May 14

Today we traveled to Wakayama to visit the Taiji Whale Museum. A classmate had previously told me that they had no interest in visiting the museum because of the activities it supports. While I would consider myself an animal lover 100%, I still wanted to attend to museum to educate myself more on the subject of whaling. I didn’t know much about it in general, and I honestly didn’t even know it is something that is culturally significant for Japanese people. All I really knew about it prior to going was that people would capture whales and dolphins either to hold in captivity or for food, which is frowned upon because a lot of those species are endangered now. Still, I like to go to places like these with an open mind to gather my own opinions rather than just going off of what others believe. 
We arrived to the museum, and they had a lot of artifacts of whales. Something that stood out to me was all the skeletons of
whales and dolphins they had. I’m unsure if they were real, but either way that made me sad. Another thing that made me sad was the baby whale they displayed. We went out to the deck and saw dolphins and whales in the water. It was the first time I’ve been so close to dolphins and whales, and I never realized how cute whales are (dolphins used to be my favorite animal so I already knew how cute they were). Seeing how cute they were made me more sad about the museum and the fact that they were held captive, but I’m still glad I went to the museum to gain knowledge about the subject. One of my classmates was talking about how Wakayama doesn’t like foreigners because they constantly protest against whaling. This plays into the intersection of tradition and modernity because protests against these kinds of issues is definitely a modern thing. While it isn’t ideal to generalize an entire population based on one thing, it also isn’t ideal to protest something that has been a part of someone’s culture for a long time. There may be some moral issues with whaling, but that isn’t something they can get rid of easily. This is a perfect example of the intersection of tradition and modernity because whaling is a long-time practice, and there are many more people now that protest against it.


The whale museum was the only place we visited, and once we were done we took a boat to the island of Hotel Urashima. The hotel was different from the ones we stayed at so far because they were traditional Japanese-style rooms. They had tatami mats so we couldn’t wear shoes on them and had to be careful with what we put on them. While we got dinner, workers put futons out for us. After dinner, we got to experience an Onsen. This one was particularly exciting because it had multiple different ones, and one of them was a cave on the ocean. This was something that was definitely out of my comfort zone and nothing that I’ve ever done before. The closest thing I’ve done to this is change in a locker room. I was a little weirded out at first, but I think the girls I went with felt closer to each other after this. We had to rinse ourselves off before going in. Although I was a little uncomfortable doing it initially, it’s something I would definitely do again. Something I noticed about the onsen is that there wasn’t any tourists, we were the only ones. And I think that’s a funny take on the intersection of tradition and modernity—that it’s more popular with Japanese people and tourists don’t overtake it. I have to admit it was nice to not see so many tourists. 



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