashi), sea bream (tai) and bonito (katuso) catches for the markets of the nearby merchant city Osaka in the Kansai plain.³³

Coinciding with the emergence of active whaling operations was the unification of the Japanese main islands (except for Ezo) under the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) in 1600. Under the new Tokugawa Shogunate, new innovations in agriculture, such as more resilient rice types or new irrigation projects, led to a steep increase in the overall population.³⁴ Especially in the Kansai plain, farmers used newly attained fields not only to increase production of food crops, however, but also to produce new cash crops, like cotton, indigo, and tobacco, which further put ecological pressure on the agricultural land, which began to lose its productivity.³⁵ To compensate farmers in the agricultural core regions began to use commercial fertiliser. Among these were ‘night soil’ and soybean cakes, but the most common commercial fertilisers were fish and to a lesser degree whale fertiliser.³⁶ Thus, marine fertilisers made out of dried or pressed sardines from the Kii Peninsula were in high demand to replenish the exhausted fields of the Kansai plain. Additional to sardines, demand for not only other marine products, such as bonito, which were used as the basic ingredient in the Japanese cuisine, but also of whales increased drastically.

With the rising demands for food and cash crops, humans began to interfere more regularly in the cetosphere. Soon, the marine animals coming close to the Kii Peninsula during the yearly migrations no longer withstand this increased anthropogenic pressure and either diminished or avoided the region. The Kii fishing groups were thus confronted with the choice of either reducing their fishing and whaling activities or to find whales and fish elsewhere. The Kii communities opted for the latter option and built a fleet of ships following the migration route of the whales along the coast to discover new fishing and whaling grounds. Since the Sengoku period (1477–1600), the Kii region had been famous for its shipbuilding techniques, which continued under the Tokugawa rule despite its regulation that forbad the construction of ocean-going vessels.³⁷ Thus, every year dozens of Kii fleets pushed west and east following along the whale pilgrimage route.

The whales first guided the Kii fishermen westward towards the Seto Inland Sea. When they found on their journey a promising fishing or whaling place, they visited the local village headman and paid for the rights to harvest the marine resources that were then often sent back to Osaka. However, since the Kii fishermen were much more efficient and reckless in harvesting marine resources, they quickly exhausted the new grounds. Sometimes, the Kii fishermen were invited by local communities to teach them new techniques, while at other places, the locals observed the newcomers and eventually adapted their advanced fishing and whaling techniques on their own. Sooner or later, however, the locals had learned the new techniques and began to regard the Kii groups as unwanted competition and ousted them.³⁸

As early as 1626, we have reports of Kii fishermen hunting whales in Kyushu, some 600 kilometres west from their home waters. Around the same time, a number of coastal communities in western Japan began to hire Kii fishermen as experts for whaling or formed their own whaling groups.³⁹ Harpoon whaling became especially successful in regions where whales migrated closely along the coast and where agricultural opportunities were limited. For example, in the 1660s, the Tosa domain in southern Shikoku was in desperate need of tax income and invited Kii fishermen to develop the local fisheries by introducing new net types and stimulating bonito rod fishing as well as harpoon whaling.⁴⁰ In this way, the Kii fleets progressed at a steady pace along the whale migration route on the Kuroshio and Tsushima currents, introducing whaling and fishing techniques to new communities, only to advance further after a short time, leaving behind an exhausted coastal ecosystem. Due to the limitations of the harpoon whaling techniques, which allowed only a limited range of whale species to target and proved often unsuccessful in the end, the impact of these Kii fleets was probably more devastating for fish stocks than for cetaceans, who could easily avoid the dangers close at the coast.

The relationship between whales and humans changed fundamentally, with the development of the net whaling technique (amitori-hō) by Wada Kakuemon Yoriharu from Taiji in 1675. While the less advanced harpoon whaling method could be conducted with a few dozen helpers, net whaling required at least two hundred whalers, meaning there was a high level of organisational sophistication and access to capital needed to pay hired fishermen. This new method had a much higher success rate and could target a broader range of whale species but was also a financial risk as operating a whaling group could cost up to 5,000 ryō per season, as it required paid workers, infrastructure, boats and equipment.⁴¹ A lookout was placed on a nearby hill looking for migrating single whales coming close along the shore. When spotted, a smoke signal was given, and up to three hundred whalers in small boats blocked the targeted whales access to the open sea. Using drums and spanned nets between the boats, the whale was driven towards the coast or into the nets and once its movement was taken away, dozens of hand harpoons were shot at the whale from all sides. Eventually, the leader of the group would jump on the back of the whale, killing the animal with a sword stab near the blowhole. After the kill, the whale was brought to a land station where another hundred to two hundred helpers were disassembling the whale into various commodities.

Most whaling villages in western Japan soon adopted this method, with northwestern Kyushu becoming the most successful whaling area. In the second half of the Edo period, almost 80 per cent of all whaling groups were based here and apart from the main island of Kyushu, coastal villages established whaling groups on the Gotō Islands, Ikitsukishima, Iki, and Tsushima.⁴² These groups focused on whales who migrated on the Tsushima Current and became disorientated in the maze of small islands.

Whale Bodies on Fields

When a whale died near the shore, the sudden release of the nutrients fixed in its body biomass could fertilise a coastal ecosystem for months. By bringing whales ashore humans altered in fundamental ways the energy balance of marine and terrestrial ecosystems alike. As a single coastal community could not possibly make use of all the energy stored in a whale, after flensing a whale, its parts were transformed into a variety of commodities to be traded over the whole Japanese Archipelago. As Jakobina Arch observed, it is no accident that all the thriving whaling communities, while scattered over the land route, were connected via the main shipping routes from where whale goods could be transported quickly to the markets.⁴³ For example, larger whaling groups like Masutomi from Ikitsukishima in Kyushu had their primary interest in processing and selling whale oil and fertiliser to the markets in Hakata and other bigger cities. Unlike harpoon whaling, which was often an ad-hoc opportunistic enterprise and used to feed the local population, net whaling transformed whale bodies into proto-industrial products aimed for interregional markets.⁴⁴

Nevertheless, especially smaller whaling communities focused on the production of whale meat. Koga Yasushi estimated that in northern Kyushu, the profit made from whale meat surpassed whale oil and fertiliser sales. As fresh whale meat could not be transported over longer distances, however, it was not suited as a proto-industrial product and was mainly sold at local markets and eaten by the local population. Outside of western Japanese coastal communities, whale meat was not well known in the Edo period.⁴⁵ Communities with access to whale meat, had, however, some advantages, especially during the frequent famines of the time. The whaling season was in the winter and the early spring months when the fields would not produce crops and the dreaded ‘spring famines’ were most violent. In such cases, a single whale could save ‘seven villages’ as a popular saying goes. It seems reasonable to assume that in northern Kyushu, a stable source of whale protein during the most critical months of the year saved many lives.⁴⁶

While the availability of whale meat could feed starving mouths, some proto-industrial products, such as whale fertiliser and whale oil had a much larger ecological impact on the terrestrial ecosystem. For example, whale oil had initially been used for illumination, but this usage fell out of fashion because of the strong odour and the availability of alternative plant-based oil.⁴⁷ After 1670, several farmers and scholars discovered independently from each other another application of whale oil: as it turned out, whale oil was an effective repellent against planthopper (unka). Whale oil proved its potency during the Tenmei famine (1782–1788) by helping peasants in western Japan repel a locust invasion and preserve part of their harvest. Several domains in western Japan stored whale oil for emergencies and the Tokugawa government helped disseminate the knowledge of this use of whale oil in 1787 and 1796.⁴⁸ According to one source, peasants who used whale oil during the Tenmei famine were able to save 30 to 40 per cent of their harvest, while their neighbours lost everything.⁴⁹

Compared to whale meat and whale oil, whale fertiliser played a less significant role in western Japan. According to the log of a ship that brought whale products from a whaling place to the regional city of Hakata in the 1850s, 60 per cent of the whale products were meat, followed by 30 per cent oil and about 5 per cent fertiliser.⁵⁰ Although the volume of whale fertiliser on the market compared to fish fertiliser was low, whale fertiliser was a noteworthy supplement to the fish fertiliser trade network as it had a different chemical composition and could therefore be used for different crops. The Nōgyō zensho (The Farmer’s Compendium) written in 1697 mentions whale scarp as an alternative to dried sardines, plant oil and night soil.⁵¹ A 1709 manual, meanwhile, stressed that sardine fertiliser was of inferior quality to herring fertiliser and that farmers only used it because it was cheap and available. It also stated that whale fertiliser was even worse and should not be sprinkled on barley or rice fields as it would spread sickness.⁵² It is not clear what exactly was meant here by ‘sickness’, but it is possible that early versions of whale fertiliser failed and that it took some trial and error to figure out the right combination. Also, in 1709, herring fertiliser from Ezo was still new to the market and was therefore probably praised. Indeed, agricultural manuals published in the early nineteenth century were more enthusiastic regarding sardine and whale fertiliser. The Baiyō hiroku (Secret Notes on Cultivation) from 1840 concluded that whale oil cake was only surpassed by high-quality sardine oil cake and was more effective than herring fertiliser. High-quality whale fertiliser was, however, expensive and was advised not to be used on low-profit products like grains or vegetables. An added advantage of whale fertiliser was that it would not freeze in winter and could be used for winter crops.⁵³

The Baiyō hiroku also claimed that whale bone fertiliser (or other bone fertilisers) was necessary for sugar plants to grow and for the plants to develop their characteristic sweetness. Also, for the growth of other cash crops, like indigo plants, tobacco, hemp, and ramie this bone powder was indispensable.⁵⁴ The Geishikō (Manuscript on Whale History) from 1808, written by Gentaku’s cousin Ōtsuki Heisen, explained that a single treatment of whale bone powder on a rice field would yield high-quality crops for three years.⁵⁵ Furthermore, a manual from Iwashiro Province (today Fukushima Prefecture) written in 1837 proposed mixing fish oil, ash, and whale waste fertiliser for the best results when growing daikon seed.⁵⁶ The last example is especially interesting as it shows that whale fertiliser was transported from western Japan as far as Iwashiro Province.⁵⁷ Sardine or herring fertiliser from Sanriku or Ezo, respectively, was transported in large quantities, which reduced the transportation costs. Whale fertiliser, on the other hand, was only available in small quantities (as the ship records from Hakata demonstrate), indicating that it was traded as a high-priced commodity.

All agricultural manuals make a clear distinction between whale waste and whale bone fertiliser, which were used for different purposes. As we know today, the effectiveness of fertilisers is based around two specific elements: nitrogen and phosphorus. Even though sardines were the most often used commercial fertiliser of the time, compared to their body mass, these elements were low in quantity.⁵⁸ When we compare the different kinds of fertilisers, we can see that sardine oil cake contained 7.97% nitrogen and 7.11% phosphate, while whale waste contained 11.59% nitrogen but only 3.01% phosphate and whale bone-meal contained 3.01% nitrogen and 26.03% phosphate.⁵⁹ From this, we can conclude that whale oil cake was the superior nitrogen fertiliser, while whale bones far outmatched anything else regarding phosphate accumulation.

Even though they did not have this chemical knowledge, the Japanese farmers recognised that whales provided two different types of fertilisers. Without a substantial livestock population, Japanese peasants had to replace the missing nitrogen with night soil and fish fertiliser and needed a different source for phosphate as animal bones were not widely available. A single whale could bring both nutrients at once and at a higher concentration than any other fertiliser. Whale fertiliser was therefore a secret trump card in the fertiliser trade network, even though it was not available in the same amounts as other fertiliser types. While fish fertiliser was brought to the agricultural core regions from the northern periphery (Sanriku and Ezo), whale oil and whale fertiliser were brought from the peripheral whaling villages in Kyushu, southern Shikoku, and the Kii Peninsula.

Conclusion

The yearly migration of thousands of cetaceans on the ocean currents along the Japanese coast, shaped and influenced the coastal and marine ecosystems in countless ways. In the cetosphere, whales were responsible for binding and transporting nutrients in their bodies, mixing and fertilising water masses and regulating fish and zooplankton abundance. However, in western Japan, these positive effects for the ecosystem remained largely unnoticed, instead the whale bodies themselves were seen as the biggest prize. Japanese fishermen understood the significance of fish and whales as the holders of valuable nutrients that could replenish the impoverished soil and this system had the advantage that more crops could be harvested in the short term and more humans could be fed. By following migrating fish and whale stocks, Kii fishermen disseminated proto-industrial fishing and whaling technologies from the Kansai region to more peripheral coastal communities. The process of connecting coastal Japan with the agricultural hinterland was an integral part of the emerging interregional coastal trade network in which not only fish fertiliser but also rice and other products were transported from one side of the archipelago to the other.⁶⁰

While whale meat was mainly of regional importance, we can understand early modern Japanese whaling better if we frame it as part of agricultural history. The Kansai and Kantō core regions could outsource many of the ecological repercussions of the fertiliser production to the less populated peripheral region. Compared to European livestock like cows and horses, fish and whale fertiliser had the advantage that it did not compete for valuable land resources and received all its nutrients from marine ecosystems. Farmers did not have to worry about removing valuable nutrients from other terrestrial ecosystems and received these nutrients without immediate negative consequences for them.

However, the mass extraction of marine resources did disturb the marine ecosystem. Overfishing, especially in places where fish spawned, would eventually lead to an overall decrease in marine fauna. Moreover, whales also began to appear less often near the coast of Japan, while they reached the coast of Japan later each year on their migration routes. In the long term, the marine fertiliser trade externalised the ecological cost from the land to the ocean and weakened the ecological functioning of the cetosphere.

2 The Beached God

A long time ago, rough sea continued to plague the village of Same-ura with no end in sight, making any attempt at fishing naught. One day, as the village was about to face certain starvation, a young fisherman decided to set out boldly into the angry sea to bring home fish and save his loved ones. However, waves destroyed his little boat, and he was quickly swallowed by the large emptiness of the ocean. As he drowned, the young man cursed the gods of the sea with his last breath. At that very moment, a large whale appeared and brought him back to the shore on his back. Overjoyed with gratitude, the villagers affectionally began to call the whale Sameuratarō. Since then, each year the whale would appear in the water of Same-ura, followed by a large swarm of sardines that the villagers could hunt. Without a doubt, the whale was a messenger of the gods, and the villagers began worshipping Sameuratarō. In fact, the whale made a pilgrimage every year to the Ise Shrine in western Japan to become a god himself.

Decades passed, until in one year, Sameuratarō did not appear. Then, one morning, the village was in an uproar. A large whale had beached near Same-ura! It was Sameuratarō but several harpoons had been driven into his body. One of them was engraved with the name of a whaling group in Kumano from the Kii Peninsula. These whalers must have struck and heavily wounded Sameuratarō when he was on his yearly pilgrimage to Ise. Doing his best to escape, the whale had struggled all the way to Same-ura, where he died on the beach, surrounded by the mourning villagers. At his death, Sameuratarō’s body turned into a large stone, which can today be found in front of the local Nishinomiya Shrine.¹

Many years later, in 1911, when Sameuratarō was only remembered in folktales, the whaling company Tōyō Hogei announced its decision to build a whaling station at Ebisu Beach, not one hundred metres away from the Nishinomiya Shrine, where one finds a three-metre-long stone half-buried in front the shrine, locally known as the ‘Sameuratarō whale stone’ (Figure 2.1).² That the shrine and the adjacent beach was dedicated to the god ‘Ebisu’ was probably considered by the whalers from western Japan as a lucky omen, as the god was in their home region known to grant good fish and whale catches. But for the locals, the location of the whaling station was a direct provocation as it was the very same beach, where Sameuratarō had, according to the local legend, died by the harpoons of western Japanese whalers. As one of the leaders of the anti-whaling faction remarked: ‘That the whaling station has been built here [at Ebisu Beach] has been fate’.³

Figure 2.1 Whale stone and Ebisu statue at Nishinomiya Shrine, Same-ura.

Photograph by the author.

As the story surrounding Sameuratarō and the whaling station in Same-ura shows us, fishermen in northeastern Japan had a different relationship to whales than their western Japanese counterparts. While dozens of whaling groups in Kii, Tosa, and Kyushu were engaged in the slaughtering of hundreds of whales each year, the people in the north mourned the death of each beached whale. Even so, in both regions, whales were closely associated to the god Ebisu, and once beached, coastal communities in the north did not hesitate to make the most out of the whale body. This chapter will explore the religious, cultural, and historical roots of the Same-ura whale stone, demonstrating how locals incorporated non-human whale agency in their religious and cultural practices. I argue that whale behaviour played a key aspect in how fishermen in western and northern Japan regarded whales. Through a close analysis of vernacular folktales and cultural practices regarding beached whales, we can reconstruct that the cetosphere played different roles along the Japanese Coast, leading to diverse representation of whales in Japanese folk religion and the coastal economies.

The Sea God Ebisu

Today, the god Ebisu (also called Hiruko or Saburo) is identified as the offspring of Izanagi and Izanami, the divine creators of Japan.⁴ According to a folk legend originating in the fifteenth century, Hiruko drifted ashore in Nishinomiya in the current Hyōgo Prefecture. Since then, he has been worshipped as a god of the sea at the local shrine. He was the patron of fishermen, sea voyagers, and shell-gatherers, who prayed to him for protection and good fish catches. At least since the seventeenth century, he has also been worshipped as a merchant god and around this time, he became one of the Seven Gods of Fortune and is often depicted beside Daikokuten, the god of the earth. Together they represent fisheries and agriculture.⁵

Since the Edo period, fishermen and merchants alike would pray to this popular Ebisu for ‘worldly benefits’ (genze riyaku), that is, the expectation of receiving tangible or intangible benefits in this world. While, in theory, one can pray for nearly every benefit – in the case of Ebisu worship these were often success in business, wealth, or good fish catches – there is a strong moral component to the prayers. While showing an effort to reach one’s goal makes it more likely that the gods will help you, greed on the other hand is often punished. For example, in his iconography, Ebisu can often be seen pulling a fat sea bream on a fishing hook. According to the religious scholars Ian Reader and George Tanabe, the use of a fishing hook instead of a net symbolises the importance to take only as much as one needs and not more. Small businessowners are in this way reminded to search financial success with good customer service instead of only maximising the short-term profit.⁶

Underneath these popular portrayals of Ebisu, however, is a more archaic version of the god buried, which I call the ‘whale Ebisu’.⁷ The historical roots of the whale Ebisu belief remain an enigma since Ebisu is the only one of the Seven Gods of Fortune who is not based on a Hindu god. In its earliest incarnation, Ebisu is described as a ‘visiting deity’ with a strong connection to the ocean. In pre-modern times, as previously discussed, fishermen would never lose sight of the island Kinkazan when leaving the coast in their small boats. This fear of the open sea is also a prominent feature of Japanese cosmology, where Japan was imagined as the centre of the world surrounded by oceans, with mythical realms lying either beyond the sea or on its bottom (where, for example, the palace of the dragon god was believed to be). The farther away from the centre one travels the greater pollution and danger. On the other hand, these far-away realms were also said to hold untold riches. Elusive messengers, of which the sea god Ebisu is the most famous, sometimes bring these riches to the people living on the Japanese islands. In this way, the open sea is at the same time a place of great danger and of great prosperity.⁸

These messengers, often marine animals, such as whales, killer whales, dolphins, but also sharks or turtles were interpreted as avatars of Ebisu or envoys under his protection. When showing reference and respect towards these ‘spirits of the sea’ (umitama), they could bring gifts from the open sea, while showing disrespect, or hunting a creature under the protection of the gods, would bring disaster to the community.⁹ These divine gifts included everything fishermen found floating on the water surface or washed ashore, for example commercial goods from shipwrecked cargo vessels, strangely shaped stones, or the appearance of a fish swarm. Even dead human bodies on the water were seen as an incarnation of Ebisu and were thought to bring good luck for catching fish.¹⁰

Whales, as the largest animals in the ocean, were especially strongly associated with Ebisu. For example, when fishing on the open sea, fishermen were not allowed to say kujira (whale) and instead had to say ebisu when referring to whales so as not to attract their displeasure.¹¹ When behaving correctly, whales would bring great riches to humans. In northeastern Japan, the belief that whales would bring good fish catches, either by indicating the location of fish schools through their presence or by actively driving fish towards the shore, was most common. As whales were connected to the gods, they could also be reasoned with to a certain degree, as the following source from the nineteenth century demonstrates:

Without whales many fish species did not come. In recent year, if you spotted a whale close to the shore and you chanted ‘ebisu’ it would swim towards the beach. Many fish were afraid of whales and stay in the bay, making it [easier for the fishermen] to catch them.¹²

Chanting ebisu, the source alludes, would attract whales to the coast, who in turn drove fish with them. In this way, we can understand how the local ecological knowledge was an amalgamation of religious beliefs, as well of observations of natural phenomena.

A second way whales were bringing riches to coastal communities was by sacrificing their bodies for human consumption and creating wealth for the communities. As discussed in the introduction, the idea that whales would let themselves be hunted if the correct religious practices were observed, was common among many ‘whale people’ in the Pacific world.¹³ In the case of early modern whaling communities in western Japan, whales would sometimes speak with whalers in dreams, allowing themselves to be hunted if certain conditions were met. However, most whales were hunted without such a direct permission and post-mortem rituals had to be conducted. Non-whaling communities, on the other hand, refrained from actively pursuing whales and only brought already injured whales to the shore or made use of beached whales, which were believed to have sacrificed their lives for the benefit of the human community.

The Hachinohe Whale Stranding Records

Among the thousands of whales that migrated each year along the Japanese coast, some inevitably ended up dying on the beach. For coastal societies, these ‘gifts’ from the ocean provided a considerable amount of protein and wealth. While the discovery of a stranded dead whale was left to chance, coastal communities could increase that chance by targeting injured or lost animals near the shore. As discussed in Chapter 1, archaeological findings and early written evidence on the Japanese Archipelago suggest that the harvest of beached whales was not a phenomenon restricted to northern Honshu but was commonplace at almost every coastal region, leading to the development of various traditions and moral frameworks surrounding beached whales.¹⁴ In western Japan, many of these traditions surrounding beached whales became part of the proto-industrial whaling culture during the Edo period, while in other regions, where organised whaling did not take root, an alternative culture on how to approach beached whales emerged.

The Sanriku Coast was one of the whale-richest regions of Tokugawa Japan, so whales did beach frequently on its shore. As domanial governments confiscated a considerable part of the profits made from a whale stranding as tax, they had a strong interest in writing down all such occurrences. In the case of the Hachinohe domain, a full record of whale strandings recorded by clerks has survived, allowing us to study the ecological and economic role whale strandings played in northern Japan. Nowadays, Hachinohe is an unspectacular industrial port city in Aomori Prefecture with some 200,000 inhabitants. At the beginning of the Edo period, Hachinohe belonged to Morioka domain (also called Nanbu domain), which had an annual revenue of 100,000 koku. In 1664, after the death of Nanbu Shigenao, the second daimyo (domanial lord) of Morioka domain, the Tokugawa Shogunate, interceded in the succession and established Hachinohe as a new, separate, smaller-sized domain of 20,000 koku. Henceforth, a fifty-kilometre coastline between the city of Hachinohe in the north and Kuji in the south belonged to this new domain.¹⁵

From the domain’s establishment in 1664 until its abolishment in 1871,¹⁶ we find seventy-four recorded entries about whales. Among those we can identify forty-two whale strandings events (some strandings warranted more than one entry), including two mass whale stranding (one in Shirogane in 1681 and one in 1818 in Kadonohama). We also know of two more mass whale strandings in neighbouring domains: the Akamae stranding of 1701 and a mass stranding in 1808 on the Shimokita Peninsula. Moreover, the records also contain entries about merchants writing petitions to receive a license for selling whale oil or bones to other domains. A close reading of the Hachinohe domain records helps us understand the importance of whale stranding for the economy of the coastal communities. While the data set is not particularly large, we can still draw a few conclusions from them. Let us first consider a typical entry:

[Kyōhō 11 (1726)] fourth day of the sixth month, clear weather

On the first day of this month, it has been reported that at the coast of Yokotehama in Taneichi one whale was washed ashore. The magistrate and the coast guard official went to the scene for a careful inspection. A man called Yaichirō from Minato village … raised 13 ryō and 100 mon and presented the money to the officials [for the whale]. The locals received one-third of the value.¹⁷

As this entry shows, when fishermen found a whale beached on their shore, they would call for the magistrate (daikan) in Hachinohe or Kuji. After an inspection on the scene the magistrate would look for a merchant who was interested in buying parts of the whale. In some cases, the whale carcass was also auctioned. In the example above, the whale was sold to Yaichirō from Minato, a village close to Hachinohe and some twenty-five kilometres away from Taneichi. We can speculate that Yaichirō must have been a wealthy merchant, as the offering of 13 ryō and 100 mon would have been enough (at least in theory) to buy food for thirteen people for a whole year. A third of this money was then given to the village, where the whale had been found, the rest was confiscated as tax. In the Sendai domain, locals often received two-thirds of the profits, but in Hachinohe the domain took normally half of the profits and in 40 per cent of the cases even two-thirds. As other entries show, this practice was not universally accepted. For example, after a whale stranding in Kofunato in 1801, locals received only one-fourth of the money, which caused civil unrest. Eventually, the domain conceded and gave them half of the whale’s value (around 20 ryō).¹⁸

On average, the domain clerks could hope to sell a whale carcass for around 18 ryō, but the prices differed greatly with a range between 1 and 55 ryō. Besides inflation and deflation of the ryō, numerous factors probably contributed to the price discrepancies: whale species, season, demand for whale products, and size of the animal. In our example, the fishermen from Yokotehama received one-third of the profit or a bit more than 4 ryō. According to Ōtsuki Heisen, a full-grown right whale could be sold in western Japan for up to 60 kanme or around 1,000 ryō, but that seems to be an extreme case.¹⁹ Recent studies have estimated that the average worth of a flensed whale by the Masutomi whaling group in Ikitsukishima in western Japan was probably more around 150 ryō.²⁰ Either way, the Hachinohe fishermen received for a stranded whale only a fraction of what a flensed whale at a whaling community would have been worth. Nevertheless, the monetary value of a stranded whale on the Sanriku Coast was still a significant amount of wealth for a fishing community and was comparable with an extraordinarily good fish catch. As the profits were distributed on a village level, sometimes several communities at once claimed the rights to a beached whale, leading to bitter conflicts between the communities. The flensing was usually done by the locals themselves, who had little experience in cutting whales. Unsurprisingly, this was often very messy and large amounts of whale liquid tended to leak out, which polluted adjacent salt farms and seaweed gathering spots.²¹

Interestingly, the frequency of the recorded whale strandings at a particular place seems to be not following a consistent pattern. Coming back to Same-ura, which is situated only four kilometres east of Hachinohe, there were six strandings between 1760 and 1824, but no recorded strandings before or after these dates. It is not clear if the lack of further records is the result of incomplete documentation or if other factors were at play here. The flensing and taking of whale meat without the oversight of the domain was forbidden and could result in severe punishments. As the fishermen had a monetary interest in avoiding the mandatory taxes to the domain, we must, however, assume that quite a few cases of whale strandings did go unreported. The research of local historian Shōbuke Susumu in the Hashikami community, for example, indicates that not every whale stranding was registered in the official domain books.²² From the data we have, a whale stranding occurred on average every five to six years in the Hachinohe domain, which meant that a given community could profit from a whale stranding directly around once per generation.

While the yearly frequency is not constant, the data indicate a certain seasonality of the whale strandings. Strandings peaked in February and March and again in May and July. In autumn and early winter, strandings were much less common, with no recorded strandings in August and November and only one stranding in December.²³ The four recorded mass whale strandings also happened in spring, between February and May. This correlates well with our present-day understanding of whale migration routes, showing that most whales travelling on the Kuroshio and Oyashio currents to the Sea of Okhotsk passed the Sanriku Coast in spring with only a few taking the same route back south in autumn. Also, sperm and sei whales, who arrived not from the south but from the east, tended to appear in spring at the Sanriku Coast. In regard to whale species, the sources are less revealing. The only species that is regularly mentioned by name are sperm whales. Sometimes the length and body proportions of the beached whales are recorded, but this alone is not enough to identify the species.

Whale strandings occurred not only in Hachinohe domain but all over the Sanriku Coast. Unfortunately, we have no complete records of the strandings in the Morioka and Sendai domains. Assuming that the frequency of stranding in Hachinohe domain is comparable to other places on the Sanriku Coast, we can estimate that during the Edo period, around 500 individual whale stranding incidents occurred, if we include the four mass whale strandings, at least 900 whales died during this time frame. However, according to a petition of fishermen from the Oshika Peninsula whale strandings occurred several times a year, indicating that the true number of whale stranding might be in the thousands.²⁴ Be that as it may, compared to the estimated 200,000 whales hunted in western Japan over the same time period, this number seems miniscule. However, we should not forget that only a tiny fraction of the whales travelling each year along the Sanriku coastline found their death on the beaches there, especially as the locals were not actively pursuing whales.

Mass Death on the Beach

While the stranding of a single whale brought modest wealth to a community, mass whale strandings could make a village rich. Let us take a closer look at such an occurrence:

In spring of 1701, the villagers of Akamae were starving. The cold and damp yamase winds from the north had destroyed the meagre crops of the coastal community in Miyako Bay. Not even the wild plants in the surrounding mountain forests grew ripe and hungry boars, deer, and rabbits descended from the hills, devastating the little that remained from the crops on the fields. Already over 26,000 people had perished in this eight-year lasting famine in the domain. For the surviving population of Akamae, rescue came eventually from the sea. On midday of 26 May 1701, a total of 139 sperm whales got lost in Miyako Bay, beaching near the village. Armed with small knives and any other cutting utensils that could be mustered, people from the village swarmed the beach and butchered the dying animals. The meat of the 139 stranded whales was sold for only two and a half ryō per animal, showing that the local economy did not possess the necessary infrastructure to absorb such large amounts of marine proteins. Nevertheless, according to the diary entry of a local official, the meat and the sperm whale oil were sold for around 300–400 ryō. The official estimated that in total a profit of around 1000 ryō was achieved, which was split between the domain and the village of Akamae. After three days of hard work, the carcasses were cleaned, and the community had not only been saved from famine but was now one of the richest communities in the region.²⁵

Present-day research indicates that mass strandings differ from single whale strandings in the fact that the individual whales caught up in the mass stranding are often healthy. These groups of whales do not appear panicked but swim calmly towards the coast. There are many theories why whales might swim in the ‘wrong’ direction, including navigational errors, ocean currents, noise, and other underwater interferences.²⁶ Interestingly, mass strandings occur more frequently among toothed whales who are organised in matrilineal hierarchies, for example, sperm whales, pilot whales, and false killer whales. These whales often swim behind a leading female whale cow and follow her onto the beach. If humans rescue a single individual and put it back in the water, the whale will swim back to the beach and strand again as long as the lead cow remains at the beach.²⁷

In the case of Miyako Bay cetaceans get entrapped, as the tubular rias is confined on three sides by land and the only natural escape route is the small entrance in the Northeast. Sperm whales inhabit most of the time in deep waters, using echolocation to orientate. However, this form of orientation does not work well in shallow waters, making it difficult for the animals to find their way out of a bay once they enter.²⁸ Therefore, we have to ask why the animals would come this close to the coast when it posed such a threat to them and was not even in their regular hunting range. Local historian Kamagasawa Isao speculated that the animals were in search for food near the coast, either small squid or sardines and chased their prey unsuspectingly into the cove during high tide without finding their way out again when the cove became shallower during the ebb. For this theory could speak that around the same period in the previous year, a great sardine catch was made in Akamae Bay, showing that sardines were common in the bay during this season.²⁹

Another possibility is that the sperm whales were themselves chased into the bay. One contemporary source cryptically hints that the sperm whales had been ‘ambushed’ on the sea. It is not clear who was responsible for such an ambush, but we can say with some certainty that it was not humans, as the language used in the historical sources refers to beached whale (yorikujira) and not whales hunted by humans (kujira-tori or hogei). But when not humans, who else would have the ability to attack sperm whales, which could not only get up to twenty metres long but could also become extremely dangerous when provoked? The most likely suspect is killer whales, who are known to attack sperm whale groups.

This theory is further supported by local ecological knowledge: In the neighbouring fishing community of Miyako, killer whales were often called ‘dragons’ (tatsu). When a good fish catch was made in Akamae Bay the Miyako fishermen credited this due to the dragon god closing off the bay to the open sea, thus trapping the fish in the bay. Based on this, we can speculate that a group of resident killer whales hunted close to Akamae and, either intentionally or unintentionally, drove fish into the bay and trapped them there. In the case of the Akamae mass stranding of 1701, these killer whales might have startled a group of foraging sperm whales, who, in a panic, fled also into the bay, where they found their demise in the shallow waters.³⁰

Killer whales being responsible for driving whales towards the shore and eventually causing them to beach was a well-known occurrence on the Sanriku Coast. Indeed, it is here where the proverb kujira no shachi no yō (like an orca to a whale) exists, which describes someone who persists in hurting somebody without letting go.³¹ Similarly, the indigenous Ainus from Ezo also believed that stranded whales were a gift from the gods and because the orcas were hunting whales, the orcas were described as the ‘gods of the whales’.³² In this interpretation, it was the orcas who brought the whales to the beach, like the whales themselves brought sardines closer to the shore.

Looking at the Hachinohe domain records we see that orca attacks on whales were given in five cases as the reason for whale strandings. Interestingly, all five of these cases happened late in the Edo period – between 1828 and 1864 – when only seven whale stranding occurred in total. One interpretation as to why we have no earlier reports of killer whale attacks could be that the cultural importance of orcas increased only over time and in earlier centuries the domain clerks were more interested in reporting the economic impact of whale strandings than their surrounding circumstances. However, there is also an alternative interpretation. In the early nineteenth century, whale strandings decreased in frequency, especially if we exclude the two mass whale strandings in 1808 and 1818. Between 1835 and 1853 not a single beaching is recorded. As we will discuss in later chapters, whale sightings decreased in this time period in general at the Sanriku Coast. Curiously, a similar phenomenon can also be seen in the European North Sea, where a study found not a single sperm whale stranding recorded between 1829 and 1913. In this case, European and American whaling was identified as the most likely culprit for the disappearance of sperm whales.³³ Seen in this light, it becomes quite important that five of the seven whale strandings in this time period were caused by killer whales. The increased whaling activities of western Japanese net whaling groups and American pelagic whalers most likely caused a drop in the sperm whale population, leading also in a drop of whale strandings at the Sanriku Coast. Moreover, the remaining whales were apparently more often attacked by killer whales than before, indicating a shift in the killer whale behaviour.

Whale Stones on the Sanriku Coast

The death of whales was often commemorated with so-called whale stones, as it also appears in the folktale of Sameuratarō. In her 2018 study, Mayumi Itoh identified 156 whale graves and related monuments all over the Japanese Archipelago, and it is believed that many more have existed in older times.³⁴ While Itoh and other Japanese folklorists make no difference between whale memorial stones and whale stones, I suggest that many whale stones in northeastern Japan were originally ‘Ebisu stones’ that differ in their religious meaning from whale memorial stones. Ebisu stones usually come in two varieties: they were either strangely shaped stones found at a beach or they were smaller stones from the bottom of the ocean, fishermen from Kyushu and the Sanriku Coast found sometimes entangled in their nets.³⁵ These stones were believed to be infused with the spirit of Ebisu.

We can find many traces of the first variety of Ebisu stones on the Sanriku Coast. For example, in Shiranuka on the Shimokita Peninsula in northern Aomori Prefecture, an Ebisu stone existed near the village. After a successful fish catch, locals would donate two sardines to Ebisu at the stone, as they believed whales and orcas had helped them during the hunt.³⁶ Other Ebisu stones can be found in Yoriiso and Samenoura (both on the Oshika Peninsula) and on Ajishima.³⁷ Some of these stones were probably taken to the shrines because of their unusual shape and only later brought in connection with whales, while others were erected in order to commemorate a stranded whale, as they wished to praise the whale for giving his life so that the people could collect the meat.³⁸ These whale stones often commemorated a specific (mass) whale stranding and shrine priests did hold yearly rituals to thank the whales for their sacrifice.³⁹

Whale stones are most prominent at the Osaki Shrine in Karakuwa near Kesennuma, a fishing port in the northern part of the former Sendai domain and today’s Miyagi Prefecture. The city centre lies deep in one of the rias of the Sanriku Coast and is protected from the open ocean by the island of Ōshima in the south and the Karakuwa Peninsula in the east. The most southern edge of the Karakuwa Peninsula is called ‘Osaki Misaki’ and fishermen used the distinctive shape of this cape as a point of orientation when leaving the coast for fishing. The Osaki Shrine of Karakuwa is located at the most southern edge of the cape. According to legend, the construction of the shrine goes back to the fourteenth century when a member of the Ōji family, who reigned over the Obi-Hyūga province in Kyushu (today’s Miyazaki Prefecture) gave up his territory. He intended to rescue the Osaki Shrine of his hometown from civil war and bring it to a safe and remote location. The legend goes that a white whale guided Ōji and his men to Osaki Misaki in Karakuwa, where they rebuilt the shrine in 1308.⁴⁰

This is not the only story that connects this shrine with a mysterious whale occurrence. According to the shrine’s records, in the fifth month of Kansei 12 (1800), the merchant Ōsukaya Yasushirō was transporting rice on his boat Toyoyoshi-maru from Sendai domain to Edo when a storm hit him and his sixteen crewmen. Taken by winds and currents, the ship drifted southeast into the open sea for two days and the crew lost all hope of ever returning to land. Suddenly, a large group of whales spearheaded by a majestic white whale appeared around the boat. The whales pushed the boat back towards the coast, saving the merchant and his crew. After his miraculous rescue, the merchant went to the Osaki Shrine and donated money to erect a whale stone.⁴¹ At the Osaki Shrine, whales were considered messengers of the gods and it was explicitly forbidden to hunt or eat them. When whales became stranded in Kesennuma Bay, the shrine officials conducted memorial services for the souls of the whales and offered sacred sake and sardines. Figures of Ebisu and Daikokuten can also be found at Osaki Shrine.⁴²

We can also find material objects directly related to whales at the shrine. Fifty metres from the entrance is a row of erected stones, at least two of which are whale stones. The engraving on the first stone reveals that the stone was erected in the fourth month of 1810 and was dedicated by fifty fishermen to a whale stranded in Tadakoshi Bay. They wanted the whale to find peace in the afterlife. The other, smaller whale stone to the right was set up for another stranded whale in the same bay in 1835.⁴³ The two whale stones at Osaki Shrine have a peculiar shape. The larger stone on the left has a distinct hole like a vulva at the bottom, while the top of the right stone is phallus-shaped. Locals have explained that these stones represent the large sex organs of whales, which were believed to increase fertility. Although there are no further primary sources, local historians speculate that fishermen (and their wives) prayed at these whale stones when wishing for children.⁴⁴

The second variety of Ebisu stones, the one entangled in nets, are harder to find in written sources or as material objects. One prominent example comes from a different retelling of the Same-ura whale stone tale, which has been recorded by the local historian Satō Ryōichi:

Onaiji-sama, the master of whales, had lived before the coast of the village Same-ura. He brought the sardines closer to the coast, granting the fishermen large catches. Every year he travelled to the Kumano Shrine in Wakayama Prefecture. There he swallowed one stone and carried it back to Same-ura to turn into a god. One year, the chief of a whaling group from Ise had a strange dream: In the dream, Onaiji told the whaler that he had come to Kumano for 33 times and that he would turn into this year a fish god. He urged the whaler to spare him this year as well, so he could fulfil his ambition. As a way of gratitude, he would let himself be captured by the whaler in the next year. The whaler, however, ignored the appeal and went out the next day to the sea to catch an unusual large whale. However, all the fishermen who ate the meat of this whale died an unexpected death. In July 1874, a citizen of Same-ura made a pilgrimage to the Ise Shrine. He slept in a Ryokan, and as the innkeeper heard his client is from the province of Nanbu [Hachinohe], he told him about the unfortunate end of Onaiji-sama.⁴⁵

While this version fails to explain how the whale stone at Nishinomiya Shrine near Ebisu Beach came to be, we have here a different association to Ebisu stones. In the Sameuratarō tale it is the body of the injured and stranded whale itself that petrifies and becomes a whale stone, while in the Onaiji-sama version, the whale has to swallow each year a stone from the bottom of the ocean near the Kumano Shrine, explaining why the whale made the dangerous pilgrimage to a region that was known for whaling.⁴⁶ These stones are a clear reference to smaller Ebisu stones that fishermen sometimes find entangled in their nets when fishing. According to this tale, when a whale gulps thirty-three of these stones from the ocean bottom, he becomes a god, indicating that not every whale is automatically a god of the sea but has the potential to become one if he takes the spirit of Ebisu into his body by swallowing stones from the ocean bottom. The motivation of becoming a god seems to protect the community of Same-ura and as after his ascension to godhood he is no longer in need of a physical body, he would have allowed the whalers to take his body. Unfortunately, whalers from Kumano caught the whale prematurely, despite being warned in a dream, and were in turn struck with a ‘whale curse’.

The Dreaming Whalers in Western Japan

One of the most curious elements of the Onaiji-sama folktale is the inclusion of whaler from western Japan for whom a whale appears in his dream. Indeed, as a closer look reveals, this was a common trope in many western Japanese whaling folktales. For example, on the Gotō Islands, there was the story of Yamada Monkurō, the chief of the Uku Island whaling group, who dreamed in 1716 of a female whale. In the dream, the whale told Monkurō that she was on a pilgrimage to the Daihō Temple with her offspring and begged the chief not to capture them. The next day, Monkurō gave the order not to hunt any whales; however, the season had been poor and many of his people had debts they wanted to pay off before the new year. When they sighted a blue whale with a calf, they ignored the order and went out to hunt them. The whale fought back and a storm took the whalers off guard, drowning seventy-two of them. Faced with this tragedy, Monkurō gave up whaling and established a sake business. In a local temple on Uku island, a memorial stupa can be found for the drowned whalers.⁴⁷

A similar folktale is also attached to a whale memorial stone in Shiro-ura (today Kihoku, Mie Prefecture), which was erected in 1759 at the local Jōrin Temple. According to this tale, a high priest of the temple had in the year before been visited in his dream by a pregnant whale, who begged to the priest to spare her, until she had given birth to her child in the South Sea. The whale would then allow herself to be seized by the local whalers on her way back. However, the priest failed to warn the whalers in time, and they caught a pregnant right whale the next day. Soon afterward, the village was struck with a plague. In order to lift the ‘whale curse’ the whalers made a large donation to the temple and asked the head priest to bury the whale and make a funeral service to appease the soul of the whale. Additional annual memorial services were conducted over the next two hundred years for the whale.⁴⁸

As these examples show, whale memorial stones in western Japan can often be found in the vicinity of whaling communities and were erected to appease the angry souls of whales that had been killed by the whalers to avert a potential ‘whale curse’ that could bring misfortune to the community. Another peculiarity of the whale memorial stones in whaling regions is that many of the memorial stones were dedicated to whale fetuses or whale calves. Often whaling groups forbade the slaughtering of whale mothers with calves as the mothers would defend their children, making the hunt much riskier. Also, when the flensing of a whale sometimes revealed that the whale had been pregnant, the whalers often expressed remorse for the fetus who did not have the chance to experience life and erected a whale memorial stone for it.⁴⁹

In Buddhism, all living creatures possess a soul that can come back to haunt the living upon death. The killing of animals was considered a sin and the idea of pollution also played a central role in everyday religious practices. For example, birth and death caused pollution and everyone that came into contact with this form of pollution needed to be purified in a religious ritual. As Shmuel Eisenstadt pointed out, pollution beliefs were centred around social taboos, which could be broken as long as the appropriate purification rituals were used afterwards to restore the former ‘clean’ state.⁵⁰ Accordingly, fishermen and whalers were ranked low in the social hierarchy of western Japan as their occupation included the taking of life. Deities would only visit a community that was in a state of purity, otherwise disaster would occur. Purification rituals therefore played a crucial role in the western coastal communities and Arne Kalland estimated that about 5 to 10 per cent of the potential fishing days were lost due to purification festivals.⁵¹

Western Japanese fishermen and whalers performed memorial services and erected memorial stones not only to appease the souls of people lost at sea but also to appease the souls of all the animals they had killed. These rituals expressed the gratitude of the fishermen that the animals had given up their life for the survival of the human community and to guide them to their next life. The most elaborate rituals were held for whales, who also received posthumous names in the local temples.⁵² Arch noted that while other nonhuman animals were also sometimes granted a memorial stone, whales were the only nonhumans to receive Buddhist names in death registers.⁵³

Whale memorial stones and Buddhist death register entries for whales were not known on the Sanriku Coast prior to the introduction of industrial whaling in 1906. But we find other elements of western whaling culture on the Sanriku Coast, such as an inversion of the dreaming whaler story. We can speculate that the Onaiji-sama folktale was originally one of the many retellings of the dreaming whaler folktale that was adapted over time to Hachinohe, a non-whaling region. In western Japan, the story was a warning to whalers not to be too greedy and to wait for the right time to catch a whale. This message made little sense in Hachinohe, however, where whales were not hunted actively. Here, whales fulfilled a different role by bringing wealth to the community, either by attracting fish or by sacrificing their own bodies during a whale beaching. Underneath the religious notion of whale Ebisu, whales are framed as positive forces of nature that help mankind. The death of Onaiji-sama is not caused by the Same-ura fishermen, but by the whalers from the Kii Peninsula who ignored the warnings of the whale. This tale shows that the inhabitants of Hachinohe were aware of the different traditions surrounding whales in the whaling regions.

The Origin of the Same-ura Whale Stone

After having discussed various legends surrounding the whale stone in Same-ura and its possible connection to western whaling practices, let us investigate the historical records a bit closer. It appears that the stone is closely connected to the mass whale stranding of 1818. At this time, 118 large whales beached, for no apparent reason, along the coast of the Hachinohe domain. This event left a distinctive cultural and religious mark for the involved fishing communities. The carcasses of the beached whales could be found between Shirahama in the north and Taneichi in the south, a distance of thirty kilometres, but most of the whales, ninety-five, stranded near the village of Kadonohama. The community of Kadonohama used their share of the money from the selling of whale meat to set up a new Shrine to show their gratitude. For the inauguration of the Whale Province Shrine (kujirasū jinsha) they performed a ceremony in which they moved an aspect of the Goddess Benzaiten from Kinkazan to the new shrine.⁵⁴

According to the local historian Shōbuke Taneyasu, the mass beaching of 1818 also intrigued Nanbu Nobumasa (1780–1847), the eighth domanial lord of Hachinohe. One of the whales had beached in Same-ura at a place called ‘Buddha Beach’ (hotoke hama). Nearby and just a few hundred metres off the island of the famous Kabushima Shrine was a peculiar stone that the locals nicknamed the ‘Buddha stone’ (hotoke ishi). When Nobumasa heard of this stone, he suspected a connection between the mass whale stranding and the Buddha stone. He ordered an investigation for looking at the old records of the domain to find the origin of the stone. One of his retainers discovered an entry in the Hachinohe-han kanjōsho nikki (Diary of the Hachinohe Domain Treasury), according to which, in 1736, a captain of a trade ship from Osaka had been harbouring with his ship near Hachinohe. One day, the captain had a curious dream in which the stone sculpture of a Jizō spoke to him.⁵⁵ The Jizō statue explained that he had ascended from the ocean to the land and that the captain should come to him to pray. When the captain ignored the dream, and tried to leave Hachinohe the next day, strong winds prevented him from leaving the harbour. Remembering the dream, the captain searched for the statue and found a stone near Kabushima Shrine that resembled a man. He prayed to the stone thinking it might be the incarnation of Buddha and soon after his ship was able to leave. The locals have since called the stone ‘Buddha stone’ and the adjunct beach ‘Buddha Beach’. They started praying to the stone and were rewarded with good fish catches.

Nobumasa was fascinated by this story and wanted to see this mysterious stone for himself. The form of the stone reminded him of Kotoshironushi-no-mikoto, an indigenous god associated with Ebisu. As Ebisu had a close connection to whales and the mass stranding had occurred near this stone, he announced that the stone should be called ‘Ebisu stone’ and the beach ‘Ebisu Beach’. He donated three boxes of sake to the stone and wrote a poem praising the stone for protecting fishing and trade ships and making the region prosperous.⁵⁶

Shōbuke Taneyasu research on the Same-ura whale stone illustrates how cultural meaning and traditions surrounding a material object can shift and distort over time. What the locals once knew as a ‘Buddha stone’, was renamed ‘Ebisu stone’ by Nobumasa after the 1818 mass beaching, only to become eventually known as ‘whale stone’. Interestingly, even in its earliest inception, fishermen prayed to the stone apparently to receive good fish catches, in this regard it is possible that already at that time a connection between Ebisu and/or whales had existed for the locals. Another element that would be reused in the Onaiji-sama folktale was again the element of receiving a prophetic vision while dreaming. In the Hachinohe-han kanjōsho nikki it was a ship captain having such a dream, while in the Onaiji-sama version, it was a whaler from Kumano.

The Cetosphere and the Two Whale Cultures

As we have seen throughout this chapter, comparing cultural representations of whales from western whaling places to the ones in the Sanriku region highlights some striking discrepancies. On a superficial level, we find that whale graves were erected in all regions to honour the souls of dead whales, but if we look more closely, we can see that these whale graves were built for different reasons. In the west, whale memorial stones were erected for whales killed by whalers, often to appease the angry spirit of a whale mother, whereas on the Sanriku Coast, whale stones were mainly erected for stranded whales.

Sanriku folktales focused on the aspect of whales bringing wealth from the sea and saving humans in peril: we have discussed the story of Sameuratarō saving a young fisherman from drowning or the story about a white whale saving the merchant Ōsukaya Yasushirō and his crew from drifting offshore. Documented cases of whales saving other species, including humans, make these stories at least plausible, however.⁵⁷ For example, in 2009, scientists recorded how humpback whales had saved a seal on an ice floe from a killer whale attack and in early 2018, a marine biologist claimed that she had been saved by a humpback whale from a tiger shark attack.⁵⁸ Similar behaviours have also been reported for dolphins.⁵⁹ These recent examples suggest that Sanriku fishermen might have observed similar behaviour and then expressed these events in folktales and historical recordings.

Why do we encounter so many stories of whales helping humans in the Northeast but not in the western Japan? Why are there not more stories about whales bringing fish closer to the shore in the whaling regions? Indeed, in the western Japanese folktales, whales appear mostly as lone swimmers migrating along the coast, neither interacting with fish nor with humans. Only when the whales or their calves were attacked did they defend themselves fiercely. One anthropogenic interpretation would be that the western whalers only regarded whales as prey and were not interested in recording alternative whale behaviour that did not fit this framework. Even worse, if they admitted that whales were helping humans, then this would further jeopardise their moral right to hunt them. This interpretation alone is unsatisfactory, however. Why would only the Sanriku fishermen recognise that whales were essential for bringing fish to the shore? Let us instead look at the behaviour of the whales during their migration along the Japanese Coast.

As noted, many baleen whale species migrate along the Japanese archipelago from the warm breeding places in the tropics to the cold but nutrient-rich arctic waters in the Sea of Okhotsk. During the migration following the ocean currents, most whales prefer to remain close to shallow waters and even orientate themselves using underwater landmarks. The whaling places in western Japan were all situated near places where whales would regularly come close to the shore during their migration. This also makes it clear why no whaling places were established in the Bungō Strait between Shikoku and Kyushu as most whales used a different migration route with better currents and orientation points.

The whaling season in western Japan during the Edo period was from early winter to spring when whales were travelling in both directions; however, whales would not waste time in these waters but move on as fast as possible, rarely pausing to hunt and instead living off their blubber reserves.⁶⁰ This behaviour explains why the whales were not seen hunting sardines in western Japan as often.⁶¹ In folktales from these regions, whales were imagined as being in the middle of their pilgrimage. This might have its origin in their migration to the southern calving grounds or to the northern feeding places. Also, in spring, whale mothers often travelled for the first time with their calves to bring them to the feeding grounds and pass on the knowledge of the migration route to their offspring.⁶²

Farther north on their journey, the baleen whales changed their behaviour. The first reports of whales driving sardines closer to the shores are from the Izu Peninsula, a region the north-bound whales would reach in early spring. When approaching the Sea of Kinkazan a few weeks later, this behaviour was even more pronounced. Here, in the ‘perturbed region’ of the Oyashio and Kuroshio currents, the baleen whales would, for the first time in months, hunt zooplankton and small fish for a few weeks. Indeed, the feeding rate of migrating baleen whales is ten times higher during the summer than during the rest of the year.⁶³ After the first hunting break on the Sanriku Coast, baleen whales would then leave again in early summer for their destination in the Sea of Okhotsk. As the perturbed region was in the open sea, the whales had to leave behind the shallow waters for their hunting. They often returned to the coast, however, with sardine shoals before them, as we will explore in the next chapter.

Sei whales lived most of the time in the open sea and reached the Japanese Coast near the perturbed region near the Sanriku Coast for hunting during the spring months. Similarly, toothed sperm whales would have been hunting squid in the deep sea (up to 2,000 metres) far away from the coast but would also have come to the perturbed region in spring to hunt sardines and anchovy.⁶⁴ Therefore, only these whale species were observed by the Sanriku fishermen, and their behaviour might have been different to that of the whales migrating along the coast. This could also explain why the whales, who were now fed and more active would be more willing to help humans in peril.

Conclusion

Whales, as the messenger or helpers of Ebisu or the dragon god, brought many benefits to the human communities, and their bodies, as containers of nutrients and wealth, were no exception. This chapter has further complicated our understanding of how humans and whales have interacted at the Sanriku Coast. A non-lethal whale culture does not automatically mean that whales were not harvested at all, but rather, that it was done more responsibly, in accordance with what the humans interpreted as the wishes of the whales. While western Japanese whalers were always eager to maximise their profits, Sanriku fishermen took only from the cetosphere what was given to them, perpetuating a more ecological sustainable system of whale harvests. However, both communities depended in the end on the same whale stocks, thus, the western Japanese excesses were likely also responsible for a drop in whale stranding at the end of the Edo period.

The origin of the different whale cultures on the Japanese Archipelago can probably be found in geographic particularities, but, even more interesting, also in the behaviour that baleen whales expressed along their migration near the Japanese coast. In western Japan, whales mostly swam through the coastal waters on their way north or south without stopping for extended periods to hunt. Whales were not an integral part of the western Japanese coastal ecosystems and whalers could hunt them with only a small risk of disturbing other fisheries. Their main concern was the ‘whale curse’ as some whales, especially whale mothers, fiercely fought to protect their calves. Furthermore, the consumption of raw whale meat bore the risk of food poisoning. Building whale monuments and performing memorial services for the whales was one way to protect against this ‘whale curse’.

Further north, whales showed different behaviours as they hunted small fish or fed on zooplankton. The fishermen here learned that having whales around benefited them as they indicated the presence of fish and could even bring the fish closer to the shore. When a whale beached, the fishermen in the north did not hesitate to make use of the carcasses and they expressed their gratitude through the erection of whale monuments or donations to shrines. The distinctive behaviour of the whales was also reflected in local folktales as part of their moral worldview. This shows us that humans experienced the cetosphere quite differently depending on how whales behaved in a certain region.

There are recurring aspects in the whale folktales, like the dream sequence that can be found in the folktales of both whaling and non-whaling regions, but the underlying messages and implications of the stories vary. Carving out these vernacular differences has been further complicated by modern interpretations of whale folktales ignoring the regional differences in favour of a national Japanese whaling culture. The examination of the Same-ura whale stone is an excellent example of how the cultural meaning of a material object can change over time.

3 Bringing Sardines to the Shore

In spring of 1677, fishermen from the hamlet Kōbuchi on the Oshika Peninsula met one of their gods. While looking for cod fish, the fishermen had ventured out onto the open sea, keeping the island of Kinkazan as a last connection to the realm of men always in sight. South of Kinkazan, they found a dead whale drifting on the water. Overjoyed with gratitude, the fishermen might have thanked the gods of the sea over this unexpected gift. They knotted the carcass to their boats and brought it back to the village. Here they flensed the animal as good as they could and found a merchant who was willing to buy the whale meat. Even after paying the tax to the Sendai domain, they still had a considerable amount of money left.

However, soon thereafter the trouble began. One of the newly arrived foreigners from the faraway domain of Kii, a man called Kondō Kihei, went to the local magistrate and the district headman and claimed that he and his crew had hunted this whale before it got away mortally wounded. Therefore, half of the profit should belong to them. To the dismay of the locals, the magistrate judged in Kihei’s favour and the fishermen had no other choice but to give away their newly earned fortune. This did go against all conventions on the Oshika Peninsula, as a drifting whale always belonged to the group who had found it. It was clear that Kihei would lay claim to every drifting whale from now on. This confrontation was just the latest of many grievances the locals had against the outsiders from Kii that had recently begun to hunt fish and whales in the region. For the first time in recorded history, all forty-four fishing communities of the Oshika Peninsula set aside their internal differences and composed together a petition to the magistrate in Ishinomaki, demanding the immediate suspension of all bonito fishing and whaling by the Kii groups. For the Oshika fishermen, there was much more at stake than just the banning of unwanted competition. Without whales, their whole livelihood was in danger.

The whaling dispute of 1677 stood at the beginning of the slow transition from subsistence fishing to the proto-industrialisation of sardine and bonito fertiliser production at the Sanriku Coast. The transfer to a different economic system required a new evaluation of how humans perceived, lived, and made use of their local environment. As I will argue in this chapter, the Oshika fishing communities believed that the cetosphere was crucial to conduct proto-industrial fishing with the tools and technologies they had at their disposal. In their eyes, the killing of whales directly threatened the socio-economic and ecological survival of the village. It did not matter for the fishermen whether whales competed for the same fish resources as humans, as without whales, fish were just too far away from the coast to be caught with methods the fishing communities had available. Rather than seeing proto-industrial marine fertiliser production or whaling as independent activities, the locals regarded these two activities as directly related. Pursuing both at the same time could potentially disturb the delicate ecological balance and lead to negative ramifications for the coastal communities’ fishing endeavour. The interweaving of ecological conservational thought with socio-economic and cultural practices aimed at securing long-term sustainability of marine resources.¹ The 1677 petition helps us to reconstruct the ecological knowledge the Oshika fishermen held in regard to whales, broadening our understanding of how proto-industrial fishing was deeply intertwined with the well-being of the cetosphere. Furthermore, a close reading of the petition reveals how Oshika fishermen did not regard the ocean as a static uniform entity. Instead, they divided it into several spatial spheres in which humans, fish, and whales played different roles.

Fishing Disputes on the Oshika Peninsula

Like most early modern societies, the Oshika communities had a deeply moral view of how economy and ecology were interconnected. Rural communities embedded their ecological worldview in a web of vernacular traditions, moral values, and religious beliefs. The resulting practices did not appear out of nowhere nor did they remain unchanged over time but were in constant flux. Thus, the local ecological knowledge of a community was constantly renegotiated not only among its members but also with its neighbours, higher political authorities and even with the environment itself. The process of renegotiating a moral framework was not harmonious, but rather came about in a series of conflicts as groups and individuals with different interests and expectations towards the use of the environment clashed.

An illuminating genre of sources that highlight these renegotiations in early modern Japan is petitions. Petitions were letters written by commoners or their representatives to the next higher authorities in the domanial hierarchy.² When disputes among commoners could not be solved locally or when criminal activities were discovered, commoners could write petitions to the authorities, who then acted as judges. Petitions could also contain requests directed at the authorities, for example for lowering taxes after a bad harvest. Writing a petition was not without danger, however. A group of petitioners not only risked being ignored by the higher authorities but even faced the possibility to be punished if their request was perceived to transgress the boundaries of the social order. Especially precarious were situations when commoners were at odds with their direct domanial superiors, as they were often not allowed – under the threat of death – to appeal to even higher authorities, circumventing the direct hierarchy.³ As this practice allowed corruption and mismanagement among lower governmental retainers, some domains began installing petition boxes, where commoners could appeal directly to a daimyo or even the shogun, without the fear of being punished.⁴

To understand the importance of the 1677 petition we have first to take a closer look at the social and political situation on the Oshika Peninsula (Figure 3.1), which was part of the Sendai domain and adjacent to the port city of Ishinomaki. In 1698 around 15,000 people lived in and around Ishinomaki, while the 44 coastal communities on the Oshika Peninsula and the surrounding islands had a total population of around 10,000.⁵ The highest political authority in the region was the Ishinomaki magistrate (daikan), a low-ranking samurai working for the domanial government. He was responsible for taxation and jurisdiction over four districts (kumi; lit. groups): the inland district of Kugazama and the three coastal districts of Onagawa, Kitsunezaki, and Kuganari, the latter three all on the Oshika Peninsula. Each district was managed by a district headman (ōkimoiri), who was elected by his peers from the commoner class. District headmen were the direct link between the samurai and commoners’ class, and it was often them, who wrote the petitions to the magistrate.⁶ Beneath them, was the village headman (kimoiri), who allocated the collective tax burden among the villagers and settled minor disputes.⁷ Similar to district headmen, village headmen were also elected for life and could only be dismissed from their position by orders of the domain because of illness or old age. As can be expected, it was usually the most wealthy and influential individuals in a village or district who were chosen for their position by their peers, and as we will see in the next chapter the title of village and district headman became often a de facto hereditary title.

Figure 3.1 Map of the Oshika Peninsula in the Early Modern Period

Economically, the coastal districts were focused almost solely on the exploitation of the rich coastal ecosystem, even though most villages had a few small fields near the village. Among the most common marine resources harvested were abalone, octopus, various smaller fish, tuna, and occasionally even dolphins. Most fishing was done near the shore with trap nets, but to hunt some species, the fishermen had to travel to the sea near the sacred island of Kinkazan, a little east of the peninsula. Another source of income was the production of salt, which was won by vaporising seawater. This method required substantial amounts of firewood, however, which became scarce by the end of the seventeenth century.⁸

Because of their dependence on coastal and marine resources, the Oshika communities had a vital interest in securing access to the coastal ecosystem as well as protecting the marine resources against overuse. A local law book from 1741 details that the land, coastline, and sea surrounding a coastal community was exclusively harvested by the closest community, while everything out on the open sea was considered under the common stewardship by all communities, called iriai (common ground).⁹ The oceanographer Yanagi Tetsuo argued that the iriai was an early example of how coastal communities could increase the productivity and biodiversity of a coastal ecosystem through careful management of the marine resources.¹⁰ He argued that the Japanese iriai often avoided the ‘tragedy of the commons’ trap, that is, the overexploitation of common resources caused by human actors seeking to maximise their profit, by allowing only a few communities to enter the iriai, while rules concerning the period of harvest and the methods of the harvest had to be rigorously followed.¹¹ In the eyes of the locals, they had a moral obligation to follow these conservation rules, unless they wanted to face starvation a few years later. If we follow Yanagi’s argument, the Oshika iriai system seems to be an illuminating example of how moral-based rules contributed to a sustainable harvest of marine resources. If we take a closer look, however, cracks appear in this image.

For example, by the nineteenth century, the continued expansion of the fish fertiliser economy and other marine proto-industries slowly diminished the fish stocks at the Oshika Peninsula.¹² This was partly because the natural fluctuations in sardine abundance caused by inter-decadal shifts in water temperature made it more difficult to notice an overall drop in long-term sardine catches.¹³ This situation has been called the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ because scientists (or fishermen) naturally orientate themselves to the baseline ecosystem they experienced when they started their observations and the next generation of observers again sets the temporal baseline at the start of their careers.¹⁴ Changes over several generations, such as smaller fish stocks, often go unnoticed and the baseline of the targeted stock of each generation becomes smaller than that of the previous generation.¹⁵

Moreover, the iriai system was far from clearly defined and was the cause of constant disputes and conflicts. Not only was it often unclear where the exclusive zone of one village ended and that of another began, even inside an iriai some communities proclaimed to have the exclusive right to harvest a certain resource or use a certain fishing technique, while the harvest of other marine resources were considered unrestricted, as long as a community possessed the right to access the iriai.¹⁶ Alone in the Kitsunezaki district over thirty conflicts between villages, were recorded in the form of petitions.¹⁷ Interestingly, petitions only covered disputes between communities. Conflicts inside a community were resolved locally by the village headmen. Even though some of the communities had fewer than fifty households, petitions were used to strengthen the internal cohesion by reconfirming the independence from other communities.¹⁸

Conflicts often started when one community began to harvest marine resources at a new spot or with a new technique that infringed on the perceived traditional rights of another community. For example, in 1664, the fishermen from Ōhara caught ten dolphins with a dragnet (hikiami) in the iriai a bit offshore.¹⁹ However, the dolphins had been directly heading towards a fixed tuna net installed by fishermen from Kyūbun closer at the coast. Therefore, the Kyūbun fishermen argued that without the Ōhara people interfering, the dolphins would have been caught by them inside their exclusive fishing zone. The conflict was settled when five of the ten captured dolphins were given to the Kyūbun fishermen.²⁰ This example illustrates the moral component of the iriai system. One could have argued that the Ōhara fishermen were in their rights to hunt these dolphins as the animals were at the time of capture in the open sea, and therefore free to take for anyone. However, as the dolphins would have entered soon into the exclusive fishing zone of the Kyūbun fishermen, it became a moral obligation that at least a part of the catch was given to these fishermen. In this way, both involved communities profited from the catch. On the other hand, it seems that the Ōhara fishermen had initially not volunteered half of the catch but needed to be forced to do so after a petition was put forward. Nevertheless, this new precedent determined the correct moral behaviour for similar situations in the future. Thus, a more or less fair allocation of marine resources laid at the core of these rules, which were negotiated through disputes, often in the form of petitions.

The Arrival of the Kii Fishermen

As we have discussed in Chapter 1, Kii fishermen followed the whale pilgrimage around the Japanese Archipelago since the early seventeenth century. While their fleets were quite successful in the west, their travels east on the Kuroshio were met with more local resistance. For example, on the Bōsō Peninsula east of the capital Edo, the Kii fleet successfully introduced new fishing techniques, such as the beach seine (jibikiami), where a long net lying in the coastal water is pulled to the beach by two groups of fishermen.²¹ After 1630, between forty and fifty sardine and bonito fishing ships from Kii were operating off the cape of Chōshi between spring and autumn each season.²² However, with the growth of the capital Edo came an increased demand for marine products in the Kanto plain. The Kii fishermen, who sold their products in the Kansai region, were seen as unwanted competitors and conflicts regarding the harvest of the marine resources began to increase.²³ The locals prevailed and instead of delivering fish fertiliser and other marine products to Kansai, they sold it directly in Edo. The Kii fishermen had no other choice than to look for new fishing grounds in the north. However, here their expansion was severely limited for the time being, as crossing the cape of Chōshi, where the Kuroshio meandered into the open ocean, was extremely dangerous. Thus, reaching the undeveloped Sanriku Coast and eventually Ezo was a considerable challenge.²⁴

Even less successful were the Kii groups with the introduction of whaling techniques in the east. As I will discuss later in the chapter, fierce resistance on the Izu Peninsula, prevented the establishment of proto-industrial whaling in the region. Only in Katsuyama on the southern tip of the Bōsō Peninsula was a new harpoon whaling group founded in 1655. Unlike their counterparts in western Japan, however, these whalers focused on Baird’s beaked whales, a species otherwise rarely hunted. It is, therefore, unclear to what degree – if at all – Kii whaling knowledge influenced the formation of this group.²⁵

A first attempt to cross the dangerous cape of Chōshi was made by Kii fishermen in 1654 when a Kii boat reached the city Miyako on the Sanriku Coast but in 1661, all eight crewmen of one such ship from Kii were lost in a storm.²⁶ Traditionally, cargo was unloaded at Chōshi and shipped via a nearby river, but as Edo grew and more commercial goods were imported from the northern domains, this became less practical every year. In 1667, Nanbu Naofusa, the first daimyo of the newly established Hachinohe domain, navigated around the cape of Chōshi to reach Edo. With this, he not only demonstrated the shipping power of Hachinohe but also that a safe passage around the cape was possible.²⁷ Just three years later, in 1670, the merchant Kawamura Zuiken found a safe sea-route around the cape of Chōshi. Together with the new sea-route through the Tsugaru Strait (between Ezo and Honshu), which merchants from the Akita domain had found in 1655, the Northeast was now connected to Edo and subsequently Osaka.²⁸

The discovery of the safe sea-route around the cape of Chōshi allowed the Kii fishermen to expand to the Northeast. In 1671, a trader from the Morioka domain invited ten fishermen from the Kii Peninsula to introduce new techniques for bonito fishing to the region. In the following years, Kii groups arrived for the first time in the Sea of Kinkazan, just off the Oshika Peninsula. Shortly after arriving in the region, the Kii groups introduced the beach seine and the tongue-tie-net (kojitaami) that trapped sardines in a bag-like net. The latter technique used four boats with ten fishermen on each one and could be used wherever sardines were found, but it produced a much smaller harvest than a full beach seine. The locals quickly adopted both techniques and sardine fertiliser became the first proto-industrial product of the Sanriku Coast.²⁹ Some locals immediately saw the benefits of learning these techniques and invited Kii fishermen to their village, as recorded on the Hei Coast in Morioka domain.³⁰

Far more controversial than sardine fishing, however, was the introduction of bonito fishing. When the influential Kodate family from the Karakuwa Peninsula near Kesennuma in Sendai domain invited a group of over ninety Kii fishermen to their village in 1675, the fishermen from the surrounding villages drafted a petition complaining that these foreigners were using too much firewood and food while taking away the bonito stock from the locals. The Kodate family countered with their own petition explaining that the Kii fishermen were here to resurrect bonito fishing, which had been given up in Kesennuma twenty years ago. Most locals had not even known that migrating bonito stocks arrived not only in winter but also in the early summer months outside of the bay. Also, the amount of additional imported rice was minimal and the higher prices for firewood just meant better payment for the locals gathering wood. In the end, the Kii fishermen were allowed to stay for the rest of the season and returned to their home province with a good harvest.³¹

We do not know exactly when the first Kii fishermen arrived on the Oshika Peninsula. Considering the geographical position of the peninsula, we can assume that it must have been their first stop before going farther north to Kesennuma or even to the Morioka domain. In any case, the new sardine fishing technique had been disseminated successfully among the local fishing communities by 1677. According to the 1677 petition, the number of travelling fishing groups had increased in recent years and in 1676 the Sendai domain had banned all foreign fishing activities. However, two groups of Kii fishermen headed by Kondō Kihei and Tokuzaemon respectively were excluded from this ban for unknown reasons.³²

It was against these activities of Kondō Kihei and Tokuzaemon that in 1677 a petition entitled Request to stop the whalers from Kishū (Kii domain) was drafted.³³ While this first petition was concerned with banning whaling and bonito fishing activities conducted by those two Kii fishing groups, a second petition from 1685 repeated the request to ban bonito fishing but not whaling, which had probably already been given up at this point. The 1677 petition was signed by all forty-four village headmen of the Oshika Peninsula and the three district headmen of the Oshika coastal districts. In contrast, the 1685 petition was signed by only eleven people, including the district headman of Kitsunezaki and the village headman of the island of Tashirojima. No official answer from the government has survived, but the 1685 petition gives us a few clues of how the first petition was received.

Polluting the Coast

What makes the 1677 petition so interesting for our purposes is that it is the earliest written document from the Sanriku Coast that shows the role whales and whaling had in the local ecological knowledge of the fishing communities. The petition is divided into five complaints made against the Kii fishermen. The first three of these complaints are concerned with the Kii whaling operations, while the fourth complaint is a protest against bonito fishing – a point that is repeated in the 1685 petition – and the last complaint is about the general ecological and economic impact of the travelling fishing groups. The petition indicates that both leaders of the Kii fishermen, Tokuzaemon and Kihei, came to the Oshika Peninsula to conduct bonito fishing. At some point Kihei’s group also began to target the plentiful whales that were roaming in the Sea of Kinkazan. It is unclear if the whaling operations had been part of the original intent of Kihei or if this was an ad hoc decision. For the latter speaks that Kihei was apparently not using the newly developed net whaling method from his home domain but the simpler harpoon whaling method.

The petition does not give us much detail about the specifics of Kihei’s whaling venture, but there exists a single whale scroll that possibly depicts such a harpoon whaling operation in the Northeast that was produced around the same time. This scroll is part of the private collection of the Ayukai family in Kesennuma. During the Edo period, the Ayukai clan was a senior vassal of the Sendai domain and ruled over Kesennuma. It is not clear if the scroll shows a Kii whaling operation or an attempt by locals to conduct harpoon whaling, but it gives us some visual indications on how such an operation might have looked like in the Northeast.³⁴ On one part of the scroll (Figure 3.2), we see how a group of fishermen have surrounded a whale on the open water and attacked it from all sides with simple harpoons that are shot into the back of the whale. Afterwards, the captured whale is fixed with ropes to the boats and towed to the beach.

Figure 3.2 Scene of harpoon whaling on the Ayukai Whale Scroll (ca. 1700).

Courtesy of Ayukai Ayako.

On the scroll we can see that during the hunt one ship is destroyed (maybe rammed by the whale?), indicating the dangers of harpoon whaling. And indeed, whales were often able to escape injured, leaving behind a trail of blood, grease, and oil in the water. For the petitioners, this was a major problem:

According to an old saying, when [you] pierce a whale, the oil will float into the bays and seaweed, octopus, and abalone won’t grow or live in the area. This saying is actually true. The oil of the whale is driven by winds and currents and does harm. [Because of this] there are no seaweed, octopus, and abalone at the coast of Izushima, Enoshima, and Kinkazan. Until this year between spring and middle of summer … [we] brought abalone to Minato and Ishinomaki to sell them. Since there were no abalone this year, however, business cannot be done at Minato and Ishinomaki, which has caused distress for the fishing villages.³⁵

The petitioners made a direct connection between the pollution caused by harpoon whaling and the well-being of the coastal ecosystem on which they depended. As we have seen, the bodies of whales’ function in the cetosphere as massive biomass containers full of nutrients. When whales are killed or injured close to the shore, these nutrients are spilled into the ocean and subsequently spread across the coastal ecosystem by currents and wind. The concentration of biomass often proves too much for the system to absorb and local flora and fauna are literally drowned in nutrients, leading to their withering, and dying.³⁶ This directly influenced the economic prospects of the fishing communities as these relied on the harvest of seaweed, octopus, and abalone to sell at the market in Ishinomaki. The economic and ecological impact of Kihei’s whaling is further stressed later in the petition, where it is stated that his group was stationed on the island Izushima a bit north-east of the peninsula. Unsurprisingly, the pollution was the most severe here, as whale grease accumulated near the shore, making it impossible to fish or produce salt at the beach.³⁷ The petitioners explained:

Izushima is indeed so small an island that even the few fishing crews cannot find lodgings here … [The island] is experiencing a shortage of firewood, and if Kihei is to bring so many of his crew along and cut the trees, there will be no firewood to boil [the lords] cauldrons [to make salt] from now on, and the forest will become bare.³⁸

As in many other places in Tokugawa Japan, firewood had become a scarce resource in the late seventeenth century in the Sendai domain. The founder of the domain, Date Masamune (1567–1636), had already implemented strong regulations concerning the use of wood. Without official permission, it was forbidden to cut bamboo or trees, but the gathering of dead branches and smaller wood for firewood was allowed if overseen by the village headmen.³⁹ On a small island like Izushima, the possibilities of gathering wood were limited, especially as firewood was needed for cooking saltwater to produce salt, which the locals did for the authorities and was their primary source of income. Kihei needed the firewood probably to produce transportable marine products he could bring back to Edo and Kii, such as fish and whale oil or fertiliser.

From these descriptions we can see that the ecological impact of whaling had immediate consequences for the local ecosystem. Kihei’s activities were perceived as disturbing the ecological balance of the coast, which directly threatened the economic foundation of the communities. On the other hand, the large influx of whalers and their activities was also a direct strain on landlocked resources such as firewood, which had already become scarce due to overuse by the locals. The petitioners claimed that the Oshika Peninsula had little farmland and that marine products were the only means of income for the locals. Should the whaling operations not be stopped, the tax payment to the government was, therefore, also in danger.

As historian Luke S. Roberts has argued, the central pillar in the relationship between the samurai caste and common people in Tokugawa Japan was the commoners’ duty to pay taxes, while the authorities had to ensure that commoners were able to practice their occupations. In times of crisis, for example, during famines or war, it was the duty of the authorities to find a solution by either reducing the tax burden, changing the policies, or organising relief supplies.⁴⁰ The threat of being unable to pay taxes was, therefore, a common trope in the petition genre.

For example, in 1639, Kii whalers had tried to establish whaling on the Izu Peninsula southwest of Edo. This led the village headmen (nanushi) of six villages on the west side of the Izu Peninsula to come together to write a petition that stated that: ‘because of the many whales killed, blood and liquid float on the water making it hopeless to capture fish, either with nets or fishing rod’.⁴¹ To further emphasise the gravity of the problem, the village headmen added that fishing was responsible for a third of their yearly tax payment, which was now in danger. The petition claimed that if the situation was not resolved quickly, the fishing communities would all starve to death. By claiming that whaling would threaten the fishing communities’ ability to pay their taxes or even endanger their livelihood, the Izu and Oshika petitions elevated their disputes with the whalers from an internal matter to a crisis the government had to solve. In the eyes of the petitioners, it was the elite’s moral duty to ensure the well-being of the coastal ecosystem so that the economic base of the fishing communities was not endangered.

Bringing a Whale to the Village

While the Oshika fishermen were not actively hunting whales, when they found drifting or beached whales, they did not hesitate to make use of the carcass. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the nutrients a whale contained, often in the form of meat and oil, were highly valued among the locals. The question to whom a drifting whale body belonged was often of great importance for the Oshika fishermen. Let us return to the fishermen of Kōbuchi, which we have met at the beginning of this chapter, and take a closer look at how their struggle was presented in the petition:

Every year the people of Tōshima (Oshika Peninsula) find several drifting whales (yorikujira, lit. approaching whales) by chance and picked-up whales off the coast and brought them back to the mist of the beach (hama no kasumi). In the third month [of this year], the fishermen from Kōbuchi bay found a drifting whale (nagarekujira) while fishing cod 150 ri south of Kinkazan.⁴² They captured and killed it and presented [part of the whale] to the lord as is demanded and sold the rest to an outside merchant. However, Kihei and his crew [went to the district headman and magistrate], claiming that he and his crew targeted the whale with their own hands [before it got away]. The magistrate ordered the district headman to give half of the sale to Kihei.⁴³

According to the petitioners, Kōbuchi fishermen had found a severely injured whale drifting in the Sea of Kinkazan and brought it back to their village for flensing and selling the meat and oil. Kihei, however, claimed his crew had injured the whale and therefore half of the profit belonged to him. Disputes among fishing groups caused by beached whales were a common occurrence on the Sanriku Coast. In 1753, a whale was chased by a killer whale into Kesennuma Bay. When the carcass was found a few days later at a nearby beach, two local fishing groups went to harvest the remains. Shortly after that, a third group arrived arguing that this beach belonged to their village and therefore a part of the profit from the whale belonged to them, causing a massive dispute among the three groups.⁴⁴ However, we can also see here clear parallels to the dispute of 1664, where the Kyūbun fishermen had felt that the Ōhara fishermen had stolen their dolphin catch, as the dolphins would have swam into their village’s exclusive fishing zone. In the end, the Kyūbun fishermen did indeed receive half of the catch, despite not having hunted a single dolphin, so Kihei’s demands do not seem completely unreasonable on a first glance. However, in the case of Kihei and the Kōbuchi fishermen, it is important to also consider the spatiality of ocean.

Kihei, as a fisherman from a different domain, did not possess an exclusive fishing right near the coast, but could only hunt in the open waters which were part of the iriai. Here, every fishing group had the same claims, so when the Kōbuchi fishermen found a drifting whale without another group nearby, they could reasonably expect to keep their catch for themselves. They further solidified their claim by bringing the whale to the ‘mist of the beach’, a term used to describe the exclusive harvest zone of a village.⁴⁵ Everything inside the ‘mist of the beach’ was considered part of the village, which not only included the houses, fields, and the nearby forest but also the bay with all the marine resources. In the eyes of the petitioners, by bringing the whale from the open water into the ‘mist of the beach’, the whale rightfully belonged to the people of Kōbuchi and could no longer be challenged. This spatial exclusivity was so important that in the case of Ōhara-Kyūbun dispute, the mere chance that the dolphins would have swam into the mist of the beach of the Kyūbun community was enough that the other side had to give up half of their catch.

Kihei’s interference by the magistrate threatened to disrupt these spatial zones of exclusivity. From Kihei’s perspective, every whale that had been injured by his crew belonged to him, regardless of where the particular whale was found or transported to. The petitioners feared, as they laid out in the following paragraphs of the petition, that in the future Kihei would claim every stranded or beached whale found in the Sea of Kinkazan, by arguing that he had chased them beforehand. This was a problem, as Kihei’s group was the only one that did engage in whaling, while the Oshika fishermen did not actively pursue whales, but waited until they beached at the shore or drifted in the ocean. In this way, Kihei would gain exclusivity over the resource ‘stranded whale’, undermining the spatial rights of the local fishermen and denying them the chance to profit from injured and dead whales.

The spatiality of the ocean also plays a central role in the fourth paragraph of the 1677 petition. Here, the petitioners explain that Kihei and Tokuzaemon have larger boats that could host up to fifteen people, compared to ten people on the local boats. Furthermore, the Kii boats had more space for provisions and could even be slept on, making it possible to stay out on the ocean for several days, while the Oshika boat had to return to the beach every few hours to change crews. With these boats, the Kii fishermen would roam the coast and the open sea to catch sardines, which they used as bait to attract bonito offshore. This method of fishing was troublesome for the locals, as it allowed the Kii fishermen to harvest the iriai much more efficiently than the locals, taking out up to 300 bonito in a single day.⁴⁶ Thus, the bonito would be hunted before they reached the coast, making the near-coastal nets of the locals useless. A key feature of a sustainably managed commons is the assumption that all participants have only limited access to the commons so that ecosystem cannot be overused. In case of the open sea iriai, this restriction had been ensured by the small size of the Oshika fishing boats that had not allowed a longer stay in the offshore regions. With the introduction of the Kii boats and their new fishing techniques, fish could now be harvested farther offshore, removing them before they could reach the shore. The 1685 petition shows that in the intervening seven years, the Oshika fishermen had adopted the bonito fishing techniques and Kii boat designs. In this petition, it is explained that the petitioners had recently started bonito rod fishing and that the continued activities of Kihei and Tokuzaemon would interfere with these efforts.

Driving Sardines into Coves

There was one more complaint from the petitioners regarding Kihei’s whaling activity. This complaint is very brief, and a less observant reader could easily overlook it and go straight to the next paragraph. For me, however, this brief paragraph is the most intriguing one in the whole of the 1677 petition. It reads:

When fishermen were to fish sardines off the coast of Tōshima, [sardines] were driven into the cove by whales. Since Kihei found a whale [there] and caught it with a spear, sardines stayed away from the cove, which is troublesome for the local fishermen because they cannot fish sardines anymore.⁴⁷

According to the petitioners, whales were responsible for bringing sardines into coves and harpoon whaling was, therefore, hurting fisheries. To the best of my knowledge, this paragraph marks the first instance where such a relationship between whales, sardines, and humans was recorded in Japanese sources.

The Sanriku fishermen were also not the only ones who made a connection between whales and fish catches. Let us return once more to the Izu Peninsula, where over 150 years after the 1639 petition, in 1796, a would-be whaler tried to establish whaling for a second time on the peninsula. In response to his request for a three-year trial whaling permission, thirty-eight local village headmen complained via a petition to the local magistrate. The petitioners explained that they had heard from their forefathers that when whaling had been conducted in Kanei 17 (1639–40), the fish catch of that year had been non-existent. Picking up dead whales from the water had, in the past, led to bad fish catches for the respective village. Since old times, whales had been crucial for driving large fish swarms of bonito and sardines from the open sea into the small coves of the Izu Peninsula, where the fishermen had installed their nets and fishing rods. The locals would even call the fish that could always be seen in proximity ‘children of the whales’ (kujira ko). Should the whales be killed, they could no longer drive the fish into the coves. The petitioner explained that poor fish catches would also affect agriculture as sardines were essential to produce fish fertiliser.⁴⁸

Unfortunately, our primary sources do not specify the species of whales that was allegedly responsible for bringing sardines closer to the shore. The most likely candidates were, however, sei whales. The name sei whale comes from Norwegian where in 1828 an unidentified whale species was given this name (‘seje’ means ‘black codfish’) as it was believed that this species would drive codfish towards the shore.⁴⁹ In Tokugawa Japan, sei whales were similarly called iwashi kujira (sardine whale) or katsuo kujira (bonito whale) as they were often encountered with these two fish species.⁵⁰ This makes a strong case for the whales mentioned in the 1796 Izu petition also being sei whales as they were accompanied by sardine and bonito swarms, which the petitioners called ‘children of the whales’.

There was some confusion regarding the whale species, however. For example, Bryde’s whales were also called iwashi kujira (nowadays named nitari kujira, meaning ‘look-alike whale’) and rorqual species like minke whales were not identified as separate species at all.⁵¹ It seems likely that the Sanriku and Izu fishermen were referring to sei whales in their respective petitions, or at least to other rorquals who feed sometimes on small fish like sardines and anchovy. In the whaling regions, rorquals were not often hunted as they were too big and strong to be captured with nets. Also, sei whales were more common in northern Japan as they do not travel along the Kuroshio but reach the Japanese Coast in spring and summer from the open sea to the east.

One curious point is the naming of sei whales as bonito whales (katsuo kujira) in Japanese. Unlike sardines, the larger bonito are not part of a rorqual’s diet. Nevertheless, our sources often place these fish close to sei whales. According to Japanese historian Tajima Yoshiya, the close connection in the historical sources between bonito and sei whales was, however, no accident but part of a survival strategy developed by the bonito. Bonito are often pursued by sharks and carnivore tuna species and would swim before or between the bigger ‘bonito whales’ to give the appearance of having a giant bodyguard. This relationship was not one-sided, however. The main targets of the bonito are small fish like sardines and during a hunt, a bonito swarm will disperse and attack a sardine school from all directions at the same time. The sardines react to this by clumping together and swimming towards the surface, where they are hunted down by the bonito. The sardines that escape this trap are then swallowed up by the nearby whales.⁵² These bonito-whale-hunts were rare in western Japan but common in the Northeast. Before the sei whale stock off the Sanriku Coast was eradicated in the early twentieth century, columns of sei whales and bonito reached up to ten kilometres each spring.⁵³ Sanriku bonito fishermen would look for sea birds called katsuodori (bonito bird) above the whale-bonito columns as they knew that the birds were also hoping to catch scattered sardines from the hunts.⁵⁴

This hunting regime is an interesting example of how in the cetosphere not only humans but also other species, such as bonito and sea birds, were directly profiting from the presence of whales. As baleen whales, sei whales and other rorquals were no direct danger to bonito and birds, but rather provided protection against other predators and opportunities for easy fish catch. Through observation, fishermen were aware of these hunting regimes and were constantly on the lookout for gatherings of sea birds and whale columns, as these indicated the presence of sardines and bonito. Dispersing, or even killing whales disrupted this regime, making fishing much more difficult.

Conclusion

As demonstrated in this chapter, the Oshika fishing communities had learned how to make use of cetaceans when venturing into the Sea of Kinkazan. Prior to the arrival of the Kii fishermen, the sea around the Oshika Peninsula was separated into two different spheres: the human-influenced near-coastal regions; called the mist of the beach and the offshore Sea of Kinkazan which reached into the perturbed region where Kuroshio and Oyashio intermingled. While the Sea of Kinkazan was considered iriai, open for all fishing activities, the human presence was quite limited here as weather, currents and the inadequacy of the small fishing vessels made longer stays in this region dangerous. Instead, marine megafauna, especially cetaceans, were here the primary initiator of top-down pressure on the ecosystem. Entering this cetosphere, local fishermen are believed to be dependent on the help of whales for successful fish catches.

The analysis of the 1677 petition has allowed us to identify the different roles whales fulfilled in the local ecological knowledge of the Oshika fishermen: drifting or beached whales were seen as a rich resource that could be harvested and brought riches to a community, while hunting whales directly was not commonly practiced. For one, whales were mostly foraging in the offshore regions of the Sea of Kinkazan, making it difficult and dangerous to reach in the small boats of the Oshika fishermen. Furthermore, killing a whale risked polluting the coastal flora and fauna, negatively affecting the harvest of other marine resources, while the cooking of whale meat and production of whale oil needed a substantial amount of firewood, a resource that was already scarce. Whales were also responsible for bringing fish towards the shore. As we have seen in the previous chapters, whales are seen as agents that can be reasoned with and that actively influence the lives of the coastal communities through their behaviour. The appearance of the Kii fishermen at the Oshika Peninsula had many social and ecological repercussions. With their larger boats and better equipment, they pushed the boundaries of the human influence zones farther offshore, not only allowing a more stable harvest of offshore fish but also began hunting whales actively, disturbing the socio-economic and ecological foundation of the locals.

Overall, Kihei’s whaling operation seems to have not been very successful. The 1685 petition implies that Kihei had given up whaling in the intervening seven years. It remains unclear if the local opposition had influenced this outcome. As David Howell has argued, the introduction of new fishing techniques often caused social unrest as they threatened the social and economic order of the community. Typically, authorities initially tried to forbid or limit the use of these technologies before they became widely accepted and adapted by the locals.⁵⁵

While the locals tried to ban whaling, without securing the technology for themselves, the situation was different in the case of the sardine and bonito fishing techniques brought by the Kii fishermen. The Sanriku fishermen first incorporated sardine fishing into their repertoire in the early 1670s and then bonito fishing after 1677. With its many cliffs and few open beaches, places to install the long beach seines for sardine fishing were limited on the Oshika Peninsula.⁵⁶ In addition, many of the shallow parts of the shore were already being used for salt production. Therefore, while the northern parts of the Sanriku Coast became specialised in sardine fertiliser production, the Oshika Peninsula instead focused on bonito fishing. Despite the initial opposition, some of the Kii fishermen moved permanently to the Oshika Peninsula in 1684, helping to develop a new proto-industry based on the export of katsuobushi (bonito flakes) and bonito fertiliser to Edo and Osaka, while sardines were relegated to a role as live bait.⁵⁷ The introduction of new fishing techniques from Kii allowed the expansion of the human sphere farther into the ocean, while also slowly diminishing the underlying fish stocks over time, causing a shifting baseline syndrome, as we will explore in future chapters.

4 Establishing Whaling in the North

In early 1808, the Confucian scholar Ōtsuki Heisen (1773–1850) was just finishing his magnus opus Geishikō (Manuscript on Whale History), when news broke about a mass whale stranding in northern Japan: eighty-seven whales of all sizes had beached near the village Tanabu in Morioka domain (today Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture). As Heisen recounts, a merchant from Edo heard of this news and – expecting an opportunity to get rich – travelled to the Shimokita Peninsula to harvest as much of these whales as possible. However, when the merchant arrived at the scene days later, he discovered that the animals had turned into rotten stinking carcasses. To make matters worse, he found no one among the locals with the right flensing tools – or even enough space to store the whale bones. With all his hopes crushed, the would-be whaler had to return home empty-handed. Heisen drew two lessons from this incident: first, one had to be prepared with tools, capital, and workers before entering the whaling business, and second, the frequent whale strandings demonstrated the immense potential of the Northeast as a whaling place.

Heisen and his cousin once removed, Ōtsuki Gentaku, were among the most prominent voices calling for the establishment of whaling in northern Japan. However, while whaling proliferated in western Japan, all attempts to establish whaling groups at the Sanriku Coast had ended in failure. Only in the 1830s, did the Sendai government decide to closely investigate the possibility of a state-sponsored whaling enterprise in the north. At the time, Japan was ravaged by the fierce Tenpō famine (1833–1837), which hit the coastal communities especially hard. Under these circumstances, the prospect of additional whale meat that could save the starving fishing communities gave much hope to the locals. Nevertheless, after only four years, this new whaling operation was once again given up.

This chapter will follow the debate surrounding the establishment of whaling in northern Japan in the late Edo period, through the eyes of whale scholars like Ōtsuki Heisen and Ōtsuki Gentaku, as well as the physician Sasaki Bokuan (1785–1861) who was tasked by the Sendai authorities to make whaling a reality in the north. This chapter examines the reasons why proto-industrial whaling was never able to take root in northern Japan. As I will argue, besides organisational deficits, lacking funds, and demand for whale products in the north, were also the changing environmental circumstances that affected the cetosphere in the nineteenth century and thus also the prospect of new whaling enterprises.

The Whale Scholars

Among the Japanese elite of the Edo period, knowledge about whales and whaling was disseminated commonly through picture scrolls and hand-written manuscripts. According to the historians Mori Hiroko and Miyazaki Katsunori dozens of these whale scrolls and manuscripts from the main whaling regions of the Kii Peninsula and northern Kyushu existed.¹ As discussed in the previous chapter, only a single scroll has been found in the Northeast, which is in the possession of the Ayukai family, and it remains unclear what kind of whaling enterprise it does depict. Heisen’s Geishikō belongs to the most well-known and widely discussed manuscripts of the time. As Heisen was a scholar working for the Sendai domain, he also discussed at various points in the manuscript the current whaling situation at the Sanriku Coast and in Ezo, lobbying for the establishment of whaling in the north. Heisen’s comments are thus a rare insight into scholarly knowledge regarding proto-industrial whaling and the Ebisu whale culture in northern Japan.

The Geishikō is a product of honzōgaku (natural knowledge studies). This scholarly field emerged in the first half of the Edo period by drawing inspiration from materia medica texts that ordered plants and animals according to a Chinese classification system. Based on the Japanese translations of these texts, scholars made similar investigations of Japanese flora and fauna. As Japanese scholars began to realise how inaccurate this knowledge system was, however, the scholars began to make their own observations of the natural world and thus created new scholarly knowledge. This process was accelerated under the sponsorship of the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751), who encouraged experimentation with agricultural ideas and the translation of Dutch books. The latter led to a separate field of inquiry called rangaku (Dutch learning), which had an especially strong impact on medicinal and anatomical knowledge production.² With this, early modern European natural knowledge began to disseminate among the intellectual elite of Edo Japan and influenced the further development of honzōgaku.³ Federico Marcon argued that honzōgaku stood in close relationship to the increased commercialisation of agricultural and proto-industrial products. Through the commodification of plants and animals in isolation from their original ecosystem, the secularisation of nature and objectification of natural species became stronger.⁴ Similarly, the Geishikō not only incorporated other Japanese scholarly texts of the time but also referenced Chinese classics and even made use of translated Dutch books, which covered a wide range of topics from medicine to natural knowledge.

The origin of the creation of the Geishikō begins, however, not with Heisen but with his cousin once removed Gentaku. The Ōtsuki’s were a wealthy farming family that also bore the title of district headman in Nishi-Iwai in Ichinoseki domain, a subsidiary domain of Sendai. Many male members of the family served as physicians and scholars for the Sendai domain.⁵ Among those, Gentaku was the most successful, serving as the personal surgeon of the Sendai daimyo in his Edo residence and opening his own rangaku school in Edo. Today, Gentaku is remembered for translating Johan Jonston’s Historia naturalis from Dutch into Japanese in the 1780s. One animal portrayed in the book was the narwhale and Gentaku became interested in the pharmaceutical uses of their horns and whales in general.⁶ In 1785, he met a fellow physician in Kyoto who had just returned from a visit to Ikitsukishima in Hirado domain, where he had treated the sick chief of the local whaling group. The eyewitness account of the whaling village left a deep impression on Gentaku. As he was working on a revised edition of the Kaitai shinso (New Text on Anatomy), the first Dutch anatomical book translated into Japanese by Gentaku’s teacher Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817), he developed an interest in the anatomy of whales. In 1800, Gentaku had the chance to meet a whaler in Edo from Hirado domain who had been ordered by the shogunate to supervise whaling in Iturup (Etorofu) on the Kuril Islands. Based on this conversation, Gentaku wrote the Geigyosōwa (Miscellaneous Stories about Whale Fish) in 1801.⁷

For his anatomical studies, Gentaku needed first-hand descriptions of whale carcasses. As he was the headmaster of his rangaku school, he did not have time to travel to the whaling places in Kyushu. In 1803, Gentaku wrote a letter to the Sendai authorities and inquired if his oldest son Genkan (1785–1837) could go to Nagasaki to learn Dutch and study whaling practices in Ikitsukishima in his stead. As Gentaku worried for the safety of Genkan – who was only eighteen years at the time – he asked for permission that the thirty-one-year-old Heisen would be allowed to accompany him. Both Genkan and Heisen were at the time enrolled in the Shōheizaka gakumonjo, the Confucian academy of the shogunate in Edo. Heisen and Genkan would eventually stay for over two years in Nagasaki, where they learned among many famous rangaku scholars.

During their stay in western Japan, in the first month of 1804, they made the trip from Nagasaki to Ikitsukishima in Hirado domain and stayed for one week at the house of the chief of the whaling group.⁸ Especially Heisen became intrigued with the whaling business, and when they returned to Edo in 1805, Heisen began working on his own whaling book, the Geishikō. While writing his manuscript, Heisen was appointed as an official Confucian scholar of the Sendai clan and in 1806 returned to Sendai to become headmaster at the Yōkendō, the Confucian school of Sendai domain. He finished the Geishikō there in 1808 and although the manuscript was not printed, copies of it circulated among the scholarly elite of Tokugawa Japan and were widely read.⁹

The Geishikō is considered the most comprehensive and sophisticated study of whales and whaling to this date in Tokugawa Japan.¹⁰ In the first three of the six volumes, Heisen traces the etymology of the word ‘whale’ in different languages, introduces and categorises all known whale species, and presents the first account of whale anatomy (probably co-written by Gentaku). While the first three volumes were concerned with the classification and knowledge about whales as a biological species in the tradition of honzōgaku, the following three volumes, called ‘appendix’, showed whaling as a profession, mainly, but not only, based on Heisen’s observation in Ikitsukishima (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Net whaling operation in western Japan, Geishikō.

Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan.

In the fourth volume, Heisen describes the current state of whaling in Japan and in the rest of the world. Based on his readings of Dutch books he believes that whaling operations in other places were more widespread and successful than in Japan. He was aware of whaling in the South Sea of China, apparently with very similar methods to those in Japan. He also referred to whaling in America and in Europe, especially in the Arctic region around Spitsbergen and Greenland.¹¹ He then lists all known whaling places in Japan, ordered by region. According to his count, over fifty whaling places were active in Japan at the time, concentrated in western Japan.

In northern and eastern Japan, whaling was non-existent, however. Instead, Heisen explained, local fishermen in Matsumae domain in southern Ezo or on the Izu Peninsula would often refer to whales as ebisu-kami (god Ebisu) and believe that they were gentle animals who were keen to not hurt humans. Even more, as the whales loved herring, they would drive them directly towards the boats of the fishermen.¹² Another noteworthy point for Heisen was the frequent strandings of whales in the north. Commenting on the Tanabu Incident of 1808, Heisen also mentioned the Akamae mass stranding we have discussed in Chapter 2.

According to the Saiyakushiki in a certain year (1701) 139 whales beached at once in the bay of Akamae village in Ōshu, and they all died after three days. Incidents like this happen occasionally in the Sea of Ōshu (Sanriku Coast). If a whaling group should be established here, without a doubt, a great number of whales could be hunted, and the kokueki would be furthered immensely.¹³

Heisen’s uses here the term kokueki (national interest), which, as Luke Roberts has shown, describes a form of inter-domanial contest to establish and attract proto-industries to secure economic advantages over the other domains.¹⁴ For Heisen these strandings were a clear sign that the region would be ideal as a whaling base, as whaling would be beneficial not only for the locals but also for the finances of the domain. He had little concern for the role the whales played for local fisheries and was rather transfixed by the idea of bringing whaling to the north. Heisen highlighted the various benefits organised whaling could have for the northern domains: ‘The truth is that the whole domain will become prosperous. As the common saying goes: One whale will make seven villages flourish.’¹⁵

One realisation Heisen had through the study of foreign books was that European and American whalers were so successful as they could follow whales along their migration routes off the coast of Greenland and America. He speculated that whales in the Pacific must also follow a similar route. Likely whales would gather in the winter months in the south to hunt fish, before swimming northwards along the Japanese coast in spring and summer: ‘But what is the farthest point north? … During the summer, many right whales gather around the western sea of Ezo, but the most northern point of their journey is even farther than Ezo. From there they probably return south.’¹⁶ Indeed, ten years prior, a whale that was targeted by whalers near Shinagawa in the early fifth month was found a few weeks later stranded at the Sanriku Coast. This was proof for Heisen that the whales that were hunted during the winter season in western Japan belonged to the same group of animals that frequently stranded in the north during the summer.

Establishing Whaling in the North

As we have seen in Chapter 2, an average whale stranding in the north generated around 18 ryō of wealth that was distributed among the authorities and the locals. Compared to the 150 ryō that whaling groups could expect in western Japan, this was a rather small amount. For whale scholars like Heisen or Gentaku, this begged the question: Why were there no whaling groups operating at the Sanriku Coast? Looking at the Hachinohe records, we find two entries about would-be-whalers asking for permission from the domain to establish a whaling enterprise. Both entries are from 1699 and it is not entirely clear if these were connected or not. The first request came from a merchant from Edo who wanted to conduct net whaling in Same-ura. It was agreed that he would pay 6 ryō and 30 barrels of whale oil as tax for each hunted whale. The second entry is from a whaler from Hizen, who similarly tried to establish net whaling in nearby Minato. He wanted a whaling licence for seven years and was willing to pay for three years as well as 6 ryō and 30 barrels of whale oil for each whale while providing a 55 ryō deposit to the domain.¹⁷ As no further records of either enterprise exist, we have to assume that they were not successful. That the domain was satisfied with a tax of 6 ryō per whale might indicate that the government expected that a hunted whale would bring in around the same amount of money as a beached whale, of which the government would claim half of the profits as tax. The Hachinohe officials did apparently not expect that a hunted whale if processed correctly and if the necessary distribution system was established could be worth well over 100 ryō.

After the unsuccessful whaling attempt on the Oshika Peninsula in 1677, these two entries were the last recorded attempts to introduce whaling at the Sanriku Coast until the nineteenth century. Coming from a northern domain themselves, both Heisen and Gentaku promoted the establishment of net whaling in northern Japan, for example in Ezo. Gentaku wrote:

Oceans surround eastern Japan. Whales appear here often at river mouths, especially in the sea Northeast of Nosaku [in Ezo]. Therefore, if the whaling method would be transmitted to the fishermen, the economies of the domains would flourish, and the liveliness of the people would undoubtedly increase.¹⁸

Gentaku argued that it was not only the local fishermen but the northern domains as a whole that would profit from the introduction of whaling. In the late eighteenth century, many domanial lords had to fight chronic fiscal problems and local governments supported whaling and other proto-industries to secure economic advantages over the other domains. Gentaku specified, however, that it could not be expected that the local fishermen would learn whaling techniques themselves and that these would have to be ‘transmitted’ to them. This could be understood as a solicitation towards the shogunate or the northern domains to initiate whaling operations. For Heisen, the most pressing problems were the lack of experienced whalers and the difficulty of securing enough funding for a whaling enterprise:

In the past, I asked [someone] how much funding I needed to start whaling in the western sea [of Japan]. [He] answered that I needed 400 kanme of silver … The regions in the east and north are different, however. It is because there is no one who is engaged in whaling in the land in the Northeast; they only captured whales that happened to get close to the shore, and they have no experience in catching whales in the open water, which means that they have no methods and are not accustomed to it. If they wish to start a whaling enterprise, they should first hire [whalers] from [the southwest], and together with them employ some crews from their own area [the Northeast].¹⁹

According to Heisen, the Sanriku fishermen were not only inexperienced in whaling, but they also did not know how to flense a whale. Employing whalers from the whaling regions was expensive, however. An informant from Hirado estimated that introducing whaling to the Sanriku Coast would cost 800 kanme of silver (ca. 13,000 ryō), double the amount than in western Japan. Heisen himself, however, believed 500 kanme silver (ca. 8,125 ryō) would be sufficient. While he conceded that bringing whaling experts to the north would be expensive, Heisen argued that hemp, iron, rice, and firewood could all be produced locally and would be cheaper than in western Japan.²⁰

There was a further reason Gentaku and Heisen pressed to introduce whaling in the north. Due to the expansion of the Russian Empire towards the east, territorial conflict with Tokugawa Japan over the island of Ezo had become more urgent. Between 1799 and 1821, the Matsumae domain was under the direct control of the Tokugawa government to secure the border region against Russian intruders. During this time, the government also had plans of bringing settlers to the north to cultivate the land and develop the local fishing industry and among them were whalers from Hirado domain.²¹ Gentaku met the whalers in 1800 while they were passing through Edo. When the Hirado whalers arrived in Iturup a few months later, they found rich whaling ground but could not determine a suitable place for a whaling base. As Iturup was extremely remote, they were not able to recruit enough skilled locals and the plan had to be abandoned.²² According to Heisen, whalers could also function as part-time navy soldiers:

[T]he whaling group is the best guard for a country surrounded by the ocean … A whale boat can carry out the duties of a warship, and the spears and so forth that they used to bring down a whale can be converted into military weapons. Those who hunt whale-fish can move around on the ocean free and therefore are the most suitable war preparations for protection against foreign invaders.²³

For Heisen, the introduction of whaling was therefore not only necessary to boost the economy of a domain but also a critical military asset against foreign aggressors. For example, the coastal defence of the Sanriku Coast was heightened, with watchtowers looking for foreign ships. The same watchtowers were also used in western Japan to look for whales swimming by and to alert the whaling groups. Furthermore, after the Tokugawa takeover of the Matsumae domain, the Tokugawa government ordered that the northern domains bring troops to the northern border to defend against possible Russian intrusions in 1808. The Sendai domain, the most powerful of the northern domains, subsequently dispatched 1,700 soldiers to Hakodate. With this increased military presence, the Sendai government extended influence far beyond its own borders. Indeed, another Sendai domain physician and mentor of Gentaku, Kudō Heisuke (1734–1800), had even suggested that developing Ezo would make Sendai a prosperous region and that Sendai could one day become the new capital of Japan.²⁴ Seen in this light, the publication of the Geishikō just around this time is certainly no coincidence but shows a renewed economic and strategic interest in the northern domains. It seems plausible that the Ōtsuki family had a specific agenda for promoting whaling in the north as part of a scheme of expanding the influence of the Sendai domain.

The Disappearance of the Whales

Heisen’s and Gentaku’s calls for establishing whaling in the Sendai domain did go unheard for almost thirty years. Only in 1837 did the Sendai government show interest in the prospect of establishing a new proto-industry, when they ordered the physician Sasaki Bokuan to establish a whaling enterprise at the Sanriku Coast. However, by that time, some major shifts in the cetosphere were underway, as whales were disappearing from the waters around the Japanese Archipelago.²⁵ In the secondary literature, the decline of the whale stocks in the nineteenth century is attributed to the appearance of American whaling ships off the Japanese Coast, who hunted great whales on the open sea before they could reach the coastal waters of Japan.²⁶ Indeed, sperm, bowhead, and right whale stocks collapsed all over the world soon after the appearance of American and European whalers.²⁷

By the 1810s, the American whaling industry had depleted the commercially desirable whale species in the seas close to the coast of South America. They subsequently moved across the Pacific Ocean to seek untouched whaling grounds.²⁸ A whaler from Massachusetts discovered the Japanese whaling ground in 1820.²⁹ The number of British and American whaling ships that participated in whaling around Japan increased steadily from around 100 vessels per year to over 800 in 1846.³⁰ The American whalers soon realised that the most promising whaling grounds were in the south around the Ogasawara Islands and farther north, off the Sanriku Coast, where the Kuroshio and Oyashio currents meet. Therefore, most of the ship sightings and landings took place in the northern domains. The following source from the nineteenth century details the situation from the Japanese perspective:

During the Bunsei period (1818-1830) many Chinese ships (i.e., foreign ships) were coming from the open sea to our coves [in Sendai domain]. The bonito fishermen had been exchanging many goods with them. But in Bunsei 6 (1823) their goods were confiscated [by the government], and they were ordered not to go near them. … As [I] understand it, the reason why these Chinese ships came was that they hunt whales and sperm whales. … Perhaps due to this, whales did not show up at our beach anymore. … Since the middle of the Bunsei Era we haven’t seen a single whale and fishing has become extremely poor.³¹

Apparently, these foreign whalers had occasionally participated in commercial exchanges with the local population, something explicitly forbidden under Tokugawa law.³² The Sendai government increased the coastal security and erected a watch tower near Ayukawa, while hunters were ordered to defend themselves with their hunting rifles, in case of an unauthorised landing.³³ But if we believe this source, the appearance of the foreign ships also had a profound influence on the whole coastal ecosystem. Sightings of whales near shore became rare, while fish catches also decreased. This observation confirmed the locals in their belief that whaling and fishing were directly connected. The authorities, on the other hand, likely draw a different lesson from the activities of the foreign ships: it showed them that Ōtsuki Heisen and Gentaku had been right. There was great potential for proto-industrial whaling in the Sea of Kinkazan, but unfortunately, it was foreign powers and not their own fishermen that took advantage of this.

The American whalers were not alone to blame for the disappearance of the whales, however. Environmental circumstances like colder sea surface temperature during the period of the fierce Tenpō famine (1833–1837) might also have had a temporary influence. Moreover, whaling communities in western Japan had placed constant pressure on the whale stocks since the early Edo period and this pressure only intensified after the invention of proto-industrial net whaling in 1675. With more competitors at different points of the whales’ migration route along the Japanese Coast, whales had a much higher chance of getting captured than in the centuries before. As noted in the Introduction, Jakobina Arch has estimated that the Japanese whalers hunted as many as 200,000 whales before the American whalers even arrived.³⁴ The Masutomi whaling group from Ikitsukishima alone was responsible for at least 20,000 killed whales.³⁵ We can only speculate on how the mass killing of whales influenced the behaviour of the animals. Heisen noted, for instance, that the humpback whales reached in recent years the Kii Peninsula a month later than in previous decades.³⁶ As discussed in Chapter 2, whale strandings became much rarer in the Hachinohe domain, while killer whale attacks likely increased. By the early nineteenth century, the cetosphere had come under serious anthropogenic pressure and whale abundance and behaviour had begun to change.

The Tenpō Famine and Sasaki Bokuan

The aforementioned Tenpō famine likely played a critical role in the decision to establish a whaling enterprise in the Sendai domain. The famine coincided with the last cold phase of the waning ‘Little Ice Age’, a time interval between 1550 and 1850 when temperatures in the northern hemisphere were regionally cooler than in the periods before and after. Compared to the average temperatures of the second half of the twentieth century, the temperature in the northern hemispheres was 2°C below this baseline.³⁷ Already fifty years prior, during the Tenmei famine (1782–1788), caused by rainy and cold summers followed by volcanic activities, over 100,000 people had died of starvation in the Northeast and around 20,000 fled to other domains.³⁸ The Tenpō famine was even worse, with the cold yamase winds contributing to wet summers that destroyed the crops. Over 180 uprisings were recorded, and the population of the Sendai domain decreased by almost 100,000. The hardest hit people were not peasants living in the inland regions, however, but people living in coastal communities. As large-scale agriculture was not possible in the mountainous regions near the coast, the fishing villages were reliant on importing food from inland. As a consequence, between 30 and 60 per cent of the population on the Oshika Peninsula perished.³⁹

While the Northeast was ravaged by frequent famines, many domains in southwestern Japan coped considerably better. This was not only because of the less devastating weather (there were no yamase winds in the southwest) but also because of better disaster prevention measures. Indeed, economic historians have explained that the Tenmei and Tenpō famines were only this fatal in the northern domains as the local and central authorities had been less willing to dedicate resources to disaster relief programs.⁴⁰ This can be exemplified by whale oil as since the Kyōhō famine (1732–1733), southwestern domains had invested in huge stockpiles of whale oil that could be utilised as a pesticide against planthoppers. Similar relief plans were not established in the northern domains, however.⁴¹ Therefore, it may not be a coincidence that Gentaku first became interested in whaling during the Tenmei period. Indeed, the traumatic experiences of this famine may have been one of the reasons why Gentaku and Heisen pushed to establish whaling in the north shortly after the Tenmei famine.

On a first glance, it may seem peculiar that the Sendai authorities chose a physician for the task of bringing whaling to their domain. Looking at Bokuan’s biography more closely reveals much about the possible intentions of the Sendai domain to establish whaling. Sasaki Bokuan was born in 1785 in Nakatsuyama, an inland town in the Monō District a bit north of Ishinomaki. He had studied gynaecology in Kyoto and was trained in internal medicine and honzōgaku. In 1819, at the age of twenty-five, he returned from Kyoto to accept the position of principal at the Igakkō, the Sendai medicine school.⁴² Originally, the medical education in Sendai had been part of the domanial school Yōkendō, but when Ōtsuki Heisen became headmaster, he initiated reforms, such as the founding of the new medical institute Igakkō in 1812. Furthermore, on the initiative of his cousin Gentaku, Heisen made Dutch learning an integral part of the curriculum at the Yōkendō and the Igakkō.⁴³ As the principal of the Igakkō, Bokuan must have been a close associate of Heisen, who would remain headmaster of the Yōkendō until his death in 1850.

After the death of Gentaku in 1827, Heisen was the only remaining authority on the matters of whaling in the Sendai domain and was most likely consulted when the domanial authorities finally decided to establish a whaling group. Already sixty-five years old in 1837, Heisen found it probably easier to leave the establishment of whaling delegated to someone he trusted but was younger than him. Furthermore, the selection of Bokuan had probably two additional advantages for the authorities: First, he had already published in 1833 a small booklet about herbs and grasses that could be eaten during a famine; vital knowledge for many commoners starving during the Tenpō famine.⁴⁴ This might indicate that the authorities saw whaling as a famine relief program.

Second, he came from a respected family in the Monō District, making him familiar with the local politics, without being involved too closely in the politics of the coastal districts as his hometown was farther inland. Bokuan most likely knew many of the influential families on the Oshika Peninsula. Since we last left the political scene of the Oshika Peninsula in the 1680s in Chapter 3, a new class of wealthy families had consolidated most of the economic output in the coastal communities under their control. Political titles, such as village headman or district headman, had become virtually hereditary among these families, who often traced back their lineage to samurai families from the Warring States period or to descendants of Kii fishermen arriving on the Sanriku Coast in the 1670s. As go-between with the samurai authorities, these families also received various privileges otherwise reserved for the samurai caste. For example, district headmen were allowed to use surnames, were excluded from the annual tax, and even received a yearly stipend of up to fifty-five koku. They also had the right to wear a sword and silk kimonos.⁴⁵ In some instances, retired district headmen received honorary samurai status.

Contemporary sources called these influential families ‘net owners’ (amimoto) as they owned most of the nets, boats, and other fishing equipment. We can find the rise of the net owners at the beginning of the eighteenth century when after the opening of the new sea-route around the cape of Chōshi, salted and dried marine products and fish fertiliser were exported in large quantities from the Sanriku Coast to Edo and Osaka.⁴⁶ A significant portion of these marine products, namely abalone, sea slugs, seaweed (kelp), and shark fins was further exported via Nagasaki to China, where they were valued as medical ingredients. Net owners played a significant part in these transactions and could accumulate wealth, which they began investing in the sardine fertiliser proto-industry, often backed by additional capital from wholesale merchants in Edo or Osaka.⁴⁷

Concurrently, economic instabilities during the Tenmei and Tenpō famines had caused many of the poorer peasants and fishermen to flee the northern domains to Ezo, where they became dekasegi (migrant workers) in the herring fertiliser business.⁴⁸ Others stayed, but became heavily indebted to the net owners, losing their economic independence. They became paid workers of the net owners and were called ‘net children’ (amiko). The relationship between the net owners and the net children was close and members of the net children were sometimes adopted into the net owner families. All said, by the early nineteenth century, these net owners formed their own social class of ‘proto-capitalists’ that had accumulated most of the village’s capital, fishing equipment and political influence.⁴⁹

The Net Owners’ Whaling Enterprise

Most of our knowledge regarding the local politics of the Oshika Peninsula and the Monō District is based on the letters of the Hiratsuka family, who were themselves net owners and hold the title of district headmen of Kitsunezaki. Like many other local notables, the Hiratsuka family claimed to have been a vassal of a local warlord during the Warring States period. They apparently lost their samurai status at the end of the war, but by 1641, when the oldest document is dated, they possessed the title of district headmen of Kitsunezaki. They would keep this title for the rest of the Edo period, except during two short transitory periods. In other words, it was also a member of the Hiratsuka family that signed the 1677 and 1685 anti-whaling petitions we have discussed in Chapter 3. Around 1800, the family took over all sardine fishing, fertiliser production, and trade in Kitsunezaki and the surrounding fishing hamlets, hiring other fishermen on a wage basis. In 1829, at age twenty-five, Hiratsuka Yūgorō became the new head of the family and functioned as district headman of Kitsunezaki until his resignation in 1840.⁵⁰

It is through the family documents of the Hiratsuka family that we know that Sasaki Bokuan was put in charge of the whaling venture.⁵¹ Bokuan’s order was to assemble a whaling group from local fishermen and organise a trial hunting to see if a commercially sustainable whaling venture was possible. The Sendai government also hired Awajiya Seisaemon, a whaling expert from Osaka. Seisaemon was asked to evaluate the prospect of whaling in the domain and to identify a suitable place for a whaling base. He received a local guide and all the district headmen were instructed to provide him with a ship and to take him to all the places he wished to investigate. Saisaemon also met with Hiratsuka Yūgorō and requested a coastline map of Sendai domain. Yūgorō forwarded the appeal to the authorities, but they were not willing to show such a map to an outsider. In the end, based on Saisaemon’s report, Ōsu-hama (lit. Ōsu Beach) on the Ogatsu Peninsula in Monō District was chosen as the base of the new whaling group.

Bokuan recruited the fishing group in Ōsu-hama, which was led by the young village headman Abe Ganzaemon (1815–1872). Hiratsuka Yūgorō was also offered to join, as he was one of the largest and most influential net owners in the region with the necessary capital to finance such an operation. Together, the three men made first calculations for the necessary capital that would be needed from the Sendai domain for such an undertaking. We do not know for how much money they initially asked for, but thirty years earlier, Heisen had estimated that a full-fledged whaling enterprise in the north would require the equivalent of at least 8,000 ryō, so we can assume that Bokuan asked for the sum of several thousand ryō. However, the Sendai domain denied this request, arguing that they only wanted a trial whaling operation, with one or two whales caught. The five-year-long struggle against the Tenpō famine and other bad investments had drained the domain’s finances. Bokuan tried again with a reduced plan for 589 ryō, but even this was cut by the government to 400 ryō; 200 ryō for each fishing group to buy equipment, while all other costs, such as paying the wages for the hired fishermen, had to be financed by the net owners themselves.⁵²

With these underwhelming funding prospects, the whaling project was already in jeopardy before it had even started. In order to save the operation, Bokuan wrote a confidential letter to Yūgorō proposing that Yūgorō should hire ten whalers from Kii domain as instructors. As the Sendai domain lacked the financial capacity to fund this, Yūgorō needed to advance the money and Bokuan offered to be liable with his own stipend in case the domain did not pay the money back later. Also, Bokuan urged Yūgorō to burn the letter after he had read it, indicating that this scheme could get Bokuan in trouble. As the letter remains today and we have no reports about whalers from Kii arriving in the region, it seems likely that Yūgorō was not willing to follow Bokuan’s suggestions. Despite all this trouble, Yūgorō started a net whaling operation in the summer of 1838 in Ōsu-hama. It was reported, however, that the inexperience of the local fishermen led to no whales being seized. Without additional monetary assistance from the domain, Yūgorō ceased all further whaling operations. As Yūgorō resigned shortly thereafter as district headman in 1840 at the young age of thirty-seven, there may have been other factors at play here as well.

Losing Yūgorō was a major setback for Bokuan, but in the same year, a local cargo merchant, Nagunama Jōsaku, put forward his own whaling request. As Bokuan’s whaling project was on hold, the responsible local official was very eager to direct Jōsaku’s appeal to his superior. The magistrate who reviewed the request was more cautious, however, and ordered an inquiry into the feasibility of the project. All district headmen were asked for their opinions and although they did not explicitly advise against Jōsaku’s whaling proposal, they raised some major concerns in a joint letter:

We have learned that [Naganuma Jōsaku] is considering using firearms to kill the whales. In the western region of the country, when they hunt whales, they surround them with boats and intimidate them by rhythmic beats from the boats and drive them into nets. Because whales don’t like the sound of the beats from the [whaling] ships, they fear even more the sound of the firearms and flee from the shore to the open ocean. We know that since the ancient past fishermen on the beach detested the sound of firearms. The use of firearms is harmful not only for hunting whales but also for hunting other types of fish.⁵³

The district headmen did not argue against whaling per se, but against the method Naganuma intended to use as they saw firearm whaling as a possible disturbance to their own fishing operations. While there was a restriction on firearms during the Edo period, they were sometimes used by hunters in the mountains. That this could be a problem for fishermen can be seen with a prohibition from Matsumae domain dating back to 1691, according to which the discharge of firearms was forbidden within earshot of the ocean so as not to startle the herring.⁵⁴

I suspect there was also another reason the district headmen argued against the new whaling proposal: the other net owner families might have regarded Naganuma Jōsaku as an unwanted upstart. The Naganuma family had only recently made their fortune by transporting rice on their cargo ships on the Kitakami River and introducing fixed shore-net salmon fishing in their district.⁵⁵ In 1839, Naganuma Heizaemon, most likely a relative of Jōsaku, became the first member of the Naganuma family to hold the title of district headman of Kugunari.⁵⁶ The Naganumas may have been seen as competitors and their involvement in organised whaling may have been perceived as a threat to the other powerful net owner families. Unfortunately, we have no further information on Jōsaku’s project, but it was likely refused, possibly because of the concerns put forward by the other district headmen. We have to conclude that both the Hiratsuka net whaling and Naganuma firearm whaling projects failed at an early stage.

With the withdrawal of the powerful families of Kitsunezaki and Kugunari, Abe Ganzaemon, the young village headmen (and later district headman) of Ōsu-hama was the last remaining net owner interested in continuing the trial whaling. Ganzaemon was the fourth family head of the local Abe dynasty. His grandfather had started a successful fishing business and had worked as village headman, while Ganzaemon’s father had become the first district headman of the family and had even received honorary samurai status after retirement. Ganzaemon himself became wealthy in 1835 – when he was only twenty-one years old – through the shipping of commodities between Matsumae and Edo. A year later, in 1836, at the peak of the Tenpō famine, he became famous throughout the region due to his relief support. As mentioned, the famine was especially severe for the coastal communities on the Sanriku Coast and to make matters worse, the famine also coincided with poor fish catches. To ease the situation in his home district, Ganzaemon organised the transport of 1,600 straw bags of rice from the Akita domain overland with cattle and horses to the Sanriku Coast. He also bought and opened up new land to be transformed into rice paddies.

All told, Ganzaemon invested more than 600 ryō in his relief effort to save the sixteen fishing villages in the Monō district. In his own home village of Ōsu-hama, not a single person died of starvation, leading to the local saying: ‘More than Buddha, more than the gods, we are grateful for the master of Ōsu.’⁵⁷As historian Maren Ehlers has argued, such private famine relief programs were not an altruistic gesture but an integral part of the Tokugawa society. While domainal lords were eager to prevent social unrest in castle towns and other centres of commerce during famines, they expected the local elite of agricultural and fishing villages to mitigate disaster effects by themselves. In return, local notables such as district headmen were given titles and privileges.⁵⁸ Ganzaemon also profited indirectly from his generosity as he could expand not only his political influence in Monō district but also his commercial interest in fishing.

Boukan’s request for whaling might have been a good opportunity for Ganzaemon to further enhance his position as the most important net owner in the district. In 1839, he hired local fishermen and assembled a small fleet of thirteen fishing boats for his whaling operation. Each of these thirteen boats had a crew of six to eight fishermen and the fleet was divided into two groups of six ships plus a head boat that organised the hunt. The crew of around a hundred novice whalers used the harpoon method to catch four humpback whales in the first year. Another three animals were injured but escaped and their dead bodies were later found ashore by other fishermen. Already in 1837, the authorities had declared that because of the trial whaling, all beached whales injured by harpoons belonged to the respective whalers. The local fishermen ignored these orders, however, and secretly disposed of the harpoons and nets that were attached to the beached whales. When Genzaemon learned of this, he went to Bokuan, who wrote to the local authorities on his behalf. Bokuan argued in the letter that the illegal harvest of whale carcasses was a terrible loss for the whalers as they lost their harpoons and net equipment, which cost over 100 ryō.

The ad-hoc flensing of beached whales by local fishermen was a highly improvised and messy business. Whale meat was only one of the products a ‘correctly’ flensed whale carcass produced: whale blubber needed to be cooked in order to produce whale oil, while bones were crushed and made into fertiliser. Bokuan argued that this uneconomic treatment of the whale was also an economic loss for the domain. He requested that every beached whale should be handed over to the whalers, regardless of the cause of death. The bureaucrats in Sendai agreed to this but insisted that the finder of a beached whale would receive one-third of the profit when the whale products were sold on the markets.

During their second whaling season in 1840, the whalers from Ōsu-hama killed several right whales and humpback whales. This was not nearly enough to sustain the high fixed costs of the operation, let alone to reimburse the initial investments used to buy the flensing material and build a coastal base where the whales could be flensed. In the seventh month of 1840, Ganzaemon wrote a petition to the Sendai authorities:

Since last year, I have been entrusted of establishing a whaling operation, which I have done at my own financial expense. This spring we have caught six whales with harpoons outside of the coastal area and together with stranded and drifting whales we found, we caught nine whales in total, which was a great result. Compared to before, the skill of my fishermen has increased tremendously. The tools we have used until now, were just [normal fishing] equipment we picked up and these cannot compare to the tools used in the whaling areas in the western part of the country. We hope that our whaling operation can become as large as in the western part, but it is difficult with our current equipment to make a nice catch.⁵⁹

Ganzaemon estimated that he would need 5,000 ryō for a full-scale whaling operation. He told the authorities he would be able to shoulder most of the funding, but that he needed a loan of an additional 1,500 ryō to continue operating. He further argued that he could lend additional money from another domain if the Sendai domain had difficulties in funding his operations, but in this case the whale meat, oil, and fertiliser would be brought to the other domain, which was not in the interest (kokueki) of the Sendai domain. However, the bankrupt Sendai Domain refused his request and instead of finding a different investor, Ganzaemon downscaled the operation for the 1841 season from thirteen to six boats. They caught another three humpback whales, but in the following year, not a single whale was captured.

The whalers did not have much more luck when they tried to sell their whale products on the markets. As they were hunting during the summer, their main problem was getting the fresh whale meat from Ōsu-hama to Sendai before it spoiled. Bokuan asked for permission to use the post-horse system of Sendai domain, which was able to transport the products in four days, but consumers in Sendai still preferred tuna, sea bream, and raw bonito over raw whale meat. As an alternative, Bokuan requested that the meat be salted and together with whale dregs (used for fertiliser) be sold outside the domain. The authorities agreed in principle but stated that the whale oil had to remain in the domain and be sold there, even though the demand remained minuscule. All told, the Ōsu-hama whalers had trouble catching enough whales and there was also no interest for whale products in Sendai. After not being able to catch a single whale in 1842, Ganzaemon gave up on his whaling operation at the end of the season.⁶⁰

The Failed Whaling Venture

This second attempt to start a whaling proto-industry on the Oshika Peninsula failed just like the Kii fishermen had to give up their operation over a hundred years earlier. This time, however, the reason seemed not to have been the opposition of the local population. First, we have to understand why the local fishermen did not protest as vehemently against whaling as they did in 1677. Indeed, conflict with the locals only occurred due to the sound of the firearms used when hunting whales and regarding who was allowed to flense a beached whale. Our primary sources do not convey any large-scale opposition against whaling or mention any religious concerns. This can be partly explained by the bias of our sources as they are all letters and petitions written by Bokuan, the involved net owners, and the authorities, giving little room for the perspective of the ordinary fisherman.

The weak resistance might also have been related to the fact that the whaling was conducted by the local net owners, whom many fishermen were indebted to or worked for, rather than whalers from other domains. The Tenpō famine had only strengthened these dependencies as in the years prior to the whaling venture, thousands of fishermen had starved and the survivors had been mostly dependent on the relief supplies provided by the net owners.⁶¹ Net owners like Abe Ganzaemon had taken over the responsibilities of the local government, which had been unable to provide proper famine relief. It, therefore, would have been difficult for the locals to protest against the whaling enterprise of their net owners.

It seems likely that the Tenpō famine was also the principal reason the Sendai authorities had pushed for trial whaling. The development of a whaling enterprise not only promised to replenish the domain’s finances, but whale meat was probably also seen as an alternative to fish for feeding the population. Apart from this, the prohibition of the domain to not sell whale oil to other regions despite it being the most valued whale product indicates that the domain knew about the properties of the oil as an insecticide and saw it as crucial for fighting locust invasions.

Although the whaling enterprise was supposed to strengthen the domain’s kokueki, the authorities had underestimated the financial investment necessary to build a new proto-industry. Besides the inexperience of the contracted fishermen, the stakeholders themselves identified the lack of financial backing as the main reason for the failure of whaling. Ganzaemon estimated that about 5,000 ryō would be necessary to build a sustainable whaling venture, but the domain finances allowed for less than a tenth of this sum, making the financial cooperation of the net owners indispensable. Instead of working together, however, the three net owners involved persisted in their own schemes and even actively sabotaged Naganuma’s proposal. Not even the wealthy Abe Ganzaemon could shoulder the cost alone, having just spent a fortune on his famine relief program.

Even if the necessary capital had been available, however, the trial whaling was too small in scope. Abe Ganzaemon had been able to assemble a fleet of thirteen ships and one hundred men, but if we look at whaling operations in Taiji or Kyushu, it can be seen that even a simple harpoon whaling operation needed at least twenty ships, while hundreds of people and dozens of ships were needed for a successful net whaling operation.⁶² It is unlikely that the half-starved and inexperienced Sanriku fishermen could have pulled off net whaling without the help of instructors from an established whaling group, which Yūgorō had most likely not been willing to pay for.

Naganuma Jōsaku’s firearm whaling would probably have been not successful either. As far as I am aware, Jōsaku’s proposal in 1838 to use firearms for whaling was the first of its kind in Japan. Just two years later, however, a whaling group from the Gotō Islands in western Kyushu ordered a whaling gun from a Japanese gun manufacturer in Nagasaki. The gun manufacturer had been instructed by a Dutch expert from Deshima on how to manufacture firearms, but his skill was not sufficient enough to produce a gun that could be used for whaling.⁶³ If the whaling groups near Nagasaki, where all the knowledge about western technologies was concentrated, could not obtain a whaling gun, how did Jōsaku in Sendai intend to get one? The domains and the Tokugawa government carefully safeguarded the stock of firearms in Japan and although professional hunters had access to these weapons, as seen during the wild boar famine in 1749 in Hachinohe,⁶⁴ it is doubtful that these hunting rifles could have killed a whale due to their thick blubber. An alternative was to buy a whaling gun from an American whaling ship that had appeared off the coast since the 1820s, but it was forbidden to trade with them and it is also doubtful whether the Americans would have sold their guns as they were essential for their hunts. We also know from later accounts that the Japanese had trouble using the American bomb lance whaling technique, which became popular in the 1850s. As we will discuss in the next chapter, even fifty years later not a single whaling group had been able to use the American bomb lance whaling successfully enough to establish a sustainable whaling business.

In the end, the most straightforward and least advanced technique of harpoon whaling turned out to be the only method that brought results. Genzaemon’s crew of over one hundred whalers only managed to kill eleven whales in four years. Under ideal circumstances, the Ōsu-hama whalers could sell one right whale for 60 ryō and a humpback whale for 25 ryō. This was not nearly enough to cover the wages and food provisions of the workers, which amounted to 550 ryō per season. All said, Ganzaemon and his partners lost 1,046 ryō between 1840 and 1842.⁶⁵

To make matters worse, the whalers also had difficulty selling their products at the markets. The local demand for whaling products was negligible as no established whale product merchant network existed in the domain. This meant most of the products had to be shipped outside of the domain, which was theoretically beneficial for the domain as it increased its trade balance, but it also added substantially to the transport costs. While whaling was conducted mainly in the winter months in western Japan, whaling operations on the Sanriku Coast had to be conducted during the summer months, when most whales reached the region on their yearly migration. However, this brought the problem of fast spoilage of whale meat because of the summer temperature. Moreover, the Tenpō famine had effectively ended in the early 1840s and the population did not have to get accustomed to new forms of meat. As for the use of whale oil, the low prices indicate that the Sendai merchants did not recognise its potential as a pesticide. In other words, to be profitable, the whalers would have had to hunt at least twenty-five to thirty whales in the four-year trial period and would have needed to establish a market for whale products in Sendai.

Conclusion

While socio-economic circumstances were not favourable and partly to blame for the failure of the Sendai trial whaling, I suggest that the Tenpō famine itself may have also played a role in the disappointing fish and whale catches. Fishing was a highly seasonal occupation and could not be operated around the year. For example, during the Tenmei famine in the 1780s, many coastal villages were only saved from starvation in late spring when the fish swarms arrived on the Kuroshio and Oyashio currents.⁶⁶ The Tenpō famine in the 1830s, however, also coincided with several years of poor fish catches.⁶⁷ In a letter to the domain, the Hiratsuka family argued that whaling would bring relief for the struggling fishermen as ‘recent years have continuously brought bad fish catches and especially the last year has been difficult’.⁶⁸ Here, whaling was presented as a solution for the poor fish catches. This is an interesting inversion of the local knowledge of the locals, who believed that whales were necessary for good fish catches, as they brought them to the shore. The net owners, on the other hand, seem to have believed that poor fish catches could be compensated with whale catches.

Poor fish catches during famines were a common phenomenon. On land, the cold and wet yamase winds that spoiled the rice in the north during the summer were generated by the unusually low sea surface temperature of the Oyashio Current.⁶⁹ In the Atlantic, such drops in the sea surface temperature during the Little Ice Age had been known to influence the abundance of boreal marine species like salmon, cod, and herring.⁷⁰ In Japan, the lower sea surface temperature and slower velocity of the Oyashio Current actually increased the salmon and cod catches on the Sanriku Coast in early spring. When this current collided with the warmer waters of the Kuroshio Current in summer, however, it caused more rain and mist that would haunt the coastal regions for weeks, making fishing activities much more difficult.⁷¹

This probably influenced not just fishing, but the whaling activities of the net owners as well as these were also conducted during the summer months. Zooplankton in the perturbed region and fish species migrating on the Kuroshio Current such as sardines were also influenced by the lower sea surface temperature. Studies of sediment cores and historical data show that while not perfectly matched in time, most of the poor sardine catches occurred during the cooling phases of the Little Ice Age. Here, it is especially important to note the partial collapse of sardine catches between 1820 and 1840.⁷² Also, while interdecadal regime shifts are a natural phenomenon, their frequency and force can be influenced by global climate changes like the Little Ice Age. A recent study from Peru suggested that after 1820, radical changes in the ocean biochemistry caused a mass disappearance of sardines.⁷³ Unsurprisingly, many whale species as consumers of zooplankton and sardines also react to oceanographic regime shifts. For example, changes in blue whale migration routes have been correlated with regime shifts in the eastern North Pacific.⁷⁴

In summary, the cold Tenpō weather most likely caused famines on land and also led to poor fish catches due to lower plankton and sardine abundance. Whaling was supposed to compensate for the bad fish catches, but due to the increased whaling activities of the American pelagic and Japanese coastal whalers and the reduced abundance of zooplankton and small fish like sardine, whales were probably also scarcer on the Sanriku Coast. It would not be until the 1870s, when both forms of whaling were subsiding, that whales returned in large numbers to the coast and the cetosphere recovered slightly.