Japanese, U.S. universities to discuss whaling, dolphin hunting

I wish them the best but I think they are both going to enter the room with the same thought "we must make the other side understand us" and not be opened minded.

Japanese Tradition? Sailing factroy ships half way around the world and using explosive harpoons is not a Japanese tradition.

Good traditions stay, bad traditions fade away.

If Ms. Yagi is so keen to preserve every aspect of Japanese tradition, can we take it that she wears her hair like the lady in the poster? Insists on wearing kimono all the time? If she's married, does she blacken her teeth in the traditional way? Defer in all things to her husband and mother-in-law?

Thought not.

She cannot rid whaling (Japanese or otherwise) of 'the tarnished image of being atrocious and evil' because like all acts of animal abuse, whether perpetrated through malice, ignorance, mental illness or gross nationalistic bloody-mindedness, it **is atrocious and evil.**

OK so Behind the Cove will get some screenings    in some Uni's in the USA, wonder how many Uni's in Japan have screens The Cove????

If she takes questions while in the US I would love to see that!!

Said it once, said it a million times, if Japan just stuck to some coastal whaling they actually EAT, few would care.

These yearly trips down to the Antarctic are truly ludicrous & a massive waste of taxes to only fill warehouses of frozen meat few want.

Sorry Yagi san your defending the indefendable

I doubt she will get many attendees even screening the film for free. Wonder who paid for the making of that film and the USA tour by the way?

Keiko Yagi hopes the events at the two universities will lead to "understanding of Japanese whaling and ridding it of the tarnished image of being atrocious and evil."

This will only happen when the mass slaughter of cetaceans for profit stops. 99% of the rest of the world got over hunting whales. What makes Japan so special they think they have the right to slaughter a resource created by the hundreds of countries who gave up whaling for profit? The gruesome slaughter of dolphins in the Taiji area has been condemned by Japanese Zoologists and they have stopped taking live dolphins from the hunt. The sale of live dolphins from the Taiji hunt is the only thing that keeps it commercially viable. They state they need to hunt them for food, but it is not the sale of the meat that makes the money.

As for hunting whales in the north and south pacific, Japan has yet to prove there is actually a market for the meat. They reduced their catch quota in the southern oceans to a few hundred with their new 'research' plan, but even most of that meat is sitting in freezers around the country with nobody wanting to buy it. There is a plan to sell it to schools cheaply and force-feed it to kids in their lunches, but how can that be considered a justifiable commercial enterprise.

Every argument that Japan puts forward to support their cetaceans hunting is as hollow as Swiss cheese. In other words, the Japanese Institute of Cetaceans Research is full of poop!

...unclear from this who is discussing what - not students I gather as Japanese students aren't able to discuss much (from my experience) due to poor communication and critical thinking skills...universities are abstract...people speak...if they can.

It's a good thing that the issue will be discussed in an academic forum where presumably reason, logic and science will carry some weight regardless of one's position.

@milodinow My guess is it is from the Fukishima Emergency Recovery fund, as it has already been used to pay for hunting in the Antartica Whale Sanctury.

Whale and dolphin meat contains toxic levels of Mercury, as well as ionising radionuclides such as Strontium and Cesium, if they have been anywhere in the North Pacific between the West coast of USA and Canada and the East Coast of Japan.

I think that if the powers that be are so worried that they fund such propaganda, then they must be losing. My advise...donate to Sea Shepherd. they are not motivated by imperialistic Nationalism or whatever these barbarians use as justification.

Having said this, i will still watch this "documentary" as i will be just the same as them if i don't listen to their reasoning for slaughtering mammals.

Before Yagi can honestly say she wants discussion and open-mindedness on the subject, let me ask: has she screened "The Cove" in Japan to Japanese students?

Nope. In fact, it has not been screened at all, or at least was cancelled in nearly all theaters it was bound for.

If anyone here is in the US, can you find a way to film the Q&A after the screening and post it on YouTube? I can't wait to see it.

I easily saw both "The Cove" and "Behind 'The Cove'" at theaters here in Japan when they were first released here. When I saw them at packed tiny theaters that play some of the best movies from around the world, there were no protests and both audiences were cool. "The Cove" is available in DVD with Japanese subtitles. You can find it on Amazon Japan. Both movies are worth seeing. I thought "The Cove" was more entertaining, and "Behind 'The Cove'" was more friendly. But that's just me.

Hahaha... when these are screened, if they are stopped outright by protest, Yagi will just go back to her "evil" narrative in describing her failed attempt to simply impose her incorrect ideas on others. She doesn't want "discussion" on the issue any more than "historians" in Japan want the UN to "consider alternative sides of the issue" in denying anything about Nanjing. She says they "only swallow what they are taught" as though they have no way of obtaining knowledge on the issue themselves, and have no opinion, but it's SHE who wants to them to suck up what she says without question, because I can guarantee any question thrown at her about the negative points of whaling will be met with scripted, BS answers first about science, then forgetting about the science lie and falling back on lies about tradition, then simply saying she's being attacked.

You can force the unwanted, decaying meat on kids through school lunches in Japan, Yagi, but you can't force it down the throats of Americans. This is going to be fun.

Norway catches 3 times as many whales as Japan and the majority of their catch are pregnant Minkes. If people are genuinely concerned about the killing of whales, then they are suspiciously going after the wrong country, implying that they don't in fact care about whales at all