Earlier this year I was commissioned by a British newspaper to research a Japanese company called Hakudai, which was reputed to be putting whale meat into dog food.

I found the company in Chikura, a sleepy fishing town in Chiba Prefecture with a long tradition of whale hunting; local supermarkets were selling fresh minke, and prowhaling advertisements decorated the walls. One poster showed a whale gobbling fish from an image of the earth with the top sliced off. The blurb, written by the Fisheries Agency, proclaimed that "whales eat five times more fish than humans" so they "must be caught within limits."

Hakudai turned out to be a shop attached to a small plant employing about two dozen people, some of whom were cutting slivers of whale meat and drying them in the sun. The boss was 43-year-old Kiyoshi Okawa, who inherited the shop from his grandfather.