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...meat is 32 times the limit set by Japan's Health Ministry. School children in Taiji eat dolphin, like the rest of the town's population. Junichiro Yamashita, who years ago raised national awareness of dolphin meat's health risks as Taiji's local assemblyman, was interviewed for the film along with current assemblyman Hisato Ryono. But Ryono, who was touted as a hero on the mercury issue in the documentary, told a local television station that he was informed his interview would be used in a film on "international contamination of the oceans," not for the Cove project...
...Killing dolphins for meat is a cultural issue on both sides of the debate. While cute and often anthropomorphized, dolphins, unlike some whale populations hunted by Japanese fishermen, are not endangered. The film editorializes that the statues and images of whales and dolphins in Taiji purposefully hide the town's dark secret of killing the animals. But the Japanese have a history of venerating and praying for animals that die for the well-being of humans and sometimes erect statues and hold festivals to comfort the animals' souls. What might be considered macabre or inappropriate by Western standards...
...Earlier this week, the town decided to release 70 of the roughly 100 dolphins from the previous week's catch. But Taiji fishermen aren't the only ones bowing to international pressure. Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) chairman Tom Yoda announced on Sept. 16 that the festival will screen the film, after previously rejecting it for TIFF's official selection (the festival starts next month). Having come under fire for initially rejecting the documentary, Yoda said the reasons for rejecting or accepting films aren't generally discussed, as the festival receives more than 700 entries each year. No film festival...
...areas where dolphin hunting is permitted, the global reaction to The Cove has a whiff of the enduringly contentious whaling debate (Japan has hunted whales in the name of science for decades despite environmentalists' ire). The new wave of criticism of dolphin hunting that has been spurred by the film has many fishermen and local bureaucrats rolling their eyes over what they interpret as a another bout of foreign outrage at a practice that is legal, regulated and culturally acceptable in Japan, where dolphin meat - like whale - is eaten in the regions where it's hunted...
...here," he says. "As long as [their killing] is humane, dolphins are like other animals to us." The most humane technique, according to Nishimura, would be to use high-tech machines to minimize the animals' suffering. The most common hunting methods, however, are oikomi, a process illustrated in the film in which fishermen chase dolphins into shallow water and surround them with a net, and tsukimbo, in which dolphins are killed individually by harpoon. Taiji is the only place in Japan to recently practice oikomi...