“What ... remains is first tried out to extract the oil, then chipped by means of hand knives, and dried in the sun for fertilizer.”
Whale meat is coarse grained and tastes something like venison but has a flavor peculiarly its own. I have eaten it for many days in succession and found it not only palatable but healthful. In fact a chemical analysis shows it to contain about 98 per cent. of digestible material, whereas ordinary beef has seldom more than 93 per cent. The Japanese prepare it in a variety of ways but perhaps it is most frequently chopped finely, mixed with vegetables, and eaten raw, dressed with a brown sauce called shoyu.
In the summer when it is impossible to ship the meat long distances because of the heat, much of it is canned. The flesh is cooked in great kettles and the cans made, packed, and labeled at the stations; the meat is then shipped to all parts of the Empire.
Whale meat on the washing platforms ready to be sent to market.
It is most unfortunate that prejudice prevents whale meat from being eaten in Europe and America. It could not, of course, be sent fresh to the large cities, but canned in the Japanese fashion it is vastly superior to much of the beef and other tinned foods now on sale in our markets. In New Zealand, the Messrs. Cook Brothers, who have developed the method of capturing humpback whales in wire nets (described in the Introduction), can a great deal of meat and ship it to the South Sea Islands, where it is sold to the natives.
The baleen of the fin whales, which is of little value in Europe and America, has been put to many uses by the Japanese. When I visited the exhibition rooms of the Toyo Hogei Kabushiki Kaisha in Tokyo, I was astonished and delighted at the cigar and cigarette cases, charcoal baskets, sandals, and other beautiful things created by their clever brains and skillful fingers from the material which in the hands of Western nations seems to be almost useless.
CHAPTER VII
A JAPANESE WHALE HUNT
After spending a delightful month at Oshima, where three fine whale skeletons were secured, I returned to Shimonoseki to send them to New York, and then traveled northward to Aikawa, three hundred miles from Tokyo. Aikawa is a typical little fishing village, situated at the end of a beautiful bay which sometimes harbors as many as fourteen whale ships from the four neighboring stations.
In the early spring finbacks and an occasional blue whale are taken there, but in June and July sei and sperm whales arrive in great numbers. The sei whale (the iwashi kujira, or sardine whale of the Japanese) is an exceedingly interesting species which, to the scientific world, had been unknown in the Pacific Ocean until my visit, although it had formed the basis of the Japanese summer fishery for twelve or fifteen years. My first hunt for sei whales resulted in a very exciting experience and one which in modern whaling is comparatively rare.