Kesen-numa City: Japan’s Shark Fin Capital
The video below claims to show a massive shark fining plant in Kesen-numa City, Japan where hundreds if not thousands of tons of shark are butchered weekly. Apparently the fishing port in Kesen-numa City is the only port dedicated to catching sharks, but we all know that where there are profits there are people willing to stretch the bounds of the law.
KESEN-NUMA CITY, JAPAN – It’s 5am on the the north eastern tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu, and 75 tons of dead shark is being meticulously arranged into a neat grid of tidy piles, of twenty sharks per pile.
If you thought shark finning was exclusively a Chinese problem, think again. Welcome to Kesen-numa City, Japan’s shark fin capital.
Here, six days a week, small teams of Japanese workers go about the hushed business of industrial shark-finning.
By 6.30am, with piles arranged, the sharks are disemboweled first. Hearts are ripped efficiently from their bodies by men wearing brightly coloured rubber boots and aprons. At 7am, the shark corpses are cleaned of their blood by workers wielding water hoses. And by 8am, small teams are silently moving up and down aisles and rows like robots in a Japanese car factory, quickly slicing off every dorsal, pectoral and tail fin from the lifeless, grey lumps. Big hungry black crows squawk in the shadows, looking for bloody morsels. And shark fins plop with regularity into small yellow plastic baskets. The baskets fill up fast, are then weighed, and finally carried to a nearby truck, where a man with a notepad strikes a deal. At 9.30am, it’s all over for another day. Fork lift trucks scoop up tons of limbless carcasses, then dump them into a high-sided truck. The process is a brutal sight to behold, and not for the faint-hearted.
-Allex Hofford
You can continue reading the very long and graphic description of this video on the Allex Hofford’s Vimeo page.
1 year ago #