Wang Jen Bu died at dusk on February 28, 1979, when he was hit by a backfiring harpoon aboard his own ship, the Taiwanese whaler Hai Hwa (Sea Flower). Which was bad luck for Wang, poetic justice for the whale, and very curious.
For the ship's position at the time of the incident, as it was reported to the Taiwanese police, was 1,200 miles from home, just off the US Pacific Trust Territory island of Palau - where all whaling is prohibited. The Taiwan Government put a brazen face on it. To this day it insists that its ships work only in "fishing zones adjacent to Taiwan," where they take only a "rather insignificant" catch.
This is demonstrably false, but one has to look far beyond Taiwan's official trade statistics to find the truth of what has been a highly profitable "pirate" trade. So far as the official record is concerned the Hai Hwa's cargo either does not exist at all, or vanishes into thin air.
Where it actually vanishes is down the throats of Japanese gourmets, whose appetite for whalemeat remains insatiable. In this respect Taiwan is not unique. Pirate whalers of several other non-IWC countries in the past have been encouraged by Japanese expertise and finance to supply the Tokyo market. But this has been a mixed year for the buccaneers. The most notorious pirate ship of them all, the Cypriot-registered Sierra, was sunk by militant conservationists, closely followed by two Spanish vessels which had also been whaling for the Japanese. And at last Tokyo had to give in to international pressure, and agreed to ban whale imports from non-IWC sources.
But then came the case of the "laundered" whalemeat.
Taiwan has four whaling vessels, including the Hai Hwa, all based in the port of Kaohsiung. They are there for anyone to see, complete with harpoons, whalebones and cargoes of meat. But, despite such incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the Taiwan Government has continued to deny that any extensive whaling has been taking place at all. The conservation group Greenpeace needed no further encouragement to begin digging in good earnest - and in due course managed to obtain the catch records of one ship, the Hai Yen (Seabird).
These showed that she had taken 290 Bryde's whales over thousands of miles of ocean in the 20 months from April 28, 1976, to December 27, 1977. Their average length, 12.14 metres, was shorter than the minimum, 12.20 metres, laid down by the IWC. All the Taiwanese vessels are pelagic (factory) whalers, which under IWC rules are banned from hunting Bryde's whales at all.
When, in May this year, Taiwan finally did produce "statistics" in response to 10 months of US diplomatic pressure, the whales had become both longer (12.33m) and fewer: 134. The whaling area had become "local," and only the dates of the Hai Yen's voyages remained unchanged.
But if the original, undoctored, statistics are typical, then Taiwan's four whalers between them are catching something in the region of 700 Bryde's whales a year. Indeed, the total could be higher still. Robert C. Lin, executive director of the Ming Tai company which owns both the Hai Yen and the Hai Hwa, told Japanese journalist Shinya Kawashima that his two ships are currently taking 500 a year, which would put the Taiwanese total at around 1,000. This is more than twice the amount which the IWC considers a safe total for the entire northern hemisphere and, as the IWC nations themselves take their own full quota, this means that three times too many Bryde's are being caught every year.
Japanese trade officials now admit that in the six months between the end of July last year, when the import of non-IWC meat was "banned," and February this year, at least 1,156 tons of frozen Bryde's whalemeat from Taiwan, falsely labelled "Product of Korea," found its way into Japan. Since the average whale taken by the Hai Yen yields 5.3 tons of meat, that represents some 218 whales. And this is only the trade which has actually been detected.
The attraction of importing whalemeat via Korea, where it was relabelled in the factories of either Marine Enterprises or Mi Wong, was that Korea is an IWC member. Thus laundered, the "Korean" meat could be legally shipped to Japan. The importers included affiliates of Taiyo Gyogyo and Nippon Suisan, two of Japan's biggest whaling companies, who now say they had no way of knowing the meat was Taiwanese. However, it was obvious to everyone else in the Tokyo fish market, for Korea neither hunts Bryde's in such quantity (its quota is only 19) nor does it export frozen meat.
The Mi Wong factory in Seoul says it was asked to buy and label the Taiwanese meat by Nichimo, a Japanese affiliate of Nippon Suisan. The Taiwanese whaler Chu Feng has three former Suisan employees - all Japanese - as key members of its crew. And the Hai Hwa harpoonist involved in the death of the luckless Wang was also a former Suisan man. None of which is conclusive proof that the Japanese whaling industry was behind this latest wheeze to beat the IWC quota. But there are clear grounds for suspicion.
The Taiwan affair will strengthen the conservationists' argument that the only way to protect whales is to ban their hunting entirely. For despite all claims to the contrary it is clearly still possible for pirates and members alike to avoid IWC regulations with ease; and for non-members to join the IWC on the basis of totally unrealistic figures. Taiwan's application for membership claimed a 1979 catch of 247 whales, all from her own coastal waters, and annual exports of "zero."
