In the movie biz and on the
streets, there’s a multi-award-winning, highly controversial documentary that
everyone is talking about… outside of Japan that is. In Japan the Oscar-winning film, The Cove, is largely unheard of in the
public arena. So when we got
wind of a screening of the film in an ex-pat bar in Shibuya, we thought it
would be interesting to go and check it out.
The Cove is an eco-documentary,
directed by world-renowned photographer, Louie Psihoyos, that
follows the efforts of a team of activists, led by ex-dolphin trainer Richard
O’Barry, to covertly record and expose the annual slaughter of over 2,000
dolphins in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji. While dolphin fishing is legal in Japan (the ban on
commercial whaling doesn’t protect dolphins and other small marine mammals), as
the documentary so graphically shows, the methods used to trap and kill the
dolphins are horribly brutal and unnecessarily cruel.
In the opening moments of the film Psihoyos states “You try to do the story legally”, but as we quickly
discover, laws sometimes had to be circumvented in order to uncover the Taiji
dolphin trade in its entirety. The
activists are under heavy surveillance by the Japanese and are met with strong
resistance from locals in the fishing community and menacing men in suits
(we’re never really sure of who they actually are). Despite employing a range of nifty physical disguises,
O’Barry and his team are threatened on a number of occasions and are required
to orchestrate highly coordinated decoy plans in order to move about the town
un-detected. Their filming efforts are equally as devious as they go to great
lengths to capture video and audio evidence of the killings– including
underwater microphones, night vision recording and remote-controlled cameras
hidden in birds nests and fake rocks – herein lies much of the controversy
surrounding the documentary.
In addition to themes of conservation and animal cruelty, The
Cove touches on the role played by marine
parks in this story, claiming that Japanese fishermen can earn over $150,000
for each dolphin taken into captivity.
The team capture on film, dolphin trainers selecting individual dolphins
from the captured pods in the cove, assumedly to be taken away to major marine
parks and trained to perform. O’Barry considers this lucrative business to be
the major driving force behind the capture of dolphins in Taiji.
Those dolphins not destined for Sea World, end up in the
meat section of the supermarket - raising a worrying health issue for humans as
scientists have found dolphin and whale meat to contain toxin levels far in
excess of that deemed fit for human consumption under Japanese and
international law, yet the meat is still widely available for purchase around
the country. The high toxicity of the meat is said to be an accumulated result
of the dolphins’ upper rank in a heavily polluted food chain.
Despite a wealth of international acclaim, The Cove has received but one official screening in Japan (at
the 2009 Tokyo International Film Festival), due to strong opposition primarily
emanating from the fishing village of Taiji. However, its escalating success in the international film
arena is creating a mounting pressure for the documentary’s release to the
Japanese public. Given the film’s
claims that the majority of Japanese are unaware of dolphin fishing or the issues associated with it, one can only wonder what the
response will be.
