Chapter 3 focuses on the earliest sources of anti-whaling protests in northeastern Japan in the late seventeenth century. It analyses a conflict between Kii whalers and local fishermen that occurred in 1677 and shows how whales and proto-industrial fishing were intertwined in the early modern period. The observation that whales would bring fish, such as sardines, closer to the shore played a key role here. Without whales, the local fishermen believed, fish would stay out in the open sea, and they could not catch them. While fishermen made use of stranded whales and even ate whale meat occasionally, they saw the active hunting of whales as a danger to the sardine and bonito proto-industries. Moreover, hunting whales also caused environmental pollution, threatening the fauna and flora near the coast, the economic foundation of the fishermen who relied on gathering coastal flora and fauna. It was in the interest of the locals to protect the community from outside threats such as whaling.

Chapter 1 describes the yearly migration of thousands of whales along the Japanese coast – often imagined as a pilgrimage by Japanese observers – and the impact this had on Japanese coastal ecosystems. Humans in the Japanese archipelago made use of stranded whales early on, but it was not until the 1570s that some fishing communities in western Japan started to actively target whales. It is argued that the dissemination of organised whaling was closely linked to the rise of the fish fertiliser proto-industry. To fulfil the demand for marine fertiliser, fishermen from the central Kii domain developed new fishing and whaling techniques. After overfishing their own coast, they began following the migration route of whales across the archipelago in search of new fishing grounds, disseminating fish and whaling techniques to other regions of Japan.