PACIFIC OCEAN—Even though their fellow countrymen are the targets of each week’s episode, Japan has a new favorite television show, which is produced in the United States and airs here every Friday night from 9-10PM eastern/pacific time on Animal Planet.
Whale Wars, which chronicles the seafaring adventures of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society—sixty American and Australian activists committed to disrupting illegal whaling by Japanese fisherman—has quickly become the number one rated comedy show on Japan’s Nippon Television Network.
“They so rearry, rearry funny,” guffawed “Cap’n Willie” Hiroshimawa, the skipper of the Shonan Maru #2, one of each episode’s targeted whaling ships. “One week they file potato gun at us; next week stink bombs. We shoot them back with big, big squirt gun. More fun than I have in rong, rong time. I ruv those guys; certainree make my rife more enjoyable.”
But the Steve Irwin and Bob Barker, the names given to the two $3 million ships owned by the conservation society, are attempting to make the lives of Hiroshimawa and his crew members anything but enjoyable. Their goal is to harass and harangue until the whalers call it quits and hang up their harpoons for good. Among other tactics, the activists have directed high frequency, 100-decibel noise at the whalers, lobbed stink bombs—which allegedly foul the whale meat and render it inedible—onto their deck, and utilized homemade potato cannons that hurl one-pound Russets from up to 100 yards away.
According to Peter Hammerstedt, the ferret-like assistant captain on the Steve Irwin, “We’re breaking their spirit, there’s no doubt about it. When I hit one of their deck hands with our pie launcher, he started laughing hysterically. It almost looked like he was enjoying himself. Impossible! That pie was traveling at 20 feet per second.”
Whale Wars was introduced to Japanese viewers by Sadaharu “Cliffie” Watanabe, Nippon Television’s Executive Vice President of Programming, who watched the show while vacationing in London. But Watanabe, who’s unable to speak or understand English, didn’t realize his fellow countrymen were legitimate, antipathetic targets.
“It was a laugh riot,” said Watanabe through an interpreter. “These overage hippies would engage the whaling ships in play fighting; kind of like having a big, expensive paint gun war on the high seas. A really expensive one.
“Last episode they used sling shots to launch rotting fish at the whalers. Hysterical. You can’t write that kind of television.”
Watanabe’s production team takes each hour-long episode of Whale Wars and speeds it up to create a thirty minute show—giving it a Keystone Cops look and feel—and inserts a music bed consisting of carnival-like calliope music.
For the last several weeks, American viewers—as well as the crew of the Steve Irwin—believe they’re watching the Shonan Maru closely tail the vessel in an attempt to relay their coordinates to other whaling ships in the area. In Japan, however, Nippon Television viewers are convinced they’re watching an expensive game of maritime “Tag, You’re It!”
Says Hiroshimawa, giggling: “We corrected as much of the dirty water they spray at us. We put it in huge baroon; when we get crose enough, we hit them with hundred garrons of their own dirty bong water. Big sprash! Big funny fun fun!”—Citizen Dick Arneson reporting
