Great Barrier Reef Photography © Matt Greenfield / Magnesium & Jon Ellis / Magnesium

The photos depicting peaceful inlets of coastal water are of Taiji, a little known whaling town on the Pacific coast of Japan’s Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture. The area is known as Kumano, and is a world heritage site, renown for its pilgrim trail and striking temples set in both ancient Cedar forests and along pristine coastline, such as this. The jagged asymmetry of the windswept trees perched on jutting outcroppings of rocks, themselves constantly battered by the sea, feels like something out of the Ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige’s well-known repertoire.

Yet every September when a group of fishermen emerge from Taiji’s sheltering coves to catch the yearly dolphin migration in order to supply the world’s aquariums and dolphinariums with fresh dolphins (at around 200,000USD a head), these picturesque waters turn from cobalt blue to blood red in a matter of hours. How? Why? It depends on who you ask.

Last October, HESO asked Louie Psihoyos founder of OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and director of The Cove. Referring to the annual slaughter of approximately 2000 dolphins in the waters of Taiji, he said Japan is “a microcosm of the oceans.

Louie Psihoyos © Manny Santiago

“I really feel,” he continued, “we only have a couple decades to turn around what’s going on in the oceans. This generation coming up and maybe the next one are going to be the only generations to be able to fix this before it’s too late, before well, just break out all the champagne and drink it because…there’s not going to be anything left for anybody else…”

Jon Ellis, diver and photographer from the Magnesium Photography Agency, commented on diving the Great Barrier Reef:

The truth is that the reef really isn’t in that good condition. Even in areas where people rarely dive there is a lot of dead coral around. It’s true that it appears to be recovering – new growth dots the outcrops of dead coral, but the predominate atmosphere is not one of vibrant health.

While it’s hard not to buy into the popular notion of having repeatedly soiled our own diapers, to the point of ruination, it’s also hard not to applaud what a dedicated few are still doing to in trying to race the clock to help stem the tide (pun intended) of the current big biological catastrophe. Can Pollution, habitat loss, overfishing, global climate change and ocean acidification be overcome?

Save coral reefs for one, which constitute less than one percent of the ocean’s space, but are home to more than 25 percent of its fish and you save humanity. Kill them and you kill us. How are we planning on saving them from bleaching—a whitening of corals that occurs when symbiotic algae living within coral tissues are expelled? Bleached coral may recover over time or simply die out altogether. The truth is, as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

What we do know is that the seas around the country’s 20,000 miles of coastline are notoriously stingy. Enough so as to exclude them from the top fifty fishing nations, according to Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Magnesium Photo’s Matt Greenfield, an avid diver, recently photographed sharks around the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia—one of the only places in their coastal waters where sea-life is truly abundant.

Shark Feeding from ジーマー on Vimeo.

Finning sharks, dredging the ocean floor, selling tainted dolphin meat as whale: the animal rights argument rightfully doesn’t stop nearby Japan from scouring the world for what the Aussies—despite 9 million miles of territorial waters—have to import. Japan’s very long and extremely well protected fisheries arm—accounting for more than 15 percent of the worldwide catch—is often openly hostile, misleading and willfully ignorant toward their own customers and any such international pressure citing the human rights argument. Tsukiji Fish market in central Tokyo, the country’s seafood nerve center, is the largest in the world and is only one of many fish markets which have misrepresented dolphin and other cetacean meat selling as whale meat. Their spokespeople seem to have a preternatural gift for keeping the masses ignorant of the unsustainable truth, flouting international law and deflecting criticism from abroad.

Most Japanese people are completely unaware of this hunt – it’s the largest direct hunt of any whale, dolphin and porpoise in the world and is putting these animals at risk while producing hundreds of tonnes of toxic meat for human consumption.

Clare Perry – EIA Senior Campaigner

Meanwhile, many Japanese Fisheries apologists counter with statements like, “…in a world where we eat millions of chickens, cows and pigs, where we seem intent on plucking every salmon, cod, oyster and shrimp out of the ocean, is there something morally wrong about hunting a marine mammal like a dolphin?”

Not morally, but concerning consumer’s health, yes. Based on 1972 World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, Japan’s fisheries and Health Ministry (JMHLW) have been ignoring the self-imposed maximum contamination levels in seafood products of 0.3µg/g (parts per million – ppm) Methylmercury (MeHg) and 0.4ppm Mercury (Hg). Recently tested Dall’s porpoise samples (caught in northern Japan) being 1.02µg/g, almost three-and-a-half times the recommended limit, often more (Source: EIA-International). The giant Blue-fin Tuna, sold in sushi bars around the world as maguro, are regularly toxic as well. In fact any fish, or ocean going mammal over a certain size and age is likely a repository for dangerous levels of Mercury and any other heavy metals dumped in the ocean over the past 60 years.

Lucky then that not many are actually eating it. Certainly not the Japanese. According to the Guardian, of the 1,873 tons of whale meat processed in 2001, 70 tons went unsold. As a recent poll suggests, some 95 percent of the 1,047 respondents reportedly ate whale meat “very rarely”, had not eaten whale meat in a “long time”, or ate it “not at all”. 34.5 percent of the poll’s participants thought commercial whaling should resume, and 39.2 percent “neither agreed nor disagreed” with the idea.

One Japanese scholar with an opinion, Jun Morikawa of Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo, argues that whaling’s popularity—and therefore the fishing of all cetaceans—is largely a myth promulgated by certain governmental bodies and major players within the whaling industry. Though it seems that as long as 39.2 percent of the world “neither agree nor disagree” with any of this, our oceans will be in trouble.

[View with PicLens]

More can be read by downloading the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) Poisonous Policies (EIA International, 2008)

The numerous tattered wooden groynes, broken concrete slabs, and piles of housing bricks bear witness to nature’s relentless attacks. Many of these defenses date back to the period of time after the North Sea Flood of 1953, and in the area around Happisburgh (pronounced /ˈheɪzbrə/) they are really showing their age. Ragged wooden piles, twisted iron reinforcements, and heaps of concrete are all that remain of these monuments to Canute.

A managed retreat from the most vulnerable areas has been proposed. The plan would let the marshes regain their role as a buffer for the flood tides, but the local residents are resisting, asking for more money to be invested into the Sisyphean task of protecting the coast.

And yet, there is a stark beauty in the landscape / seascape. This delicate border of sand and flint cliffs form the ‘last ditch’ defense of the flat Norfolk hinterlands.

[View with PicLens]

Izu is the teardrop peninsula jutting out into the Pacific ocean a little over one hundred kilometers from the mass of gray concrete that is the Tokyo megalopolis. Izu is morning mists, bambooed hilltops and wooden inns nestled in the moist salt air wet from the steam of a hundred hot springs poking through the lush volcanic soil. Izu is where Tokyo’s trains from the 60s go to rust and die, happy recipients of the second most rainfall in Japan. It’s a romantics romance and though proximally near, the makeup of Izu makes for an Alice-through-the-looking-glass kind of trip. For, after all, it is the metamorphosis one undergoes in getting there that is arguably the most important part of the trip. Photographer Jon Ellis is interested in capturing the process of “getting there”, rather than what might be done once arrived.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

Jon Ellis will be participating in the four-person exhibition Fragments of Tokyo from 2/8/10 – 2/14/10 at Place M in Shinjuku. If you are in Tokyo please visit the gallery (click the link below).