Recently in Japan Category

Japan does whale hunting for strictly scientific reasons. Those reasons being....

The scientific research included injecting minke whale sperm into cows eggs, and attempts to produce test-tube whale babies, News Limited newspapers report.

This explains so much.

Technorati Tags: conservation, japan, whales

Australian Customs offices have released video and pictures of recent Japanese whaling practices. Amongst other things these photos and video show a mother and her calf killed together. The calf is estimated at being under a year old. Scientific whaling practices at their best. I won't post the pictures or video here, but this link has it all.

Even better, from what I've read Japan still has whale meat left over from last year. Last year being one of the worst years for meat prices, falling so low that dog food makers were buying it.

Technorati Tags: conservation, japan, video, whales

Australia seems to be taking this years Japanese whale hunt very seriously. The government will be dispatching planes and ships to monitor and record the whaling fleets activities. They hope that recording the activities may led to a lawsuit in international courts. Hopefully this will help end Japans "scientific" whaling practices. Along those same lines is this article from earlier in the year that shows action being taken on the Japanese side of things. Assemblymen from the city of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture are trying to ban dolphin meat due to extremely high levels of mercury. They've even gone so far as to call it "Toxic Waste." Their main concern is that this meat is being fed to children at schools across the prefecture. Meat that has up to ten times the legal level of mercury. With Japan's population become more and more concerned about food safety after recent problems with tainted Japanese food this argument may actually have some effect on the local population.

But Japan is not completely without heart when it comes to whales and dolphins. When they're not eating them they do enjoy putting silly hats on them.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Technorati Tags: conservation, japan, whales

Back in September I went for my first dive in Japan. I traveled six hours to Kashiwajima in Kochi prefecture. Or if you read the 日本語 it would look like this: 柏島。I took this trip thanks to Live Scene Dive Shop here in Fukuyama. They were the ones nice enough to deal with one silly, and large, foreigner. We almost didn't dive this weekend thanks to a typhoon that was barreling towards Japan. In order to safely dive the trip was moved up from Saturday to Friday. So on a very rainy Friday night, around 9 pm, six Japanese people and one awkward American piled into a very large van and drove six hours to Kashiwajima.

The thing that surpassed me the most about Kashiwajima was how busy it was. We stayed at a lodging house for divers, appropriately called FIN House, which provided us with the comforts of home and a place to store our equipment. They also served a mean meal of Japanese food. Besides all the divers around there seemed to be very few locals out and about. Granted, this wasn't a very populated island, but the lack of activity was kind of sad.

Our first dive on Saturday was at noon. The weather was quite sunny, though clouds in the distance looked threatening enough. The first dive was a shallow dive, only 18 meters, and was only a 5 minute boat ride from the docks. At first I was a bit disappointed by the apparent lack of wildlife. That was until we hit the slope. Among the rocks was a plethora of sea life, and my personal favorite of the weekend, eels. I probably saw around 10 eels on this first dive, as well as some fire darts and a little happy yellow spotted puffer.

After a fun filled meal of Japanese food (rice balls, miso soup, spaghetti) we loaded up our equipment on a different boat and headed to another dive site. Our second site wasn't too far away from the first spot, but this spot was much more rocky. Ok, so every dive spot was rocky, just in various quantities and sizes of the rocks. We swam out to a rocky slope and down to around 26 meters where I had the luck to see not one, but two ribbon eels. These small and brightly colored eels made the entire trip worth while. I managed to take a few good photos before someone's wayward fin scared him away. The video at the end of the post has a short clip of the second eel we ran across. Somehow I was able to pull off this wonderful macro photo of a really small shrimp. In case you're wondering, yes I did crop it and do some slight color correction. Also on this dive I saw several Lion Fish, as well as a Lion Fish hanging out with an Octopus.

Upon exiting the water we entered into a world of pain as a heavy rain had started. Not a fun time. Luckily we were already wet anyways, and were finished diving for the day. After a hot shower I settled in for a long futon nap, and then some fun filled bad Japanese bonding time with my co-divers.

The next morning we got up early for a 7 o'clock dive, which was good as the weather was decent. For this dive we took a 15 minute boat ride out to a large, rocky, wall with a decently strong current at a depth of 25 meters. This area had quite a few larger fish as well as a decent amount of soft and hard corals. As opposed to before where there was hardly any. It was a fun dive with a large variety of fish.

After a fun filled Japanese breakfast we headed out to our last dive around 11. This dive had us drop down into a rocky area and then swim out to a large flat sandy area. This was a treat for me as it was the first time in this type of environment. I was able to observe some some really interesting camouflaged fish and shrimps. My favorite were the Goby Shrimp relationships. Every type of Goby is paired up with a certain type of shrimp and they hang out in the same hole. I spent about 5 minutes just watching these two shrimp move sand and shells out of their hole while the Goby stood guard. After awhile we headed into some large rocks and took a group picture. Notice how cute we all are.

After exiting I noticed two things. First it was raining again, and second that there were ten other boats on the water servicing divers. I had no idea that this area was so popular. Live and learn I guess. We packed up our equipment, showered, and in my case bought a couple of t-shirts. Then it was off we went in the rain for another 6 hour drive back to Fukuyama.

A couple fun filled things about diving in Japan. When we did our dive logs we all got little maps of the dive sites, to which we drew our dive paths on. Handy if you want to do dives later one. Maybe it was just my dive shop, we we played fish bingo. As in when you spot a certain type of fish we got to put a sticker on our bingo card. Its easy to shock Japanese people by asking if they have eaten the various types of fish you saw when diving. I was surprised they hadn't.

While Kashiwajima probably won't make it on any Top 100 SCUBA Sites, it has quite a few interesting things to see. The ribbon eels alone were worth the trip, and I would do this trip again next year. Plus it was a good opportunity to hang out with some really nice Japanese divers and get a look at the Japanese diving scene.

Technorati Tags: diving, japan, kashiwajima, scuba, video

I wrote an article about my Asian diving for the monthly Hiroshima ALT newsletter Wide Island View. Its nothing I've not written here before, but worth a read if you're interested in what we English teachers in Japan write about. Click on it to view in your browser, or right click to download it. The file comes in at about 550 kbs.

Out of all the photos I sent them why did they use the clownfish photo? Seriously. Clownfish. Sigh...

Technorati Tags: diving, fiji, japan, koh tao, philippines, scuba, thailand, travel