Whale Watch

At any hour of day or night the summons may come. Then the young Nisei from California must trudge down to the waterfront in Japan and pitch in at one of the world's oddest jobs: measuring dead whales. "When the mountainous carcasses are cut up, the stench is stifling," says Lawrence Tsunoda, 28, a marine mammalogist from San Diego. "As for the pools of blood, well..."

Tsunoda and Los Angeles Zoologist Eugene Nitta, 24, were hired by the U.S. Department of Commerce this summer to record the sex and length of every catch towed to Japan's seven whaling ports and to send the data to the regulatory International Whaling Commission in London. Their object is to try to make sure that Japan's $100 million-a-year whaling industry, the world's largest, does not violate international standards (no pregnant whales and none smaller than 35 ft. can be taken).

The Japanese say their whaling is essential. Whale meat accounts for 10% of Japan's protein diet. The blood and entrails are processed into pet food or fertilizer. The skin and bones end up as oil. Even the football-size testicles of sperm whales are boiled, sliced and served as a delicacy.

There is serious disagreement, however, on the number of whales that can be caught without endangering the species. Officially, the International Whaling Commission is supposed to preserve the species by setting quotas, but the organization has no effective enforcement power, and it routinely sets quotas that will satisfy the major whaling nations. Japan has the right to catch 15,700 sperm, sei and fin whales this year, almost half the world total (the few remaining blues and humpbacks are now "protected"). Last spring, the U.S. and Japan made a separate arrangement for the U.S. to monitor Japanese catches, but even now the U.S. observers will see only about 3,000 of the dead whales; the rest are processed on huge factory ships at sea. The Japanese-American agreement--unless it is revised following President Nixon's Hawaii talks with Japanese Premier Kakuei Tanaka--thus means little more than that Japan is willing to make a gesture to appease what Whaling Inspector Kineo Kegasawa calls America's "cry-boy environmentalists."

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