If you’re into eating whales, Kouji Shingru’s shop is the place for you.

Located on a pedestrian-only street in Tokyo’s bustling Asakusa neighborhood, Shingru’s compact establishment has it all: deep red whale steaks and fillets in vacuum-sealed packages, cured whale on a stick, snack-sized bags of whale jerky, and a wide selection of canned whale morsels packed in brown sauce. A steady stream of customers — most of them over 50 — flows through the Yushi Special Shop in Whales, one of the capital’s only retail outlets for whale products.

Whale for sale in Shingru’s shop.

Photo: Colin Woodard.

“Almost all those who like whale meat are middle-aged and older,” says Shingru, a middle-aged man himself. “Young people have no experience with eating whale. In fact, my shop is one of the only places where young people have a chance to eat it.”

The problem, says Shingru, is with the supply. Since 1986, commercial whaling has been banned by the International Whaling Commission, and whale-eating nations have had to make do with the byproducts of their scientific catch. Japan — whose people once killed and ate thousands of blue, fin, sperm, sei, and humpback whales in a single season — has in recent years subsisted on an annual supply of 500 to 600 minke whales, each only a third the size of the fin whales that were once the backbone of the country’s whaling industry.

“Twenty years ago there was a lot of whale meat, and whale was a popular fish,” Shingru explains. “Now there is very little available, and whale meat is very expensive.” He holds up a 100-gram package of fresh minke bacon, white and light pink in color, selling for 1,800 yen ($15.30) — too dear for many consumers, he says. “Twenty years ago, this would have cost one-tenth as much.”

That may be about to change. This year Japan has more than doubled its whaling quota to 935 minkes, ostensibly as part of long-term research into the size and health of their population in the frigid waters around Antarctica. Norway has also boosted its quota in the North Atlantic, upsetting anti-whaling activists who note that this will be the world’s most deadly whaling season in a generation.

Indeed, 2006 could well be the year that the international whaling moratorium collapses altogether. In a triumph of patient diplomacy, Japan has used aid and trade measures to convince a small army of previously disinterested Caribbean and Pacific nations to join the IWC and vote with Japan. When the IWC meets this June in St. Kitts in the Caribbean, the pro-whaling bloc may well have the votes to overturn the ban. Whale, it seems, is back on the menu.

The Case for Whaling

Many in the West see a resumption of whaling as barbaric, a return to the dark days of the 20th century, when floating factories drove many great whales to the brink of extinction to procure industrial oil and pet food. But people in whale-eating nations see the issue differently, and find some of the criticisms by other countries hypocritical.

In Norway, even leading environmental groups like the Oslo-based Bellona Foundation support the country’s whale hunt. “We use small fishing vessels that consume few inputs and cause almost no pollution — it’s very friendly eco-production,” says Bellona’s Marius Holm. “Our principle is that we should harvest what nature provides, but in a sustainable way regarding the ecosystem as a whole and the specific stocks.” As long as it’s done sustainably, he adds, “We think whaling is a good thing.”

Make way for the minke.

Photo: NOAA.

Using those criteria, it’s hard to disagree. Norway’s government-sanctioned hunt is controversial — it’s the only country in the world that has a commercial hunt in defiance of the moratorium — but it does appear to be sustainable. Operating from about 30 small fishing vessels, Norway’s whalers are allowed to kill up to 1,052 minkes out of a total estimated North Atlantic population of roughly 100,000. “The hunt we have had along our coast has always been sustainable,” says Halvard Johansen of the Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries. “We’ve been whaling on this coast since the ninth century, and we don’t see that big a difference between aboriginal whaling and what we do here.” (Native residents in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are permitted a limited annual subsistence hunt.)

“We utilize the whole animal — nothing is thrown away,” Icelandic whaler Kristjan Loftsson told me when I visited his country. Loftsson is managing director of Iceland’s four-boat whaling fleet, which catches about 40 minkes each year under a science permit. “We feel that we’re being hung for mistakes made 80 years ago in the Antarctic.”

Our interview started on the deck of one of Loftsson’s 150-foot steam-powered boats, which are so small they return from a hunt with one or two minke carcasses strapped to the outside of the hull. (The animals are butchered on shore.) But when my questions turned to the whale’s place in Icelandic food culture, Loftsson insisted we adjourn to 3 Frakkar, a nearby Reykjavik restaurant whose deep freezers have kept its tables supplied with whale throughout the moratorium.

The fin whale is served as sashimi, and looks and tastes like a cross between high-grade tuna and beef tenderloin. Despite spending 20 years in 3 Frakkar’s freezers, it’s subtle and delicious. “It’s the best sushi meat you can have,” Loftsson proclaims, his beard shaking with enthusiasm, “but here we eat it mostly as grilled meat.”

When the small dish is finished, I have some misgivings about having eaten part of a great whale, but the experience can’t fail to impress just how many meals a single whale must produce. In terms of food per life taken, it’s hard to compete with an 80-ton mammal — that’s 35,000 times the live weight of a chicken.

One’s Dear Old Taste

In Tokyo, Shingru had a back room where customers could eat their whale purchases, but I settled for a portable bag of minke whale jerky. It tasted something like beef jerky, only sweeter, as promised by the text on the package: “This Kuzira Jerky tastes sweet,” it read in English, “one’s dear old taste.”

The last reference was targeted at older Japanese who lived through the famine years at the close of World War II. In those days, whale meat provided a lifeline to a truly starving population, accounting for nearly half of all animal protein consumption, and earning itself a revered position in the nation’s food culture. “It is no exaggeration to say that the blood of the whale has flown in each Japanese person who has consumed whale as [an] important gift from the sea,” wrote Takeo Koizumi of the Tokyo University of Agriculture in a whaling association newsletter in 2003.

But a generation gap exists, says Hideki Moronuki, chief of the division that oversees whaling at the Japanese Fisheries Agency. “Whale meat is more than twice as expensive as yellowfin tuna, and many people, particularly the younger generation, can’t afford it,” he notes. “The quantity of whale meat provided by the market has increased because of the expansion of our research” — the meat from the additional whales captured for science must not be wasted, under IWC rules — “but still the price is not cheap.”

If the IWC moratorium is lifted, prices could go down — but demand, not supply, may become Japan’s problem. Even with an expanded scientific hunt, hundreds of tons of unsold whale meat have been piling up in storage freezers.

A native Alaskan crew at work.

Photo: NOAA.

Now there’s even a campaign to introduce whale to Japanese children and teens. Schools in Wakayama, a whaling region, have added the meat to their lunch program. “Whale culture” lessons have been added to elementary-school curricula, and one fast-food chain has started serving whale burgers, to a storm of international criticism.

But Glenn Inwood, a New Zealander who serves as spokesperson for Tokyo’s Institute for Cetacean Research, thinks the anti-whaling argument has become philosophical, not scientific. “It has really come down to whether or not you think the whale resource should be used at all, regardless of their abundance,” he says. Opposition, he says, is fueled by public revulsion over harpooning and flensing — the process of removing blubber from the carcass — two practices that opponents have videotaped for distribution.

In the end, supporters say the whale hunt is not all that different from the mainstream meat industry. “Many of us live in cities and eat meat wrapped in plastic and manage to have our eyes closed to where it came from,” Inwood says. “The one thing the meat industry has been successful at is making sure nobody sees what happens inside a slaughterhouse.”

Overdeveloped and under-regulated,
Albania faces a sea of troubles.

Photo: albaniafoto.com

For 11 years, this city of 700,000 has been dumping its waste in a suburban field five miles southwest of the center, forming great hills of rotting food, plastics, batteries, appliances, medical waste, and construction materials. Fires smolder throughout the dump, and more are set all the time by the 20 families who live here, eking out a precarious living by collecting metals and other valuables left in the ashes. The resultant clouds of smoke — laden with dioxins and heavy metals — drift over the surrounding neighborhoods, where many parents no longer allow their children to play outside.

One of the poorest countries in Europe, Albania is confronting an environmental crisis that goes well beyond the capital’s garbage woes. While many of its Eastern European neighbors spent the past decade and a half rebuilding from communism, this beleaguered nation staggered from one social upheaval to the next. Now that the dust has settled, Albanian environmental experts are taking stock of the situation and trying to get the attention of foreign donors, whose support will be essential for getting anything done. And getting things done is a requirement; as the country works to join the European Union, it must meet a set of strict environmental standards.

Narin Panariti, legislative and policy director at the Albanian Ministry of the Environment, says the staff there is busy identifying legal and regulatory changes that need to be made to conform with European Union law, a project the office hopes to have completed by the end of the year. “It’s an enormous list of things to do, more than in any other sector except agriculture,” she notes. “It will take us years, probably more than a decade, to perform all the changes.”

Albania, just east of Italy’s boot heel.

Image: Central Intelligence Agency’s
World Factbook.

A Long, Unwinding Road

Long after the collapse of communism, Albania’s 3.5 million people still don’t have a single wastewater treatment plant, toxic-waste disposal facility, or sanitary landfill. The country is littered with abandoned communist-era industrial enterprises that are now home to families of squatters and their livestock, even though the soil, water, and building surfaces are poisoned with contaminants. Peasants are cutting down forests to heat their homes, while construction companies haphazardly mine gravel from riverbeds, disrupting aquatic life and furthering an already critical nationwide erosion problem.

The entire industrial sector collapsed shortly after Albania emerged from communism in the early 1990s, triggering an exodus of 300,000 people to Italy and Greece. Hundreds of thousands more streamed into urban areas from impoverished mountain regions, building homes in city parks, suburban fields, coastal beaches, and the newly abandoned factories. In 1997, the country descended into anarchy following the collapse of fraudulent pyramid investment schemes; by the time order was restored months later, 1,500 were dead, and hundreds of public buildings had been destroyed. Shortly thereafter, nearly half a million Albanian-speaking refugees poured into the country, fleeing the war in neighboring Kosovo.

“The environment has not been, and could not have been, a priority for the government,” says Dhimiter Haxhimihali, a chemist at the University of Tirana and coauthor of several studies on the country’s environmental conditions. Even now, when environmental problems have reached a crisis point, public officials are often unwilling or unable to respond. “There are so many social and economic problems in this country, and the state budget does not have the resources to deal with them,” Haxhimihali says.

Take the situation at the old Porto Romano chemical factory on the outskirts of Durres, Albania’s second-largest city and primary shipping port. Five years ago, delegates from the U.N. Environment Program visited the abandoned pesticide plant and realized they had stumbled upon one of the most contaminated spots in the Balkans. Hundreds of tons of dangerous chemicals had been left in unlocked storage sheds, and others had been dumped in a wetland near the site, which is now in the midst of a residential neighborhood. Area soils contained residues of the pesticide lindane at concentrations of 1,290 to 3,140 milligrams per kilogram of soil; in the Netherlands, authorities intervene when lindane residues reach just 2 mg per kilo. The delegation also found chromium residues, and, in one sample, a level of chlorobenzene 4,000 times higher than E.U. standards.

Children play on the contaminated
grounds of the Porto Romano factory.

Photo: GRID-Arendal.

But what really horrified the UNEP team was that thousands of people were living within the contaminated zone, most of them new arrivals from the impoverished north. They had built homes out of materials scavenged from the plant’s buildings, set their cows and sheep out to graze amongst the toxins, even let their children use the factory as a playground. Several families were actually living inside the plant buildings. UNEP called for the plant to be sealed off from the surrounding neighborhood and for an emergency evacuation of the people in the area. The plant, along with four other “hotspots,” posed “immediate risks to human health and the environment” and required “urgent remedial action,” UNEP warned in a prominent report.

Two years later, this reporter visited the site, and nothing had changed. The factory had no fence around it, no signs warding off the children happily playing in the dirt or the owners of the milk cows chomping away on the scraggly vegetation. Mounds of fluorescent yellow waste could be seen scattered alongside the road, in alleyways, and in what appeared to be a schoolyard. Asked about the situation, the mayor of Durres, Miri Hoti, said he lacked the funds to erect a fence and, in any case, was upset that the squatters were making it difficult to sell the plant to private investors. A similar scenario had unfolded at a shuttered PVC plant in the southern city of Vlora.

Now, three years later, the plants have been fenced off, but cleanup work has yet to begin. “The projects depend on the financial capabilities of the ministry, which are quite low since these are incredibly expensive interventions,” says Panariti, noting that the World Bank and the U.N. have funded feasibility studies at the sites. “Without foreign help, there is little we can do.”

Life in the Slow Lane

Even as they’re mired in problems of the past, state and local officials are having difficulty keeping ahead of new affronts. Poorly planned construction projects have marred some of Albania’s most popular beaches and seaside retreats, while new suburban buildings are often not even connected to sewer lines. “Politicians here are very uneasy about complying with land-use strategies or enforcing building laws, because they don’t want to offend people and lose their votes,” says Arian Gace, an Albanian official at the local office of the U.N.’s Global Environment Facility.

Pollution chokes the streets of Tirana.

Photo: GRID-Arendal.

Then there’s the question of air pollution. Under communism, private automobile ownership was illegal; today, upwards of 300,000 vehicles choke the capital’s streets, driving rush-hour dust and small-particle pollution levels to 10 times the World Health Organization safety limit. “Most cars are secondhand and use a very bad quality of diesel,” notes Mihallaq Qirjo, director of the Albania office of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe. “Albania has exchanged the industrial pollution of the past for the automotive pollution of the present.”

“There is a serious lack of leaders with long-term thinking,” says Gace. “A lot of people just want to get rich, trash the country, and get out. The biggest guarantee I see for environmental improvement is the political pressure exerted by the E.U. to improve enforcement.” The E.U.’s requirement that all applicants meet approved guidelines — which address issues ranging from noise pollution to sustainable development to eco-labeling — might mean the country has to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to build wastewater-treatment plants and landfills, eliminate leaded fuel, and prevent building in wetlands and other threatened habitats. Gace notes that anything that betters Albania’s prospects for membership is extremely popular with voters. However, it’s not always popular with politicians, who he says tend to have business interests of their own.

“The present politicians do not have a genuine interest in going in the fast lane toward Europe, because if you are going there you must comply with a lot of regulations that are going to lower your profit margins,” he says. Progress, Gace predicts, will likely remain slow.

Even good leadership only goes so far. Edi Rama, the popular and effective mayor of Tirana, has won awards from World Mayor and the U.N. for fighting poverty and corruption. He has knocked down hundreds of shops, discos, and restaurants that had been illegally constructed in the city’s parks, and gotten trash collected and centralized, instead of burning in heaps scattered throughout the city. But Tirana has tripled its size since 1992, creating new problems faster than the municipal government can solve them.

Rama, a former painter, says solving the problems requires coordinated action between his office, parliament, and a variety of government agencies. “Unfortunately,” he says, “getting institutions to work with one another [in this country] is the hardest work you can imagine.”