« Happy, Happy, Happy Jangsaengpo | Main | This is what whaling looks like »
May 05, 2005
Minke whales butchered
Hi, I got some news from Ulsan, South Korea. My name is So Yeon Leem. I'm working as a Korean interpreter at the Whale Embassy here in Jangsaengpo, Ulsan. (I'll just assume that you all know why we - Greenpeace and KFEM - are here.)
It was around 9 o'clock this evening. I heard Ben calling another interpreter's name from outside. Then, he ran into the dorm and found me just sitting there. He said one Korean guy came and tried to say something to him. When I went out, there was a car and the driver guy told me one whale was being processed in a restaurant down there. He introduced him as a local resident. (Actually I remembered him. He was one of visitors to the Embassy the other day.)
We decided to go and look.
Stephanie (acting campaigner), Jae-Jung (another Korean interpreter) and I drove to that restaurant. It was only a few minutes away from the camp just by walk!!! When we got there, there were quite a lot of people watching it. At the first place, we're very careful to take photos. But there were already people taking pictures of and recording what's happening, so Stephanie started recording it too. (There was even a person from Ulsan MBC who was recording that process.) Well, let me tell you what I actually saw. I caught almost the end of the whole process. There were several wooden boxes staked up. They were filled with plastic-wrapped whale meats. One guy was using the axe to take flesh apart from the ribs and backbone. (Its rib looked like about 1.2~1.5 m to me.) The other guys was trimming those flesh. Blood was everywhere on the blue plastic cover. Of course, I could smell it!
After 20 minutes, We were back to the camp with one Korean guy, Baek-Sup Moon, who used to be a crew on Rainbow Warrier. He was there too and actually got some information. According to him, that whale was declared 'by-catch.' It was an immature Minkie Whale caught in Jook-Byeon 3 days ago. Jook-Byeon is located in a bit northern part of east coast, and 3 hours to drive away. (Surprisingly, it was quite far from Ulsan.) And then, that restaurant bought it for $30 000 . Since it was not illegal, people could process it publicly.
That's all I know about it.
--So Yeon Leem
Posted by at May 5, 2005 02:57 PM

