"This paper aims to identify cultural attitudes reflected in the traditional whaling songs of Japan. A corpus of 50 songs from nine prefectures is analyzed. The findings suggest that the songs may provide some insight into social, folkloric and spiritual attitudes accompanying traditional whaling. These attitudes include veneration of whales and symbolic invocation of both whales and deities. Observing broadly distributed common forms and imagery across the corpus, between songs of different genres and regions, this paper suggests that these songs are local affirmations of a wider social, folkloric and spiritual consensus. In these respects they may be said to differ from the more narrative whaling songs and sea shanties of British and American origin. " |