“A steel wire cable was looped about the tail just in front of the flukes, and the huge carcass drawn slowly upward over the end of the wharf.”
On shore the station bell was clanging and men were assembling on the wharf; strong well-built fellows they were, many of them half naked and busy sharpening the blades of murderous-looking knives. With them mingled dozens of women and girls clad in tight blue trousers and kimonas, each one armed with a stout iron hook or with carrying racks slung over their shoulders.
In a few moments the rattling steam winch had brought the whale close in shore, a steel wire cable was looped about the tail just in front of the flukes, and the huge carcass drawn slowly upward over the end of the wharf.
As it rose the eager cutters attacked it savagely with their long-bladed knives, slicing off enormous blocks of flesh and blubber which were seized by “hook men” almost before they fell, passed to the women, and drawn to the back of the platform.
Meanwhile two other cutters in a sampan were at work dividing the carcass just in front of the dorsal fin. The entire posterior part of the whale was then drawn upward and lowered on the wharf to be stripped of blubber and flesh. Transverse incisions were made in the portion of the body remaining in the water, a hook was fastened to a “blanket piece,” and as the blubber was torn off by the winch the carcass rolled over and over. The head, disjointed at the neck, was hoisted bodily upon the pier. Section by section the carcass was cut apart and drawn upward to fall into the hands of the men on the wharf and be sliced into great blocks two or three feet square.
The scene was one of “orderly confusion”—men, women and girls, laughing and chattering, running here and there, sometimes stopping for a few words of banter but each with his or her own work to do. Above the babel of sounds, the strange, half wild, meaningless chant, “Ya-ra-cu-ra-sa,” rose and died away, swelling again in a fierce chorus as the sweating, half-naked men pulled and strained at a great jawbone or swung the hundred-pound chunks of flesh into the waiting hand cars which carried them to the washing vats. Sometimes a kimona-clad, bare-footed girl slipped on the oily boards or treacherous, sliding, blubber cakes and sprawled into a great pool of blood, rising amid roars of laughter to shake herself, wipe the red blotches from her little snub nose and go on as merrily as before.
“Section by section the carcass was cut apart and drawn upward to fall into the hands of the men on the wharf and be sliced into great blocks two or three feet square.”
It was essentially a good-natured crowd, working hard and ceaselessly but apparently deriving as much fun from their labor as though it were a holiday. The spirit of the place was infectious, and as I splashed about in the blood and grease, I talked and joked with the cutters in bad Japanese, causing screams of laughter when I seriously informed them that “the sun was very hot water” by the quite natural mistake of substituting the word atsui-yu for atsui (hot).