Word: taiji
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...despite the presence of interviews and archival footage, its goal is fundamentally the same as that of any Hollywood thriller: to tell a suspenseful story. Although “The Cove” is technically an exposé, focusing on the inhumane capture and slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, it uses the methods of fiction storytelling to narrate the filmmakers’ investigation into these abuses. It’s when nonfiction films forget that they owe the audience a narrative that they encounter trouble, a fact that seems lost on many critics and is responsible for the fact...
...Crimson’s first goal also came off the foot of Baskind, ten minutes into the first half as she took a pass from sophomore Hana Taiji and ricocheted it behind the hands of Lion goalkeeper Lindsay Danielson...
...Cove's central points, however, is not as open for cultural interpretation. Dolphin meat - like whale - contains high levels of mercury, and at its highest instances, the concentration of methyl mercury in bottlenose dolphin 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...
...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...
...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...