I20 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



animals at this early period, because rorquals sink when dead — was 

 heaved right up on to the shore by a primitive slipway that led to 

 the entrance of a large warehouselike building. Even in ancient 

 times, it appears that every bit of the whale was used. UnHke the 

 Europeans and others who made use of the whole animal in earliest 

 times but then jettisoned an ever-increasing amount of it until they 

 took only the blubber and baleen or, at one period, only the baleen 

 but who have now been forced to return to the more economical 

 practice of processing the entire corpse, the Japanese always got the 

 utmost out of their prize. The pictures of the processes they em- 

 ployed are most enhghtening on this score. 



First, the blubber was stripped and carted into the building to be 

 rendered in a series of large iron pots placed neatly against one wall, 

 their fires fed by a troop of special laborers. The baleen, if it were 

 a rorqual or right whale, went into a separate room where it was 

 washed, ironed, and dried. The flesh was then neatly butchered, 

 graded, and even, in some cases, packaged in split-bamboo cartons 

 and rushed off to market by another group of laborers, distinguished 

 by different clothing, who bore their loads suspended from either 

 end of long poles. The bones and the residue that could not be eaten 

 — which was astonishingly little, for almost all parts of the intes- 

 tines were thoroughly scoured and cut into special delicacies for 

 the table — were then hacked into small pieces and shipped to the 

 farmers in large baskets. We can only assume that, from the first, 

 this residue was used by them as manure, just as the Amerindians 

 used little fishes to fertilize their corn crops at the time of planting. 

 A wiser and more wholesome use of a product of the sea has never 

 been devised by any people, and in its efficiency it not only paral- 

 lels and equals, but even surpasses, the most modern phase of whal- 

 ing, wherein almost the entire animal is used, for we still throw 

 away the stomach and its contents, while the early Japanese appear 

 to have made use even of these, either directly as food or via their 

 employment as manure or fertilizer, and we nowadays also throw 

 away the baleen. 



The Japanese from earliest times seem to have been able to take 

 all kinds of whales by using the ingenious prehistoric device of the 

 inflated bladder, or float. Not only were black rights and sperms 

 taken, but also all the rorquals and even the gray whale, which later 



