Shrugging off global revulsion, and protests by celebrities as well as the US Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, Japanese fishermen began to slaughter up to 200 dolphins trapped in a cove made infamous by an Oscar-winning documentary.
The picturesque bay at Taiji, 420km south of Tokyo, is the site of the world's largest annual dolphin slaughter. In recent years it has become the focus of outrage about a practice defended by Japan as part of its hunting tradition.
During the six-month season, fishermen corral scores of dolphins and herd them into the secluded cove. They select a number to sell to marine parks and aquariums, separating them from their pods, and butcher most of the rest for meat, stabbing them with knives and harpoons and turning the seawater crimson.
Since last weekend, according to the Sea Shepherd conservation group, which has been streaming live footage on its website, more than 250 bottlenose dolphins have been rounded up. As of yesterday, 51 - including a rare albino calf - had been captured for possible sale, while many of the remainder faced a gruesome death after four nights without food.
In an unusual intervention by a diplomat, Kennedy tweeted that she was "deeply concerned by inhumaneness of drive hunt dolphin killing". She added that the US Government opposed the practice of driving the creatures into a cove, also carried out in other Japanese coastal towns. Yoko Ono, the Japanese-born widow of John Lennon, also weighed in, warning Taiji fishermen that the slaughter would "make the children of the world hate the Japanese".
