In western Japan whaling was an important proto-industry during the Edo period (1603-1868). Fishing communities in northeastern Japan, on the other hand, did not engage in whaling, as they regarded whales as the incarnation of the god Ebisu, who they believed to be responsible for good fish catches. The situation was, however, more complicated regarding dolphins. While large groups of dolphins were sometimes called “three thousand ebisu,” unlike their larger cousins, dolphins were not protected by the northeastern fishing communities but killed in large numbers.

This paper show that while whales were believed to drive fish towards the shore, dolphins were often made responsible for dispersing fish swarms, actively hurting fisheries. Because of this, fishermen in some communities in northeastern Japan, began to actively target dolphins, even though they were otherwise against whaling practices. This paper aims at uncovering the socio-economic, religious, and ecological role of dolphin hunts in the northeastern communities of Yamada and Karakuwa and set them in relation to the broader northeastern non-whaling culture. Both communities are small fishing villages situated in the central region of the Sanriku Coast. Yamada was engaged in proto-industrial dolphin hunts between 1738 and 1928. In Karakuwa, dolphin hunts started even earlier in 1670. In the latter case, we have reports of dolphins being driven by orcas into the bay, where local fishers could trap the dolphins with fixed-shore nets. Both communities were also anti-whaling; in Yamada, protests against whaling forestalled the construction of an industrial whaling station in 1904, while the Ōsaki Shrine near Karakuwa was a place of whale worship, with a strong whaling taboo. The paper untangles the complex relationship of humans with cetaceans, showing how local ecological knowledge intersected with religious and cultural representation of marine mammals in northeastern Japan.  

Keywords: dolphin, worship, Japan, whaling, hunting

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Fynn Holm is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History at Harvard University. As a global environmental historian, he investigates the human relationship with oceans and mountains in Japan and Europe. A revised manuscript of his dissertation, which he defended in 2019 at the University of Zurich, is scheduled to be published by Cambridge University Press under the title “The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c. 1600-2019” in 2023.