Wackos at the Cove

 

 Taiji Front Lines

Chaos to Kushimoto

By Steven Thompson
March 13, 2012

The situation in Taiji has gone from End-of-the-Season Sayonara to Wacko-Fest Extravaganza at the Cove.

Make some popcorn, get a drink. It's only going to get more interesting in our quest to save the dolphins.

Yesterday, right-wing nationalists spit what looks like chocolate sauce all over a Cove Guardian's car. This has confirmed three things for me.

1. Right Wingers are silly
2. Japanese police need better planning
3. Cove Guardian strategy works

A few car loads of Japanese wannabe gangsters looked like drunken toddlers as they spit brown goo, displayed their middle fingers, and stuck out their tongues as they pushed around Taiji's finest boys in blue, one day after the more heavily armed prefectural police went home for the season.

The Taiji situation has gone beyond my imagination. If the nationalists had not come to show their tongues and fingers, nothing would have happened in Taiji and the Cove Guardians would have inevitably gone home till September.

But now that the Zaitokukai has sent the special Kansai Club to Taiji, any activist keen to get more involved will and should send resources to Sea Shepherd or Save Japan Dolphins, or they will go to Taiji and join the fun.

Can you say Zaitokukai and smile at the same time? Try it. Slowly. Zai--to--ku--kai...Zai--to--ku--kai.

It always ends with a falling diphthong sound mirroring the fall of nationalism in Japan after World War II. Right Wing groups are a shadow of their former selves. They would be more relevant wearing clown noses and spraying silly string in the air.  But they do piss people off. Yesterday they pissed off the 50 police focusing on Taiji.

Last season the police looked silly when they couldn't move a meditating Cove Guardian zen master. The police held a multi-day training seminar for a battalion of uniformed and undercover detectives. This season the Japanese police were overwhelmed by a ragtag group of Japanese bullies. There is only one way to go for next year: more preparation.

If the Taiji establishment decides to continue to murder dolphins, Cove Guardians will be back and better funded than ever before. This means that the security expenses to the local economy will soon outweigh the cost of the hunt. Who will look silly then?

Thank you Zaitokukai! 

The Japanese nationalists have made themselves part of the problem. The Cove Guardians are clearly part of the solution.