Simple Tribe

On Sept. 25, the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan (FCCJ) held a press screening of the controversial film, “The Cove.” I’ve read quite a bit about it in the news, along with written a bit about it for one of the papers I’m at, and was thus quite excited to get in and get to view the thing with my own eyes. So were a lot of people, apparently, because the room was packed with people, journalists and non-journalists alike, and the spillover had to be sent to a separate room to watch the screening.

The film itself was alright; not exactly what I would have imagined to be Sundance material, but interesting and effective enough. It was slightly sensationalist, especially the way the music was set to footage of dolphins swimming and king activist Ric O’Barry “busting” into an IWC meeting with a screen showing footage of dolphin slaughter strapped to his chest. It also struck me as a bit juvenile, the way the film heralded how they oh so cunningly outwitted the Japanese authorities with their clever “Oceans 11″ team. The documentary was peppered here and there with hippy-ish “oh man, dolphins are so spiritual!” commentary with some borderline conspiracy-theorist statements thrown in for good measure. Besides that, I do think it was a film that leaves a big impression, and it did really make me think about the issue of how we choose animals for our food supply, and where they come from. And far be it for me to complain about watching humorous scenes of the Japanese cops bumbling about their work.

After the film was the Q&A session with Richard O’Barry himself. Things started out on a reasonably self-congratulatory note, with O’Barry patting himself and one of the officials who appeared in the film on the back and preaching his cause. Then the actual Q&A began, and things turned weird. Journalists began waving their hands in the air. Microphones were passed and questioned were raised — sort of. It’s not often I ever hear a bunch of writers, who (I thought) are taught to be concise, ask questions in such a drawn-out way. One by one, reporters stood with the mic in their hands and vomited out their attempts to prove how clever they were or to brown-nose O’Barry.

“Hi, I’m from [insert news agency here], and I, uh, I don’t know if you remember me but we went to Taiji together once and….”

At one point, O’Barry mentioned a journalist who had bought dolphin meat from Taiji either that day or the day before and planned to test it for mercury levels later. A rotund Italian man waved his hand in the air, “Me, it’s me!!” before running off to fetch the hunk of meat. A few minutes later he triumphantly handed it to O’Barry, who waved it around in the air while going on about poison or hunting or something. Then he made the mistake of giving the mic to the Italian guy, who launched into a speech in Japanese and English about all the pains he had to go through to buy the dolphin (”They wouldn’t sell it to just me… I had to go with my Japanese friend!”) and how he hypothesized that it was being sold as whale meat in Tsukiji. After far too long of this, someone finally wrestled the mic out of his hands and the show moved on.

Throughout the entire ordeal the unqualified interpreter — we wondered if she was actually just in training — struggled, uttering out odd sentences and long chains of language as the speakers impatiently waited to dribble more self-promoting dialog. She honestly didn’t do much worse than one bilingual Japanese reporter who was asked to translate his “question” into both languages and appeared to forget his own point about halfway through. It was a lesson in tedium to be sure.

Another prize moment was when Dr. Tetsuya Endo, whose data on mercury levels in Taiji residents was used in the film, stood up and complained about the angle The Cove took, and how they had misused his data. He spoke in Japanese, of course, and the interpreter seemed to fall into a deep trance as she tried to remember all the details of his heated attack on O’Barry. The two ended up arguing at each other in their respective languages until someone relieved Endo of his opportunity to speak. He fidgeted uncomfortably for the rest of the Q&A, setting up in a corner of the room and surrounding himself with journalists, bystanders and anyone else who was willing to listen after it was over.

The evening ended with O’Barry, after all his heartfelt speech about how much he loves dolphins and how he feels so responsible for, posturing that he’s really pushing the issue because he wants to save people from mercury poisoning. “These animals are toxic!” he proclaimed more than once about the flesh of his beloved dolphins. Sure he convinced a lot of people on that one.