Dolphin-hunting season has arrived again in this sleepy harbor town at the tip of the Kii peninsula south of Kyoto. Since October, perhaps 2,000 small whales and striped, bottlenose, spotted and risso’s dolphins have been slaughtered for meat that ends up on the tables of local homes and restaurants and in vacuum-packed bags in supermarkets. By the end of March, 1,000 more will go the same way, part of what is probably the largest annual cull of cetaceans – about 26,000 around coastal Japan according to environmentalists -- in the world.
Six hours from Tokyo and accessible only via a coastal road that snakes through tunnels hewn from dense, pine-carpeted mountains, Taiji for years escaped the prying eyes of animal rights activists, but the isolation has been abruptly ended by the Internet and the cheap rail pass. A steady trickle of foreign protestors – most Japanese people know little about the tradition -- now arrives in the rusting town square to cross swords with local bureaucrats and the 26 fishermen who run the hunt.