Chapter 5 discusses how industrial whaling was disseminated from Norway and Russia to the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that industrial whaling, invented by Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn in the 1860s, was taken up by Russian and Japanese whalers as a way to colonise the coastal waters and marine resources around the Korean Peninsula. Industrial whaling techniques allowed whalers to hunt even the largest whale species, such as blue and fin whales, which had a devastating effect on the feedback loops of the marine ecosystem. After a Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, western Japanese whaling companies used colonial tactics to bring industrial whaling to the main islands. The chapter argues that the rise of industrial whaling altered the interaction between humans and cetaceans forever, leading to the swift destruction of the cetosphere. While industrial whaling was successfully disseminated in colonial Korea, Japanese fishermen were more resistant and began protesting the new methods even in regions that had long proto-industrial whaling histories. However, the fiercest protest against industrial whaling occurred in former non-whaling regions such as Hokkaido and the Northeast.