''Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan'' is a 2018 book by Jakobina K. Arch. The book details the history of

whaling in Japan Japanese whaling, in terms of active hunting of whales, is estimated by the Japan Whaling Association to have begun around the 12th century. However, Japanese whaling on an industrial scale began around the 1890s when Japan started to participat ...

, especially during the

Tokugawa period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

. In particular, the book notes the relationship between the Japanese archipelago and the maritime space around it, as well as between the shore and inland populations of Japan. While shore-based and near-shore

whaling Whaling is the hunting of whales for their products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that was important in the Industrial Revolution. Whaling was practiced as an organized industry as early as 875 AD. By the 16t ...

was big business in early modern Japan, employing tens of thousands of workers and drawing substantial investment, the practice was unsustainable, and it fell off before the middle of the nineteenth century, even before American whaling ships had a major impact on Pacific whale species. If the oceans are paid attention to as global environments and as key sources of nutrients and economic resources, the book argues, then Tokugawa Japan was neither as self-sufficient nor as sustainable as has previously been argued. This decline in whaling by about the 1840s brings the book's argument up to the present. The book "finds little evidence of Japan's supposed 9,000-year unbroken whaling tradition in modern factory-ship whaling," which would thus render Japan's twentieth century claims to qualify for exemptions from the

International Whaling Commission The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is a specialised regional fishery management organisation, established under the terms of the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) to "provide for the proper conservation ...

's moratorium on commercial whaling based on a long indigenous cultural practice of whaling unfounded. While Japan may claim a history of whaling, the book thus argues, it was not continuous, and it was both commercial and ecologically unsustainable from its early history.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan 2018 non-fiction books Environmental non-fiction books Maritime history Books about whaling History books about Japan Whaling in Japan University of Washington Press books Environmental history of Japan