Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.    

Ikizukuri

Cruelty, writes Nietzsche, is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind. Indeed, to practise cruelty - to refine it into an art form and a virtue - is the mark of human culture; a means by which we express our power over life and our divine indifference to suffering, be it that of animals, slaves, or those regarded as enemies of the state.

For it is not only beasts that are tortured and butchered, or sea-creatures that are turned into sashimi. And so as my companion's plate of ikizukuri was prepared and served with all the delicate knife-work that a Japanese chef is capable of, I thought once more of Fu Chou Li, who was executed in 1905 by being cut into a hundred pieces. 

The public dismemberment of this poor wretch - guilty of murdering a prince - was something that obsessed Bataille, who kept a photograph of the event which played a decisive role in his thinking. For he saw in the picture not only great horror, but also a look on the victim's face of ecstatic joy that seemed to transcend his torment. And it was this that lent the picture an almost unbearable beauty and fascination:

"The young and seductive Chinese man ... I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin."

- Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany State University Press, 1988, p. 120.

I understand, I think, where Bataille is coming from - and why he finds the anguished eroticism of human sacrifice and sadism so rich in meaning. But as I looked down at my friend's plate and saw the still-living but semi-sliced fish attempt to take one last gasp of air, I was glad I had chosen the noodles.