Chapter 7 analyses the violent conflict between industrial whalers and fishermen leading up to the Hachinohe uprising of 1911. Whalers, bureaucrats, and fishing scientists used fishery science to discredit the ecological knowledge of the local fishermen. In their accounts, allegedly objective scientific knowledge proved that whaling would not harm fishing while the locals' counterarguments were ridiculed as religious superstitions. Unlike in Ayukawa, fishermen in Hachinohe showed stronger resistance, eventually leading to the destruction of the whaling station in Same-ura in late 1911. However, the whaling company was able to reconcile with the local fishermen by offering them job opportunities in the whaling business. By 1912, all protests in Northeast Japan ceased, and whaling towns, such as Ayukawa and Hachinohe, brought economic wealth to the region. It is argued that the dwindling resistance of the population was closely connected to the decline of near-coastal fishing around 1900. With the advent of offshore fishing, whales no longer held the same environmental importance for fishermen, as they were no longer dependent on them to bring sardines close to the shore.

Chapter 8 traces how northeastern Japan became the national centre of industrial whaling after the 1911 Hachinohe uprising. With the example of Ayukawa, this chapter argues that industrial whaling was reinvented as a local culture after World War II in northeastern Japan with the organisation of whaling festivals, the building of whale monument stones, and the production of a feature film. Nowadays, people in northeastern Japan see themselves as representatives of a Japanese national whaling culture, and most do not know that their ancestors fought against the introduction of whaling for 300 years. Thus, its former identity as a non-whaling region has disappeared almost entirely from the collective memory. However, the excessive hunting of whales as well as the changing international landscape eventually brought an end to commercial whaling in 1987, leaving the ‘whaling towns’ of the Northeast without their main source of income. The situation was further complicated by the 2011 tsunami that destroyed large parts of Ayukawa and was seen by many as the end of whaling in Japan.

Chapter 5 discusses how industrial whaling was disseminated from Norway and Russia to the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that industrial whaling, invented by Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn in the 1860s, was taken up by Russian and Japanese whalers as a way to colonise the coastal waters and marine resources around the Korean Peninsula. Industrial whaling techniques allowed whalers to hunt even the largest whale species, such as blue and fin whales, which had a devastating effect on the feedback loops of the marine ecosystem. After a Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, western Japanese whaling companies used colonial tactics to bring industrial whaling to the main islands. The chapter argues that the rise of industrial whaling altered the interaction between humans and cetaceans forever, leading to the swift destruction of the cetosphere. While industrial whaling was successfully disseminated in colonial Korea, Japanese fishermen were more resistant and began protesting the new methods even in regions that had long proto-industrial whaling histories. However, the fiercest protest against industrial whaling occurred in former non-whaling regions such as Hokkaido and the Northeast.

Chapter 6 discusses the socio-economic changes the arrival of industrial whaling brought to the fishing community of Ayukawa in northeastern Japan in 1906. While fishermen were first critical of whaling in Ayukawa, they soon accepted the new industrial whaling practices, and the town became the central hub of coastal industrial whaling. It is argued that the local elite played a crucial role in mitigating environmental pollution by buying up whale carcasses that had been thrown away and turning them into whale fertiliser. This not only reduced coastal pollution but also created job opportunities, leading to a mass influx of immigrants from other regions. Soon, the opposing fishermen in Ayukawa found themselves to be a minority in their own village, as the new immigrants had a keen interest in preserving industrial whaling.