The App is Not the Territory: Representation and the Just City in Personal GIS

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Here's the text from my talk at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013.  This has been a great, great conference - I'll be writing more about how it's renewing my faith in academic seriousness.

But for now, here's my little contribution:


Michel De Certeau has written . . . “To walk is to lack a place.  It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.  The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place . . .” (2011, 103).  This placelessness has been touted as part of cities’ democratic potential – their placelessness leads to the chance encounter that overturns social barriers and creates new possibilities.

But in cities and across the entire landscape, personal navigation systems are putting this placelessness to rout.  Goals are always at the ready – the best restaurants, the most perfect attractions for the bearer's taste, the places to find one's own kind.  The city may yet appear to be a strange melange, a mix of class and kind without parallel.  But the mobile screen now works to create a different truth – connected to global positioning systems and data networks, the screen labels and divides, inflects the cityscape with information, guides currents of bodies and interest along constructed paths of meaning.

My objects in this study are ‘locative’ applications and the portable platforms they are used through – software like Yelp!, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Layar, Urbanspoon; the smartphones and tablets by which they are carried through and made to interact with the world; and the Global Positioning System of geosynchronous satellites that fix these networked objects in their landscape.  The most successful and prominent geolocative apps seek to connect residents and travelers with attractions and amenities that meet their desires – for instance, allowing searches for restaurants according to price, style, and location, then providing in the same technological package directions to the destination.  Much of the information in these applications is provided by users, in the form of both basic information and reviews or other commentary on locations.  

However, I must admit that my close reading of these technologies is here going to be very limited, in favor of broader analysis.  Let’s look briefly at a few screenshots to identify features I’ll be building on.  Here’s Urbanspoon, an older app that uses augmented reality technology to place information about restaurants and attractions over the user’s view of the city, as if she were seeing through buildings.  Here’s Yelp!, which emphasizes a deep bench of crowdsourced user reviews, and uses a top-down map view to arrange information – a view that makes us think again of De Certeau, in his description of looking down from a skyscraper: “One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law . . . It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one' eyes.” (De Certeau, 184, pp 92).  Both applications, which use data display formats common to mobile locative applications of all sorts, engage in a rhetoric of mastery, of – to use a phrase rooted in a military context shared with GPS technology itself – total information awareness.

Phenomenologically as well as rhetorically, these applications remove sizeable intangible barriers between places – barriers of information that would in a previous era have been overcome much more haphazardly through personal networks, analog media, and chance encounter.  They strip away the layer of mystery that would have driven the flaneur’s urban exploration, and satisfy desire seamlessly.

However, the technological rhetoric of transparency and mastery advanced by locative apps overshadows a class-inflected blindness symptomatic of the neoliberal network society.  The network society, underpinned by internet and transportation technologies and new regimes of free trade, has rendered places like cities and nations increasingly subordinate to the networked flows between them, and subsumed regional and national class systems to a global logic that intensifies local stratifications and differences (Castells).  Personal GPS reproduces and reifies this stratification within the city, linking points of interest and rendering the spaces between mute and irrelevant.  What falls out of this sorting, what is not worthy of the screenholders' attention, disappears.

Critical Geography:

My interest in mobile GPS and mapping is an attempt to add something, from a media studies perspective, to a discourse that is decades old within the field of Geography – a field which, starting particularly in the 1980s, experienced a massive critical turn, in which what had long been taken for granted as a certain scientific facticity of space and landscape, and their representation, was reconceptualized as the outcome of deeply political and power-inflected social processes.  This turn grew out of and was fed by voices outside of geography proper, for instance Michel Foucault’s lament of the Western bias towards the interrogation of the progress of time over the extension of space, and extolling of the promise of a history of “spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.” (Foucault 1980, 149).

Maps are obviously key to this power-inflection of space.  Interventions have been delivered by both an interdisciplinary array of intellectuals deploying cartography as a lens for the social problems of the current era, and by a wholesale critical turn in the field of geography itself.  One standard-bearer was Edward Soja, who in 1989 summarized the necessity of the critical turn.  “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spaciality of social life, how human geographies are filled with politics and ideology.” (Soja 2011, p.25)

As an easy example of the role maps play in this process, see how in this medieval map, castles, churches, and the houses of important people were larger, or how in contemporary maps found in the United States, the Northern Hemisphere is always on ‘top’ and North America is always centered.  My distinguished panelmate Sangeet Kumar, in an article in Global Media and Communication, has written about how representations in Google Earth intervene in the debate surrounding the disputed territories of Kashmir, and similar global disputes around places like the Senkaku Islands have only multiplied in the era of globalization.

Writing in 1968, Henri Lefebvre inaugurated the more local demand for what he termed the “right to the city”, which argued for control over space-making as a necessary feature of any truly democratic enfranchisement (Lefebvre 1996).  David Harvey – almost certainly the world’s most famous geographer – addressed the city as a specific problem/nexus of capitalism, and read the efforts of urban planners like Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses as, in essence, acts of class warfare (Harvey 2009).  Harvey emphasized the project of democratic city-making as one that should be collective and communal (Harvey 2008).  

The need for these interventions was acute: used undemocratically, computerized, centralized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were proven very capable of furthering and accelerating the process of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, for instance when decisions are to be made about the placement of polluting industrial facilities or the distribution of access to amenities.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s geographers pushed hard for greater community involvement in the usage of GIS, though with little consequence.  As to whether smart phones, locative apps, and their crowdsourced “Volunteered Geographic Information” represent a ‘democratization’ of what was once a strictly centralized and largely governmental GIS regime, I unfortunately only have time here to point you to Jose Van Dijck’s great piece “Users Like You,” which unpacks the rhetoric and reality of open access on Youtube.

Compared to issues like territorial dispute and environmental justice, my interest here seems less urgent: the ideology of urbanism, and the phenomenology of the urban experience.  The famous inaugurator of the urban experience was the 19th century city-walker, the flaneur, whose openness to organic, randomized encounter, whose hunger for difference and novelty, was a marker of sophistication.  Personal GIS is the final death knell of this ideal.

The City and the City

A haunting metaphor for the experience of the networked city is found in China Mieville's The City and the City, a Borgesian thought experiment distended into a novel.  Mieville, a Phd-holding Marxist best known for his hallucinatory contributions to the techno-critical subgenre known as steampunk, in this book imagines two Central Asian cities – Ul Qoma and Beszel – that share the same geographic space, but are, in accord with a centuries-old convention, completely functionally and psychically separated.  A citizen of Beszel, for instance, might walk the same street with Ul Qomans, but through the learned ability to 'unsee,' would never interact with them, even in the most subtle ways.  A citizen of Beszel could never enter a shop 'in' Ul Qoma, even if it were physically next door to their house in Beszel.  

Though taken by some as a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, The City and the City stands much more easily as an exploration of the new kind of citydwelling produced by neoliberalism and the network society.  Beszel and Ul qoma are separate, and unequal – Beszel struggling in poverty, while Ul Qoma stands within and beside it, rich from commerce.  Just as in real contemporary cities full of homelessness and desperation, passing without seeing is a survival mechanism, a means of avoiding conflict and contradiction and getting about one’s business.

To go from the fictional to the real, we can take my current hometown of Tampa, Florida, where I moved a year and a half ago.  Tampa is a radically stratified and geographically bloated place, whose population is starkly divided between haves and have-nots – here very closely related to the drives and the drive-nots.  There are traditionally segregated neighborhoods in Tampa – places like Channelside and South Tampa where elites can be left undisturbed.  My own neighborhood, though, is more paradigmatic of 21st century distributed urban geography – Seminole Heights, and adjacent Ybor City, are neightborhoods in redevelopment.  I knew within a few weeks of arriving in Tampa where I ‘belonged,’ and a traveler of my social ilk would have known the same thing within a few hours.  This is a map representing the path between places like Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café, the Independent tap room, Microgroove Records, Yesterdaze Vintage, the Mermaid Tavern, Tempus Projects art gallery, etc. etc. etc.  What would not show up on a visitor’s map is that Ella’s is right next to a pawn shop, the Mermaid is right next to a used tire store, and across the street from an hourly hotel.  Tampa is two cities, three cities, many cities existing side by side, but the map reduces it to the one you want it to be.

This sort of situation holds in any number of redeveloping neighborhoods in cities from the south to the rust belt, for example in Columbus, Ohio’s Short North, where I really tried to encourage Sangeet to buy a condo a couple of years ago.  These trends, roughly dateable to the mid-1990s, are a reversal of the urban planning realities of the 1960s through 1990s, best characterized by City of Glass, Mike Davis’ poetic study of what he termed “fortress Los Angeles,” in which opaqueness and impenetrability were politicized strategies for dealing with the frictions of urban class disparity.  For Davis, the early projects of the architect Frank Gehry, with their “walled compounds and cities . . . offer powerful metaphors for the retreat from the street and the introversion of space that characterized the design  backlash against the urban insurrections of the 1960s.”  Between those insurrections and the crack wars of the 1980s, there was a powerful, mounting sense of a nationwide confrontation between the forces of urban 'order' and dispossessed, predominantly nonwhite citizens.  This mounting tension culminated in the Los Angeles Uprisings of 1992-1993.

But since that nadir, many urban centers have experienced a change in the social fabric that is, if not total, certainly drastic, and that has significantly altered the nature of the barriers confronting visitors and outsiders.  With the exception of outliers such as Baltimore and Detroit, America's largest cities have experienced almost uncanny drops in the crime rate since 1993.  The phenomenon is still not entirely understood, but it is at least partly underpinned by new technologies and practices of relocation – particularly, GIS-driven ‘smart’ policing which has, in turn, fed a pathological expansion in the relocative prison-industrial complex, removing and neutralizing entire segments of the population seen as foolish enough to engage in open, violent class warfare.

With this oppressive support, urban geography and planning have begun to reflect a superficially gentler mode of class coexistence, primarily characterized by 'urban renewal.'  Though this can often consist of large-scale municipal projects or high-dollar developments, it also encompasses the smaller, fragmentary efforts of middle-income, mostly young, often white professionals to take advantage of inexpensive housing and retail stock in neighborhoods that are no longer perceived as zones of class warfare.  Thus the fortress mentality of high-dollar enclaves in Los Angeles may now be less typical than the appearance of coffee shops and trendy restaurants in struggling neighborhoods now seen as full of ‘potential’.  

They can be scattered geographically and cater to highly specialized social niches.  Smartphone location applications including Yelp!, Foursquare, and Layar are technological corollaries for this re-entry into the city, and of at least some degree of retreat from the late 20th century ‘fortress’ mentality – but, in a classic illustration of the tenets of neoliberalism, the appearance of systemic neutrality – ‘we’re just helping you get where you want to go – is based on, and reinforces, displaced inequality and subtler mechanisms of exclusion.  In addition to the looming shadow of the prisons, these proliferating individualized sites present their own implicit cultural barriers to strangers, visitors, and community members, while creating rich distraction from persistent despair in the urban landscape.

In moving from one of these islands of gentrification to another, with the aid of a locative app like Yelp!, the user is enacting a radical reversal of the ‘global village’ envisioned by Marshall McLuhan and other optimistic thinkers of the network era.  They are using what Mark Graham has termed “virtual portals,” connections of the same sort that connect distant points and drive macro-globalization.  But rather than crafting international connections that shorten long distances, in this case virtual portals erase local space, creating phenomenological shortcuts that craft a different, narrower city out of the variety of raw materials at hand, in a process of very selective collage by which social and economic worlds that share continuous physical space are separated into tiers of varying value and power.

So, while the automobile was perhaps the gravest blow to this democratizing ideology of the flaneur, with its expectation of randomness and joy in experience, personal GIS is its final death. The flaneur is replaced with an elite urban subject who is a strategic neoliberal maximizer.  We are able to instantly determine, in any city where we as the mobile international elite might find ourselves, the right ‘kind’ of places for our ‘kind,’ represented on screens that erase the spaces between them – the spaces of the poor, dirty, and hungry.  Thus the pursuit of pleasure renders us terrifyingly fixed within an informational-social matrix – a prison of excess knowledge.

Conclusions: Writing the City

That a technology promoted as an enhancement to seeing might actually have the effect of hampering it isn’t surprising.  All vision and representation is inherently interpretive, not a progress away from filtration or blockage or distortion, but a choice between the different varieties of modulation and meaning-making inherent in human sociability.  In this sense (not to be too much of an intellectual imperialist) critical cartography is inherently a branch of media studies.  That personal mapping technologies are overwhelmingly capitalist (rather than, like the old maps, statist) is the defining vector of their meaning.

The new city-being-written through the confluence of network technology and mobile locative media echoes in microcosm the global trends in social stratification brought about by networks.  Just as Manuel Castells diagnosed early in the process, the construction of a global ‘network society’ has produced increasing stratification within particular geographic spaces, in the place of differentials between geographic spaces.

Thus, under network regimes that both demand personal GIS systems and are reified by them, the reintegration of cities across various lines of difference may be less relevant to the task of social integration and democratization than it might have been under previous technological regimes.  Through writing networks of difference and similarity – particularly networks of class-inflected taste – into everyday experience, these technologies not only re-map, but re-segregate the new, more physically integrated city of the 21st century.  This amounts to a limitation of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,’ insofar as the management and construction of the city is taken out of any public process and into the commercialized meta-spaces of information crowdsourcing.

Locative mapping more generally literalizes or embodies the gap in meaning-making processes between built human space on the one hand, and the broader, delocated social discourses that shape their meaning, on the other.  As with so many media phenomena, this is not a truly new thing entering the world.  Older media regularly pointed towards and lent meaning to spaces at a distance, and often in explicitly commercialized form – through advertising, through restaurant reviews, etc.  But the immediacy of this new mapping draws down substantially greater barriers between particular spaces, circuits, and citizen-customer-users.  As all places become written-on, and particularly as the taste dimension of these places become more and more intensely and rigorously reified, the chance encounters that embody the democratic and discursive possibilities of city life will be further and further curtailed.

The Manchurian Incident and the Alien Act

Eighty-one years ago today, a Japanese Lieutenant set a dynamite charge on the tracks of a Japanese-controlled railway in Manchuria, in Northern China.  The act, blamed on the Chinese, was a successful attempt to initiate sino-Japanese war by the Japanese Kwantung Army.  The army had to an extent gone rogue, engaging in militant acts intended to provoke a Chinese response, and was about to be disciplined by the leadership from Tokyo when it chose to take matters into its own hands by manufacturing Chinese resistance.  This is known as the Manchurian Incident or the Mukden Incident.  What followed was more than a decade of Japanese occupation of and violence against China, including the most brutal single incident in all of World War II, the Rape of Nanking.

Note that I say Nanking was singular in its brutality, not in the number of people it killed.  The statistical honors might go to the Holocaust of eastern European Jewry, or to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States, or maybe even to the firebombing of Dresden by the English.  What's remarkable about Nanking, and what it shares with the Mukden incident that paved the way for it, is the completely uncontrolled and undisciplined nature of Japanese military action.

Perhaps this is the real threat Mukden and Nanking hold for Japanese popular imagination, the reason there has yet to be a collective national reconciliation with the legacy of the war, nearly a full century and several generations later - a phenomenon whose very narrow manifestations in popular music I've documented.   Perhaps it's not the evil of these acts that's so threatening, but the fact that they are out of character.  Certainly, the Germans killed all those Jews, but they did it with a characteristic German efficiency that can be recouped - they may have done something wrong, but they were still German.

Japan's war crimes, though, defied every treasured stereotype of Japanese unity, the concepts so often propagated, not just in the West but within Japan itself, of a 'hive-like' 'oriental' mentality, of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and humility.  In Mukden, low-ranking officers took it up on themselves to undermine the plans of their leaders, including implicitly the Emperor.  In Nanking, enlisted men ran wild, raping, pillaging, and murdering in endlessly creative ways.  These were not strong Japanese collective actions gone awry - they were actions deriving from some other root, something alien and awry, something that, whether deeply human or deeply perverse, were surely not 'Japanese.'  They cannot be recouped, explained, or folded into a narrative of evolution.  For those who believe in the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit, they can only be denied, repressed, dismissed.

Basic Training: Japanese Hip Hop as a Legacy of Militarism

Note, 2013: Those with University Access can now read the fully-fledged article that came out of these ideas in Communication, Culture, and Critique. 

Second Note, 2013: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Image and some info from Mixtapetroopers

This is the cover of a mix CD put out near the end of 2010 by DJ Muta of Libra Records and Juswanna, Mega-G, and DJ 49 (not really familiar with the latter two guys, but Mega-G apparently hosts an occasional Ustream show).  The cover echoes an earlier Japanese hip hop CD cover - I think by Buddha Brand, but I'm not sure? - and the idea of the CD is using the instrumentals from old records and putting new vocals over them.  The title connects to military themes and images that have long been prominent in U.S. and, in turn, Japanese hip hop.  Examples that jump to mind include Public Enemy's S1W security/dance troupe and the Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated Killarmy, who took the contemporary trend for camouflage to a logical conclusion.

But in Japan the military connection is particularly deep and multidimensional, going back the better part of two centuries and connecting contemporary Japanese hip hop to the forces of Western imperialism and Japanese modernization.  And "Basic Training" is specifically part of it.  In his book Kokka to Ongaku [Nation and Music], Okunaka Yasuto tells the fascinating story of how the bakufu, the military government of Japan in the fading years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, came to introduce Western music to Japan for the first time (with the exception of missionary music that Christians had brought in the 15th century before their exclusion).

The motivation was not aesthetic - the introduction of the fife-and-drum corps was part of the bakufu's efforts to upgrade their military forces to modern standards of uniformity and organization.  The Japanese military before the mid-19th century had their well-known equivalent of knights - the samurai - who mostly engaged in single combat on open fields or rode independently on horseback..  Then they had foot soldiers, who were decidedly not the equivalent of relatively well-organized English men-at-arms and bowmen.  Rather, they tended to be utterly untrained and undisciplined peasants who ran around in chaotic masses. This was all well and good when they were fighting each other, but as soon as the bakufu became cognizant of the threat posed by the better-organized and -armed Western powers, they became quick students of modern military arts - or at least, to the extent that they could through the somewhat narrow channel of information they had access to, Dutch scholarship.

Along with technology (mainly guns), the bakufu realized they needed to adopt discipline, and this was strongly rooted in drilling and marching.  There are some pretty fantastic scenes in, if I remember correctly, The Seven Samurai that suggest just how important the drum would have been to implementing uniform drilling.  The townspeople that Takashi Shimura's character attempts to teach have a firmly ingrained habit of running at top speed and with no sense of unit cohesion when under the duress of training, up to and including running into each other.

Shogunate Troops with Drum

I found a trove of great information about this period over at Axis History (a site whose politics I know nothing about). The drum was introduced, along with other reforms, by Takashima Shuuhan, as a tool for management, giving marchers a guide for timing their step, regulating their speed, and in turn, staying out of one another's way.  Here is a frame of drum scores from the book he released, and here's a great video of a contemporary troupe re-enacting what a pre-Meiji Japanese military band might have looked and sounded like:



This was, of course, a pivotal moment in Japanese history, of which the musical impact was among the smallest parts.  But the link between music and militarism continued.  Take, for instance, the so-called gunka, military or patriotic songs largely derived from the Prussian tradition (which replaced Dutch Learning as the basis for Japanese military practice in the Meiji era).  And while the flowering of jazz in Tokyo starting in the 1920s was part of the strongly anti-militarist "Taisho Democracy," the groundwork for it was no doubt laid in part by the exposure to Western sounds that had started with Japan's military - particularly since military instruments were much closer to the sounds of jazz than the palette used in classical music, the other musical import aggressively promoted by the Japanese government as part of Meiji reforms.

But the biggest further impact of militarism on Japanese music came, of course, during the American occupation.  During this time there were massive food shortages among the Japanese general public, and working musicians would certainly have mostly belonged to this group of the not-particularly-elevated.  The only people with food and money in abundance were the occupying forces, so Japanese musicians quickly learned to play what the American soldiers wanted to hear - initially jazz, which they would have already understood well, and later early versions of rock and roll.  The same dynamic continued into roughly contemporary times, though not in Tokyo - even today, the areas of Okinawa's capital city of Naha surrounding the American bases have clothing stores and music shops catering specifically to black American soldiers, forming a cultural resource for Japanese youth with any sort of interest in hip hop.

The bigger questions here are profound.  I had long assumed that the story of Western music in Japan began with Admiral Perry's landing and the group of minstrels he brought with him, making the entire ensuing history of Western music in Japan a matter of imperial imposition.  But this isn't the case at all - as happened again and again throughout Japanese history, something was consciously adopted from abroad as part of attempts to transform Japan into a nation that could compete internationally (that 'internationally' is complicated but key - at this point the Bakufu were reforming the military as part of a frantic rearguard action against international interference, so in some sense they were trying to keep from internationalizing - but were nonetheless doing just that).  The same pattern would continue over the next century-plus, in music as in other things.

Japan is Run By Racist Idiots Who Prefer Robots to Brown People

Sometimes you just have to call 'em like you see 'em.  In this case, the strike zone is pretty wide.

On the one hand, you have the billions of yen over the years poured into programs to develop home-care robots.  I would be shocked to find that any remotely responsible health care expert could have thought this was a good idea even at its earliest stages.  Health care is not just about lifting and moving people - the CARE is right there in the name, and we're still quite a distance from developing any robot with that capability.


On the other hand, you have the intentional sabotage of a program intended to extend residency to highly-trained and carefully vetted nurses from the Phillipines and Indonesia.  This is reflective of a much wider resistance to any formal immigration liberalization.  Equally pathetic is the recent celebration of the arrival of a handful of individual and families from Myanmar as part of a U.N. resettlement program.  The latter is a more purely moral failure, where the former shows an inability even to act in rational self-interest.  I'm speculating a bit here, but I would bet short odds that the root cause of these ridiculous and shameful policy failures is the deep racism of a relatively small but powerful segment of the Japanese right wing.

I've been watching Treme, and in the second episode there's a moment where a lawyer who is trying to navigate the insanity of post-Katrina police bureaucracy simply loses her shit and starts screaming curse words into a pillow.  I can think of few more correct responses to such a patently ridiculous situation as this one.

Liyoon - Japanese Killer Whale

I can't believe I haven't heard about this already.  Apparently released about five months ago, this is in some ways a predictable Japanese "national pride" perspective on the discussion over whaling/dolphin hunts that's still boiling well after the release of The Cove.  But there are several weird/interesting twists, some of which will be obvious immediately:



It makes a lot of sense that this is in English, since the essential message is about the hypocrisy and even racism of the Western anti-whaling position.  The most convincing point made, as far as I'm concerned, is that pigs, like dolphins, are pretty smart animals, but the West eats tons of them anyway (actually, so does Japan, but I think the point still stands).

The really interesting part, and a vital reminder of the vastly different Japanese political landscape, is that Liyoon is Zainichi - a Japanese-born Korean.  He used to belong to a group called KP, which stood for "Korean Pride."  From an American perspective, it's odd to think about an ethnic minority pushing such an overtly nationalist (or at the very least, patriotic) viewpoint, but the dominance of American influence in Japanese politics and culture changes the math radically.  At some moments it makes sense to identify as Zainichi against a Yamato ethnic mainstream, but at least as often someone like Liyoon is going to encounter threats to the "Japanese" side of his identity, and feel the need to rise to their defense.

That reactive/defensive stance seems omnipresent - in fact, it pretty much explains the whole whale situation.  Most Japanese don't actually eat whale meat, but many nonetheless support the hunt because it has a symbolic power even if they're not participating in it.  It represents their ability to defy the West, and specifically America (home of the Sea Shepard), at least in some relatively small way.  If that element of defiance wasn't important, it's pretty clear most Japanese, at the very least, wouldn't care about whale hunting one way or the other.