Whale Like Me's journey started in 2006. For those just tuning in: Whale Like Me is the feature documentary production poised to shake up the stand off between whalers and conservationists, and - we hope - open new ways of understanding whales, and the way humans relate to them.
Our web presence started in May 2010, and in this space just after Christmas, before we launch into an exciting New Year for the project, I'd like to put out some very well-deserved thanks to those responsible for Whale Like Me online.
Emily Frances Knox and her partner, Michael Gregg, devote time and energy to maintaining our Facebook and Twitter presence, and in the space of just a few months, they have established a cetacean news service many have come to rely on for interesting developments in what we know of - and how we relate to - whales and dolphins.
Web developer Sid Bachtiar, based in Levin, has patiently implemented our web designs - here he is with his dad... ok, just kidding. Here he is with his son Josh.
As the site continues to grow, you can be sure Sid is to thank, weaving code.
Sid's company Bluehorn is based in Levin, New Zealand... just a pleasant drive away from our beautiful city of Wellington.
More news in the New Year - positive news: stay tuned.
Apologies for the lack of updates - we have been busy working hard to advance the project, which leaves little-to-no time to actually blog about it. I’ll try to make up for this with more frequent entries this month.
I returned to Japan in late November – my third trip there in the past 5 months.
Hideki and I met with various officials, and were surprised by the good welcome we received. Of course there was caution, as we expected, but the bottom line was a very proper, official neutrality towards our project. Neutrality is the proper response, and one I would expect from both sides.
As a point of interesting comparison, we have had more trouble meeting with Australian officials than we have had with the Japanese. Our work seems to be situated on an active fault line between both sides, where neither side feels sure of their footing. I have experienced initial distrust from Australian, American and Japanese interested parties alike – the Australians and Americans being uncomfortable with the presence of a Japanese co-director and a collaborative approach, and the Japanese being uncomfortable with my Australian/American nationality and the international nature of the production.
My impressions may certainly evolve, but it seems to me that the Japanese concern is the more natural of the two, since they are the ones under scrutiny by the international community over this issue, and since foreign media attention is so often one-sided against their interests. This makes it all the more interesting that we have had more trouble meeting with Australian officials than we have had with Japanese ones, while benefiting from personal references and introductions on both sides.
Next, we journeyed to the coastal town I am becoming better and better acquainted with – to meet the whaler again.
I must refer to him as the whaler for now, until all formalities have been taken care of and we have agreed on how his identity is revealed.
The meeting was informal, and as we talked, I realized that I like him. As with the first meeting, the difficult issues brought tension to the air – there is no escaping this and on the contrary, I am glad we are both staunch defenders of our positions, but in all other instances there was almost a sense of camaraderie.
This makes our interaction all the more interesting – what I seek would spell the end of his livelihood as a whaler, and what he seeks would spell the continuing practice of what I see as murder – yet we seem to be embarking upon a friendship, based on the rare conviction that our stories should be told alongside each other, and at least for me, on a sense of wonder that such a thing is turning out to be possible.
My Japanese is improving incrementally: I now hear the language very well. The different words register clearly in my mind as I hear them, even though I only understand a fraction of them. The whaler’s English remains a blessing, making communication easy, and allowing co-director Hideki Fuji to be a full participant in our conversations rather than a translator.
During this meeting, we were advised of a fascinating event which we will have the honor of attending and filming, in January 2011 – details to be revealed in a future update. We also discussed my attendance of Japanese language school in March followed by 4 to 6 weeks of immersion, living in the coastal town, meeting its residents and absorbing something of its nature.
More news very soon, and best wishes to you all – wherever you hail from on this Ocean Planet.
Hideki leaves me waiting in the car: this first contact is to drop off our proposal.
Hideki will then seek to meet with the head of the whaling operation the next day and perhaps arrange a meeting that includes me on the third day... should we even get that far.
I step out and walk up and down the waterfront, intending to spend the 5 minute wait in appreciation of the sea.
Rather than stress over the outcome, I’m now in a meditative zone – I look out across the Pacific and draw up memories of the days when I lived in Venice Beach, California, in the early 90’s. That familiar boardwalk lies there, beyond thousands of miles of deep, mysterious waters in which untold, watery lives unfold.
Most weekends I would get the hell out of LA and its infernal grid to hike through the arid canyons north of Malibu. The memory of the hikes washes over me now: probably because of how I would enter the same meditative state on these walks, where everything falls away leaving only an expanded, more vibrant present awareness of the world around me. In these times, there is a feeling of connecting earth and heaven, and the senses extend beyond the body to fuse with the air, the water, the earth and the life they are all host to.
Hideki has been gone 30 minutes, and I continue to walk.
Hideki has not returned after an hour – I choose various vantage points along the beach to stand and observe the universal rituals of the beach-going public.
After an hour and a half, I laugh at how tortured this wait would be if I were in any other state of mind.
Surely, either this long absence is a very good sign, or a very bad one.
The inhabitants of this region are far more friendly than the bustling denizens of Tokyo – most nod or smile as they pass me. Only a few seem to not know what to do with me, and so remain impassive or stern.
The butterflies flit about. The hornets fly about their business.
A cat pads out from the bushes, across the road and down the stone steps to the sand, where it promptly digs and squats. I look away out of respect for the keen sense of dignity cats have – especially in these embarrassing moments of public body function - then back again in time to see it paw a token amount of sand over its business before returning back the way it came.
Well over two ours have passed, and finally, there is Hideki, alive and smiling.
The film will be made, he says.
We sit and look out over the water. The details come out gradually, some of which I can share here.
The head of the whaling operation is a very reasonable man, intelligent and well-traveled, Hideki explains. And most importantly for us, he shares the vision of exchange of Whale Like Me. Many details remain to be discussed but in principle, we have a meeting of the minds, and this creative partnership of a conservationist with whalers will move forwards.
The next day, the three of us meet. I agree with Hideki’s impressions of the man.
Whale Like Me proposed this meeting but could not know in advance who the whaler would be: now that I have him in front of me, I see that he is perfect. He will represent his perspective with intelligence, and give my conservationist approach real questions to grapple with. Already during our first brief meeting, we left each other with some potent challenges to chew upon and the tension in the air was thick: there is no doubt we will - all three of us - grow and evolve through the making of this film.
My time with him during the shoot will be tense, confronting and real – but the outcome, I know, will mark progress towards unlocking the stalemate over whaling. He and Hideki will represent to foreigners a more honest representation of who the whalers and the Japanese are, what they do, and why. I will represent to Japanese people a more honest view of who conservationists are, what we do, and why.
The dice are not loaded: after following this chemical reaction between opposites, caught on film, the chips will fall where they may.
The sky is unmercifully blue today, and Tokyo bakes beneath it.
I walk the now familiar route from Shinjuku Higashi to Shinjuku Station, to print our proposal at a Kinko’s where most of the staff speak no English, and all the software interfaces are locked in Japanese. A paradox of globalization if ever I saw one.
The drive to the whaling town is familiar. We had driven it two years earlier on a trip where I was to see for the first time a freshly killed Baird’s Beaked Whale butchered and processed.
During the drive, Hideki helps me push my Japanese language skills a little further – we recite the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac, and I compose nonsensical phrases all involving the middle of a rice field.
Malcolm lies down in the middle of a rice field.
The pigeon sits with a wild boar in the middle of a rice field.
The owl stands in the middle of a rice field.
Boku no dai koku bashira tanbo no naka ni desu
A huge part of the fun of being new born to a language is you get to put together your new words any which way you want, and people accept its not because you’re weird, but merely because you’re foreign. It allows the return of a valuable playfulness that adult life, within our culture of origin, can often restrict.
The lightness of the nonsense conceals considerable tension: we are headed towards what feels like an almost impossible mission – to speak with the head of a coastal whaling company, and attempt to convince him of the value of our project.
For those of you just tuning in for the first time, the mission seems impossible because Japanese whalers have become very wary of foreign media. Even before The Cove was made, they knew that foreign media coverage of their activities generally catered to the anti-whaling perspective only, and portrayed them in an unflattering and uni-dimensional light.
After The Cove? Well, that impression increased somewhat, to put things mildly.
Its quite easy to imagine that no foreigner could convince a Japanese whaler to trust him with this topic at this point in time – and I have been living with this thought for a couple of years now, constantly tricking myself into believing that somehow, Hideki and I would find a way.
Such positive affirmations tend to work best when the moment of truth is far off and abstract. We grope forwards into the future, taking what steps we can towards our goal, thinking we’re putting in place the correct conditions for the outcome we desire. It is only at the doorstep of that goal that we realize with strong immediacy: the door may remain resolutely shut, no matter how hard we have tried.
Concretely, most of our efforts have consisted in designing a balanced film, which honors truth, direct experience, and honest, respectful dialogue above all. For me, it has been an exercise in letting go, because I am against whaling. I have had to put into action the Taoist principles of wu wei: to let go and accept that the outcome I desire may or may not come as a result of my commitment to openness, and truth. To strive by not striving.
What it boils down to is this: truth is more important than my desire… and this may be the hardest truth for one to accept. I can’t say that I have won that battle, but I am at least conscious that it is a battle I need to wage, and I remind myself of it daily.
What outcome do I desire? First, that the whalers accept to let me walk a mile in their shoes, and that they then accept to walk a mile in mine. Second, that this might lead to whales no longer coming to harm at the hands of men.
So, at the doorstep of Whale Like Me’s ultimate gatekeeper, the whaler himself, I have to accept that he also must fight that inner battle in order to accept that this adventure is worthwhile.
No matter how hard I have tried to trust that our goal of exchanged experience will lead to a future I can accept, I must now face that if the whalers cannot attain that same trust – the journey will end abruptly here.
Hideki and I talk openly about the upcoming meeting now. Then silence again.
I again fight to practice wu wei: I should not worry or have a heavy heart if I believe my efforts and principles will lead to a future I can accept. If Hideki and I have done our best, and the whalers still cannot see value in our approach – then that is the truth of this matter, and I must embrace it. The film then becomes a chronicle of that truth – a sadder story with less potential for mutual understanding and reconciliation, but truth nonetheless.
It is now in the hands of the whalers. Or some would say, in the hands of God, the Universe, or Divine Providence. In any event, it is out of my hands.
Optimism springs from nothingness, and hangs about inside the car like a miracle.
The past few weeks have been busy for Whale Like Me.
A fair amount of interest has been expressed by the press, even at this early stage. Here are some links to an article by The Australian’s Tokyo correspondent Rick Wallace, and follow up article by Elizah Leigh:
We will conduct a radio interview with Radio Australia soon – more news on that to come shortly if you want to tune in.
This is exciting in and of itself, but all the more so because we are saving a lot of the most interesting aspects of the film for later (else why would anyone watch the film). If the generic overview we can give of the project at this early stage is raising eyebrows, we feel confident the film will surpass expectations.
We are very busy at present in Tokyo, but Hideki has started to provide for press coverage in Japan. Our project seeks to provide more balance to this issue, and it is important that the Japanese press be able to comment since commentary has started overseas.
We remain in need of your support – your donations make all the difference.
Please use our crowd-sourcing tools to donate and spread the word:
http://www.whalelikeme.com/help_us
Whale Like Me aims to unlock the stalemate: we cannot accomplish this adventure of experience exchange and dialogue without your help.
The world of marine conservation has been somewhat divided concerning the IWC's compromise proposal to allow a controlled return to commercial whaling, under consideration at this year's meetings in Agadir, Morocco.
The Whale Like Me team feels legalizing commercial whaling, regardless of promises that strict quotas would be enforced, is a very dangerous path to head down. How many other nations would have stepped up to join the whaling industry, upon seeing that Japan, Norway and Iceland were allowed to do so legally?
The proposal claims no new nation would be allowed to start whaling, but it is not so hard for countries to simply opt out of the IWC to pursue their own agendas when need be. Any assurances that legalized whaling won't psychologically legitimize whaling activity from new players... ring hollow.
How would we enforce quotas effectively when it has proven impossible to do so in other areas of marine resource management?
And the saddest question of all: how should we be expected to trust Japan’s fisheries to respect the quotas given the ample evidence of corrupt proceedings surrounding the treatment of the Tokyo 2, and the bribing of developing IWC member nations?
So in this respect, we feel this is a very positive development. In the words of Patrick Ramage, director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Global Whale Campaign:
"Had it been done here, this deal would have lived in infamy. This was an intense three year effort but one conducted behind closed doors and focused on defining terms under which commercial whaling would continue rather than how it would end. The proposal it produced could not withstand public scrutiny and ignored the overwhelming global support for permanent protection for whales. Any future process of negotiation should not leave the views, expertise, and perspective of the global NGO community sitting outside."
It appears however that the IWC might simply postpone voting on a return to commercial whaling until next year, allowing the uproar surrounding the Japanese corruption scandals to diminish. So vigilance remains important. We will probably face the same danger just one year from now, and if we have forgotten the reasons why the proposal is flawed, our national delegates to the IWC will not necessarily remember it for us. We are their conscience.
The production of Whale Like Me retains the same goal as ever: to promote reconciliation with Japan through open exploration of our different ways of relating to cetaceans. The corruption problems unfairly taint an entire nation in the eyes of the world. Whale Like Me will show that they originate and are enabled by a small group of people. The Japanese people and the whalers themselves are not all to be held responsible for the policies of small factions within their government.
Likewise, despite the dismay the world is experiencing surrounding the exposed corruption, it is our conviction that the basic desire of anti-whaling nations is still to explore common ground and overcome the corruption together. Whale Like Me’s overall message of friendship between ‘opposing sides’ has become all the more urgent, if hope of such reconciliation and cooperation is to survive.
And of course, direct experience of cetaceans remains our focus: we believe nobody can hold a fully informed opinion on whaling without some experience of what it is like to meet cetaceans at close quarters, without any other agenda than the experience itself. Our exploration of the ramifications of such encounters remains the Rosetta's stone without which 'opposing sides' will eternally find understanding each other almost impossible.
I am somewhere above the Pacific ocean again, hurtling towards New Zealand at a snail’s pace. Most passengers are sleeping but my sleeping patterns don’t know what to do with themselves anymore, so I am not surprised to be awake.
In May, I made 17 interstate and international trips in just 27 days, from Australia, to Europe, to the US, and on to New Zealand – meeting deadlines along the way, and sometimes receiving confirmation of journey segments just three or four days before booking tickets and making traveling. The trip to New Zealand involved selling a vehicle in Sydney, and shipping belongings: it is a move of sorts, although it certainly did not feel like one when I left for Japan only 2 days after arriving in New Zealand.
The final journey that will earn me some real rest is in one week: a spell back in Sydney.
They say the soul takes a while to catch up with one’s international travels, and it certainly feels that way – a whale might keep pace with its soul as it travels the oceans but I’ve quartered, sliced and diced mine and left it strewn across the planet to stumble, crawl and swim its way back towards unity.
This third time in Japan was in character with the land and culture: subtle. If I were tuned to only feeling the big splashes, I would feel nothing right now. But magic whispered regularly, like the frequent, almost imperceptible earth quakes that shake Tokyo.
Hideki and I have refined our process for the Japanese whaling family. We shot some footage geared solely towards a revision of the trailer, in order to present a more balanced impression of the film’s arc. And during sleepless nights, I wrestled with sequence breakdowns, playing with that jigsaw puzzle that is a feature film. From roughly 2am until 9am, the splintered pieces of the whole shifted around, always settling closer to their final resting place, sometimes revealing new pieces that were hidden just a moment before, but without which the film would be but a limping shadow of itself.
These new pieces did not leap out with a shout, full of a sense of their own importance. They just stepped out of the shadows without a word. They had always been there, lying dormant. Like Stephen King says, the story is a dinosaur fossil and the storyteller’s work is archeological work. Unearth as much of it as possible. Listen to its silent confessions. Allow it to exist again.
The bones don’t scream their presence. And we remove them one by one with gloved hands, precision hand tools and brushes, not with jackhammers. We reassemble them one by one in to the coherent picture of a behemoth kept hidden for millions of years. Until the final bone is in place, the whole will remain shrouded, even to me... I am not its maker, only its discoverer and curator.
There will be tales of action in the weeks to follow, particularly when principal photography gets underway in August - if our fundraising hits its mark - but this week was a nocturnal haze of magic whispers: whale bones telling of how to assemble them into a whole, in preparation of its owner’s resurrection, and immortal life in film.
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