The Cultural Catch: Japanese Whaling Fiction and the Gender(ed) Politics of Nostalgia

This article reads the post-moratorium boom in historical whaling fiction against shifting debates over the legitimacy of Japanese whaling. Taking Itō Jun’s Kyogei no umi (2013) as example, I draw on critical heritage studies and Svetlana Boym’s theory of nostalgia to show how the novel reconstructs Edo-period whaling as a morally coherent, patriarchal community built on self-sacrifice and masculine heroism. In doing so, the novel aligns with cultural-nationalist framings of whaling, enhancing its symbolic value as a marker of Japanese identity. The article thus shows how such narratives participate in the discursive work that sustains whaling in contemporary Japan.