Taiji town, in Wakayama prefecture, is a sleepy little fishing village on the eastern coast of Japan about four driving hours from Osaka (Kansai) international airport. Taiji is considered the birthplace of traditional whale hunting in Japan, with a history that dates back to the 1600's. Traveling down and around the coast from Osaka to Taiji, you will see that the entire coastline is dotted with similar small towns – all with the same style of harbors and small fishing boats. What sets Taiji apart from other towns is the refusal to accept that there are alternatives to this long held custom of slaughtering small cetaceans. Most of the world was not aware that this was happening until Ric O'Barry brought it to the world's attention through the making and screening of his award-winning documentary “The Cove”. “The Cove” was not the first time that the practices had attracted attention here; in 2003 Sea Shepherd activists Alex Cornelissen and Allison Lance were arrested for cutting the nets in the notorious cove and were detained for four weeks before being evicted from Japan. Arriving in Taiji on 31 August 2010, with a small but select group of Sea Shepherd volunteer activists – all from Brisbane, Australia – we discovered the town was not what we expected. The fleet of fishing boats used in the Dolphin drives, known to us from information readily available on the internet, were sitting lazily in the main harbour. An initial drive past The Cove on our first day in Taiji, the last guaranteed day of safety until April 2011 for the dolphins, yielded no confrontations with pro-hunting militants and no other opposition. In fact, the town was all but deserted. After checking into our accommodation, one other scuba diver, two scouts, and I headed back to the town to ascertain what preparations were underway for the start of a possible six-month slaughter. We were able to casually walk down to the beach at The Cove, which is visible from the road into town. There was no scrutiny or surveillance from the adjacent car park as we had expected. We donned our snorkelling gear and swam around to the secluded killing cove – this was an unsettling experience – swimming in waters where up to 2,000 Bottlenose and Risso dolphins, False Killer and Pilot whales have been butchered on an annual basis just did not feel right. Our swim into and out of the killing cove was uneventful, save for the attention it received from a couple that began filming and conducted a short interview with us. This action swiftly brought us to the attention of the local Police. With snorkeling gear in hand, we attempted to walk from The Cove but did not get very far before being questioned by two local [Shingu] Police officers. After some playful banter, and surprisingly no questions as to why we were snorkeling in the cove, we shook hands and left to return to our traditional-style guesthouse in a nearby town. That night, two of us again headed for the town under cover of darkness, armed with equipment to document any activity either into or out of the harbor and around The Cove, including the secluded killing cove. We nestled into position undetected for the duration of our surveillance activities, and at 3:00am lights started appearing around the town as fishermen woke for their daily routines. At 3:45am, the fishermen started leaving the harbor under the light of the half moon and a star-lit sky. It was not until 5:30am that a procession of the boats involved in the dolphin drives left the sanctity of the main harbor and headed due east under the rising sun. Shortly before 8:00am the boats returned back from the same easterly direction. This time not in single file but in a long arc of eight evenly spaced boats, slowly driving forward, herding a pod of terrified dolphins or small whales toward their doom. The only noise was the droning of the engines from the distance. Two of the larger boats in the fleet charged ahead to set up positions near the entrance to The Cove, ready to ensure that their quarry did not escape. The dolphins must have gone deep and shifted direction, because within a few minutes all boats broke formation and headed back out to sea. This was a great day for the dolphins with none being caught. A press release was quickly penned to inform the world that the hunts had again resumed with the first one being unsuccessful. It was not only the world that listened to this first report, but also the fishermen and those holding higher office in the Institute for Cetacean Research, the organization that ultimately profits from the sales of dolphins for captivity and the annual illegal Antarctic whaling operation. They now knew that representatives of their nemesis, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, were in town – watching and waiting! A pod of bottlenose dolphins were captured the following morning and witnessed in The Cove. The town's fisheries agency confirmed that twenty had been captured and a number of them had been kept for sale with the remainder released. Our photographic evidence confirmed this statement. The captured dolphins were manually moved using small boats and hand-held stretchers to the holding pens in the main harbor on Friday, 3 September where they wait for slave owners from aquariums and other captive dolphin enterprises to collect them; they are destined for a life of misery and will be forced to endure an unnatural diet of dead fish laced with antibiotics and anti-depressants in order to survive. The knowledge that their activities were being closely monitored prompted an immediate heightening of security over the holding pens and around the town by a team of eleven police and two Japanese Coastguard employees. They were growing anxious over the possibility of a rescue attempt on the dolphins. Sea Shepherd did it in 2003, and could do it in 2010! Throughout our time in Taiji, we were stopped several times by the police, never admitting our true intentions or affiliations. We also encountered the Japanese Coastguard personnel who knew I was leading this charge into their territory and wanted to warn me that if I attempted a second Sea Shepherd action on the nets then I would be charged – the others in my group were warned not to associate with me! The Coastguard let us leave, but ensured that we were constantly followed by both Police and Coastguard vehicles until we lost them in a series of maneuvres in the back streets of Kushimoto. They have not found us since, despite attempts to pose as media for bogus interviews and always calling us within minutes of us escaping their surveillance attempts. Read more from the campaign report here Sea Shepherd
