Marine conservation campaigners have lodged a complaint with police demanding that “toxic” dolphin meat be removed from sale in Japan, after a test showed a sample contained levels of mercury up to 100 times higher than the government’s recommended safe level.
Action for Dolphins (AFD), a nonprofit based in Australia, filed the complaint with police in central Japan this month, amid expert warnings that regular consumption of dolphin meat could threaten the health of consumers.
AFD said recent testing at a laboratory in Japan revealed that one sample bought in the country – a portion of Risso’s dolphin offal – exceeded the government-set regulatory limit of mercury by up to 97.5 times. A second package of Risso’s dolphin offal showed mercury levels 80 times higher than the safe limit.
An AFD investigator based in Japan ordered Risso’s dolphin offal from the Yahoo! Japan website on 13 October 2022. Two packages arrived on 15 October and were sent to a laboratory in Japan, where they were tested separately.
Hannah Tait, AFD’s chief executive, said she hoped the test results and police complaint would result in dolphin meat being removed from sale in supermarkets, restaurants and the online retailer Yahoo! Japan.
“There are multiple test results dating back a decade showing potentially toxic levels of mercury in whale and dolphin meat sold via Yahoo! Japan’s website,” Tait told the Guardian. “There is a lack of information and labelling … anyone can buy the meat, including pregnant women, which is particularly troubling.
“We hope that by launching this complaint the matter will be taken up with urgency and these products will be removed from Yahoo! Japan’s website, as well as from supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.
“This is a case of the Japanese government looking the other way, even though – as we say in our complaint – the continued sale of [toxic] dolphin meat is a violation of Japanese food sanitation laws.”
In an email to the Guardian, Yahoo! Japan said it did not sell dolphin meat “or any related products” on its site – only whale meat. The offal tested by AFD is listed on the Yahoo! Japan site as coming from the hanagondo-kujira, which can be translated into English as Risso’s dolphin or Risso’s pilot whale. The AFD investigator used the latter translation, which also appears on other cetacean websites.
Tait said the cetacean is biologically a member of the dolphin family.
Yahoo! Japan is the only major online retailer in the country that continues to sell cetacean products. Rakuten, Japan’s biggest online retailer, stopped selling whale and dolphin meat in 2014 after the international court of justice ordered Japan to immediately halt its annual whale hunts in the Southern Ocean.
The complaint, submitted on behalf of AFD by the Tokyo-based law office of Takashi Takano, targets a speciality whale meat store that sells meat from cetaceans caught in Taiji, on Japan’s Pacific coast, via Yahoo! Japan.
Russell Fielding, an assistant professor at Coastal Carolina University who has conducted extensive research on cetaceans and mercury concentration, said the contamination levels found in the meat tested by AFD would be expected to cause health problems if consumed regularly.
“With mercury concentrations of 39 parts per million (ppm) and methylmercury concentrations of 1.58 ppm, the meat tested certainly exceeds the recommendations and would be expected to cause health problems if consumed regularly,” said Russell, who is not a member of AFD.
In its guidelines, Japan’s health ministry advises that fish and seafood with levels above 0.4 ppm for total mercury and 0.3 ppm for methylmercury are unsafe for human consumption.
The complaint is the latest part of AFD’s campaign to end dolphin hunting in Taiji, where the annual slaughter of hundreds of dolphins was the subject of 2009 Oscar-winning documentary The Cove. Other dolphins are kept alive and sold to aquariums and marine parks.
In a rare interview several years ago, local dolphin hunters told the Guardian that they were simply protecting a traditional industry and accused opponents of attempting to destroy the area’s culinary traditions.
Tests conducted by AFD in 2020 and 2021 revealed mercury levels in dolphin meat between 12 and 25 times the regulatory limit. The organisation launched a criminal complaint against the sale of toxic whale and dolphin meat in 2021, but prosecutors decided not to take action.
Studies of people who regularly consume cetacean products show that mercury and other contaminants can have an adverse effect on foetal development, neural development and memory, as well as increasing the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, hypertension and arteriosclerosis in adults.
A 2010 study by the National Institute for Minamata Disease – which Tait described as “flawed” – found that levels of mercury detected in Taiji residents were above the national average, probably due to their consumption of whale and dolphin meat. Further tests found they had suffered no ill effects, however.
The tests involved hair samples from 1,137 of the town’s approximately 3,500 residents.
