Iki Island

Iki Island (壱岐島) is an island lying between the island of Kyūshū and the Tsushima islands in the Tsushima Strait, the eastern channel of the Korea Strait. It is currently part of Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan. The city of Iki is the centre of the local government. The island has three ports.

The island’s residents gain their livlihood primarily from the sea. Until the mid-1970s, they were prosperous, owing to their proximity to highly a highly productive fishing area known as the Shichiriga Banks. Those waters were also on the migration route of vast pods of dolphins — bottlenose, huge gray and white Risso’s, and jet-black false killer whales.

Geography

The island hosts a population of 33,202 within the 138.45 km² island, measuring 17 km from the north–south direction and 14 km in the east–west direction. Agriculture is widely practiced by the local inhabitants, and crops including rice and tobacco are planted. There is also an onsen (Japanese hot spring). Sea urchin is a delicacy there, as is the local Shōchū.

Together with the neighbouring islands of Tsushima, they are collectively known as the Iki–Tsushima Quasi-National Park.

History

After the Toi invasion, private trade started between Goryeo, Tsushima, Iki, and Kyūshū, but were halted by the Mongol Invasions of Japan of 1274 and 1281. However, the Mongols were halted from further aggression against Japan. The Koryosa (history of the Goryeo dynasty) mentions that in 1274, an army of Mongol troops, which included Korean soldiers, captured both Tsushima and Iki and killed a great number of islanders.

Iki became one of the major bases of Wokou (Japanese pirates, also called wako) along with Tsushima and Matsuura.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, in particularly the town of Katsumoto, the islanders were notorious for the over-fishing of the local species of whales and dolphins. In view of the already endangered yellowtails, the local town government banned large-scale, commercial fishing of yellowtails after 1982.[1]

In 1977, the local fishermen invited television companies to film the mass slaughtering of dolphins. In response, activists heavily condemned the fishermen's acts of killing the dolphins.[2]

Extermination of Dolphins

During the 1970s the fishermen experienced a decline in their catch and they suspected dolphins were taking too many fish. The fishermen began shooting and harpooning dolphins, but though they killed a few, the effort was ineffectual. In 1977, they adopted the oi komi dolphin drive , a technique used by fishermen in other parts of Japan who hunt dolphins for food. When dolphins are sighted, the fishermen form their boats, each of them made of white fiberglass and roughly thirty feet in length, into a huge horseshoe on one side of the dolphin pod. They swing metal pipes into the water and bang on them with hammers and steel rods. The clanging from a hundred boats or more curling around the dolphin pod in a U-shape causes the dolphins, with their exquisitely sensitive hearing, to flee ahead of the painful sound. Maintaining communication through CB radios, the fishermen maneuver the horseshoe so as to drive the dolphins into a bay where they can be confined and killed by stabbing them with long spears.

In 1979 they rounded up hundreds of dolphins and slaughtered them on Tatsunoshima Island across the bay from Katsumoto Town. An aerial photograph of the event made its way into international syndication. In 1979 Hardy Jones brought a film crew to Iki to film the fishermen and the slaughter. The result was a film entitled “Island at the Edge.” [3]

The following year Jones returned with cameraman Howard Hall and filmed the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins. The highly graphic footage, distributed through CBS News, along with still photographs, caused an avalanche of protest around the world.

Dolphin hunting largely ceased after 1980 partly because the massive protest caused serious embarrassment to Japan. But perhaps because dolphins stopped showing up in great numbers off Iki. The cause may be that the pods were seriously depleted by the drive fishery or because warming ocean temperatures caused dolphin prey species to move.

See also

• Iki, Nagasaki
• Iki Province

External links

• Website by the Japanese government