Days like these

When I signed up for this campaign I knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic. In fact I prepared as best as I could for the difficult situations I would find myself in. Who wants to spend hard earned money to watch dolphins get slaughter? Certainly not I, but I knew I could contribute and it was something I just had to do. I just wasn’t ready for the backlash from people I had considered friends.
That is how my morning began. Up with the sun and anxious to see what Andy and Nicole,  who stayed up most of the night editing footage of the crazy trip following the Taiji Three. By the way Andy had given them the names of Bob, Steve, and Godzilla! I will not repeat what happened but it is over now and I can move on. To the cove. I just prayed that the boats were in today but alas they were not. Darn! Up to the lookout point and it wasn’t long before the banger boats appeared on the horizon. Yes they had a pod. Here come the skiff boats which carry the nets used to coral the dolphins into the killing cove. Jared and I took off to Glenda’s mountaintop, ugh I hate those stairs, but up we went. I still had my sailing bibs on so I was pealing clothes off like a mad woman once I reach the top. We could see they had a new tarp. It seems the dolphin hunters check out our video blogs and pictures and adjust accordingly. Guess they didn’t like the photo’s of blood escaping from the killing cove so they just added another tarp to hide it. But we filmed anyway. As always Jared and I each had a shadow.
You get used to it after awhile but you are always aware. At this point I’d like to say something. We are not here to harass, yell, cut nets, antagonize or anything else but film and document. I respect the Japanese culture and am always nice to the guards and police, and most of them are (ah hum) nice back. The lovely town of Katsuura, where we stay, is just awesome and we are welcomed wherever we go, however, always mindful of our surroundings. It is a beautiful country filled with polite, kind, and gentle people, excluding of course those 26 fisherman in Taiji. I realize, also, that change must come from within Japan and that it will not come from some westerner screaming at a fisherman to stop doing what he has done his whole life, no matter how much I disagree with it. The problem is, the people of Japan are unaware of what is happening in Taiji, and that is where my work here comes into play.  Slowly we are seeing more and more Japanese people come to check it out for themselves. Today, after the slaughter was over, as we sat at the edge of the cove reflecting, a man from Tokyo approached us. “Sea Shepherd?” he asked…yes…and we started talking in his broken English and Nicole’s broken Japanese. I could see in his eyes he was not proud of what his fellow countrymen were doing but did not want to say anything. We invited him to join us tomorrow. We shall see if he returns. This is not the first time I have met Japanese who have traveled from long distances to come and see what was happening so in my mind, I believe progress is being made.  The media ban on all sotries relating to the slaughter might still be in effect, but they cannot ban YouTube, YET.  I will return to Japan next year and the year after if I must, until this slaughter ends. I just hope for the dolphins it ends sooner than later. Today, again, the cove ran red with blood and again today I was there to witness.