Chapter 2 discusses the economic and religious importance of beached whales in northeastern Japan. Making use of folktales regarding the sea god Ebisu and domanial records on whale strandings, it is argued that stranded whales had a considerable impact on the culture and economy of northeastern communities that led to a different interpretation of whales than the communities in western Japan that engaged in active whaling. As is shown in this chapter, the reason why a non-whaling culture developed in Northeast Japan but not in western Japan is connected to how whales behave on their migration routes along the Japanese coast. Baleen whales passed through western Japanese waters in the winter months without foraging and with little disturbance to the coastal ecosystem. Therefore, whalers could hunt whales with only a small risk of damaging fisheries. However, further north, whales exhibited different behaviour as they hunted small fish for several weeks during the spring. The fishermen there had learned that having whales around benefited them as they indicated the presence of fish and could even bring the fish closer to the shore. This knowledge was thus transmitted in folktales and through material objects such as ‘whale stones’.

Chapter 1 describes the yearly migration of thousands of whales along the Japanese coast – often imagined as a pilgrimage by Japanese observers – and the impact this had on Japanese coastal ecosystems. Humans in the Japanese archipelago made use of stranded whales early on, but it was not until the 1570s that some fishing communities in western Japan started to actively target whales. It is argued that the dissemination of organised whaling was closely linked to the rise of the fish fertiliser proto-industry. To fulfil the demand for marine fertiliser, fishermen from the central Kii domain developed new fishing and whaling techniques. After overfishing their own coast, they began following the migration route of whales across the archipelago in search of new fishing grounds, disseminating fish and whaling techniques to other regions of Japan.