FEATURE | Dark Tide
Dark Tide
Fencer Leslie-Ann Gervais scheduled some downtime in Japan to heal an injury. She returned home with an unexpected wound
By David Young
A world-class fencer with Olympic ambitions, Caledonia’s Leslie-Ann Gervais also nurtures a love for surfing and the transcendent appeal of the ocean, a passion thrown into painful contrast in Taiji.
In the days after, Gervais was in contact with actor-activist Hayden Panettiere (standing third from left) who had visited Taiji for a surfers’ protest previously in 2007 
Taiji’s fishermen do not accord dolphins any special status and consider them to be no different than tuna, pointing out that those North Americans horrified by documentaries like The Cove would be equally shocked if they were able to witness the graphic inner workings of the industrial abbatoirs that make hamburgers possible
On the face of it, the town of Taiji is an almost magical place. A tiny fishing village nestled between mountains of Japan’s Kii Peninsula, the scenery is exquisite but rugged, a serrated coastline of steep cliffs and craggy mountain faces bearded in black pines, chinquapins and evergreen oaks. Historically, that local geography made overland access tricky and as a result the area has remained quiet and insular, a town of fewer than 4,000 that is largely left to its own devices. Within that isolated community is an even smaller and more secretive enclave: Hatagiri Bay.
Leslie-Ann Gervais has saltwater in her veins. “I love the ocean,” she says rapturously. “For so long, I thought I was addicted to surfing, but it’s the ocean that I’m addicted to. I love being in the ocean, I love marine life and being so close to nature.”
That discovery wasn’t immediate, however. The Caledonia-bred athlete started off her competitive career as as a teenager, competing in Modern Pentathlon before discovering that, of the five sports, fencing’s combination of agility and strategy appealed to her most. At 14, she was told she was too old to have any serious prospects in the sport, but she excelled at it and by 17 had made the junior national team, becoming the first Canadian woman to win a Senior North American Cup the following year. Soon she was travelling the globe to compete with the best in the world. And along the way, she discovered another passion. During a North American Cup competition in Florida, Gervais was staying in a hotel on the beach, tried surfing and loved it; she soon discovered that you can surf the Great Lakes, and went on to sharpen her skills on Lake Erie, later earning a spot on the Canadian national surfing team. Competing in fencing events across the globe, Gervais started taking her surfboard along with her, taking to the waves in her downtime.
“I started surfing more and more,” she says. “Fencing is an intensely competitive sport, whereas surfing seems like the opposite, always a release. When I had won the East Coast Championships and qualified for Worlds, I decided to just concentrate on surfing.” As with fencing, she displayed remarkable acumen, becoming a member of the Canadian National Surf Team, being named Ladies Canadian East Coast Surfing Champion three times, representing Canada twice at the World Surfing Championships and then qualifying for a third World Championships before an injury forced her to retire from competition. She decided to make a comeback in fencing. “I always knew I would go back to fencing; I just didn’t want to live in Europe at the time, and that’s where you need to be to compete in all the World Cups and get in the best training.” Since returning, she has competed in the World Cup once and the Canadian and Pan Am Championships twice, winning a team silver at the latter in 2008.
Again, injury changed the plot line: In 2009, while training for nationals, she was hit hard in practice by a male opponent who delivered the épée to her shoulder with such impact that her shoulder blade was knocked out of alignment. She ended up in emergency, suffering nerve damage as a result of the episode. Unable to move her arm for a while, her arm muscles atrophied, her ranking dropped and she had to start from scratch. Without strength in her shoulder, Gervais was relying on wrist strength, which caused its own problems. When the complications inevitably erupted, she was prescribed downtime. She decided to use visit Japan and its restful onsen, hot springs set in the serenity of nature. And then her thoughts turned to Taiji. “I assumed I’d be spending time in the hot springs,” she says. “Not climbing fences and that sort of thing.”
As far back as the early 1600s, Taiji’s identity has been that of a whaling town. It was here that Japanese whaling got its start, here where the Antarctic whaling ships crewed up and where, four centuries later, the practice has continued to define the town in the eyes of the world. If the name has a familiar ring, it is because the town was the subject of the haunting 2009 documentary The Cove, an Oscar-winning film that delves into the mysteries of Hatagiri Bay, whose waters are the staging grounds for a bloody if long-standing hunt of pilot whales and dolphins.
The film follows a group of eco-activists who struggle with Japanese police and fishermen to document the goings-on in Hatagiri Bay’s secluded cove where dolphins are hunted. Central to the action is 60-year-old activist Ric O’Barry, who rose to fame as the trainer for the TV series Flipper and who has spent the intervening decades advocating for dolphins and rescuing them when necessary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the doc has had troubled release in Japan, where theatres have received threats from groups arguing that its slaughter footage is an affront to traditional Japanese culture. In the wake of Taiji’s recent infamy, most senior town officials now refuse to talk to journalists and routinely accuse Westerners of assaulting Japanese culture or perpetuating racist misinformation. (Similar hunts of considerable tradition in take place in the Faroe Islands and Solomon Islands, as does a black-market cull in Peru.) They, and the fishermen who live and work in the town, do not acknowledge the evolved intelligence of dolphins and consider them to be no different from tuna, pointing out that those North Americans horrified by The Cove would be just as shocked if they were able to witness the inner workings of the industrial slaughterhouses responsible for the hamburger, sausages and steaks that are staples of summer barbecues.
Until July 2010, an October 2009 screening of The Cove at the Tokyo International Film Festival had been the Japanese public’s only chance to see the film. In the shadow of that screening, and with her curiosity piqued by an absence of news reports from the fishing village, Gervais arrived in Japan. “I found out about this about two years ago,” she says. “A friend of mine went over with the Sea Shepherd and I heard about it through him and I had offhandedly said a number of times, ‘Let’s go back to Taiji’ and he always refused because he had such an awful experience there.” Even so, she felt compelled to visit, and had mostly been thwarted by the hectic schedule of fencing competition, until her injury presented an opportunity.
“I planned to go at the same time that they were showcasing The Cove because I had heard that others were going to be in Taiji after that,” she says. “And so I was train-bound. But they cancelled their trip, perhaps because it was going to be too much of a sensitive time. So I ended up being there for 10 days alone.” A few weeks earlier, O’Barry had written that progress had been made, that although the pilot whales caught in the season’s first oikomi drives were killed for meat, those dolphins not sold into captivity were set to be released. The visit to Taiji, it seemed, would be relatively happy, buoyed by a sense of having forced a meaningful change. “I assumed the slaughter had ended,” she says. “So when I saw dolphins in the cove, I had no idea what to do.”
The Taiji Isana Union, a local dolphin hunters’ co-op, rigidly controls the oikomi hunt throughout its September-March season, limiting it to just 26 of the town’s 500-odd fishermen. The hunt is grimly efficient. Motorboats head out to the sea corridor used as a migratory route by pilot whales and dolphins, surrounding pods and driving them toward a capture cove by disrupting the dolphins’ echolocation, the elegant sonar that the mammals use to perceive the world around them. The fishermen lower flanged metal poles into the water, striking the rods with hammers to create a wall of noise that disorients the dolphins and causes them to blindly flee. The process is known as drive fishing because of the way fishermen are able to invisibly herd their prey.
Once forced into the capture cove, the exit is sealed with nets, and the dolphins and whales left overnight, to rest and so that the panic-driven stress hormones have left their body. That move is designed to make healthy young dolphins more attractive to those buyers looking to train them for dolphinariums or for swim-with-dolphin programs – a trained animal can fetch up to $150,000 – but it is thought to be useful even in the majority that aren’t sold into captivity. The reduced levels of cortisol, it is thought, makes the dolphins’ flesh more tender. The unsold specimens are corralled into Hatagiri Bay’s narrow, mountain-enclosed cove, an area restricted from public access by hillside tarps, chained pathways, fences trimmed with razor wire and – in case you missed the hints – signs warning, “Keep Out, Danger!” Despite the air of concern for public safety, the greater consideration might be aesthetic. Netted into the bay’s shallows in the morning light, the dolphins are surrounded by oikomi fishermen who fall on them with spears and long knives, turning the waters ruby red. It has been estimated that some 20,000 dolphins and porpoises meet their end in the cove every year.
In Taiji and neighbouring towns, whale meat has been eaten for centuries. Whalers once sent the choicest cuts via ship to Japan’s imperial rulers, but the modern reality is almost numbingly mundane. Dolphins and whales culled by the oikomi hunters end up portioned and shrink-wrapped in grocers’ coolers across the country. At around a quarter the price of beef, it is a cheap meat favoured by the poor. But eating it can come at a cost. Studies have found toxic methyl mercury in whale and dolphin meat in concentrations up to 87 times the government’s acceptable limits.
“To the best of my knowledge, no women have gone to Taiji alone. Villagers didn’t know how to react to that and I was able to move around easier,” says Gervais. “I had been given a map that marked a trail that would lead me to the edge of the cliff. It’s really spooky up there – aside from anything else, I could easily be pushed off a cliff and it would be treated as an accident.” Gervais escaped unscathed, though not unshaken by the experience of what she had seen. “I was counting how many fins there were, trying to make out what species of dolphin were in the cove.” She spotted bottle-nose dolphins and pilot whales, Risso’s dolphins and box whales.
“The fishermen are up there protecting that vantage point,” she explains of the incriminating view. “They don’t want people documenting what they’re doing,” Still she returned. “It seemed like every day they would have another barrier up, until they eventually put up barbed wire. That got entangled around my leg, and in places they had it strung at neck level. The morning of the slaughter, I wanted to get up there to do some filming because it’s really hard to see from the beach side, but I had a bad feeling and didn’t go to the cliffs. I went to the beach area instead and I saw about 10 fishermen waiting to get picked up. Even seeing that, knowing what was about to happen, was traumatizing. There were a handful of fishermen shadowing me, trying to provoke a response. I was just trying to restrain myself. And then I saw a pilot whale fight for its life and I felt so helpless. I can’t even explain the feeling. There’s nothing you can do.”
Except alert the world. Gervais forwarded a plaintive message to actor-activist Hayden Panettiere, who appears briefly in The Cove, describing what she had seen, and warning that the catch-and-release program was a PR ploy and that carnage was ongoing. Panettiere in turn relayed it via her blog. And Gervais has been in communication with other aid agencies since then; the Whaleman Foundation, which had staged surfers’ protests in Taiji before, offered her emotional support during her time in Taiji and has since invited her to California to go swimming with wild dolphins. Halting what seems to be a pointless sacrifice is something that Gervais connects with profoundly, both as an animal activist and as one who loves the ocean.
“It’s hard to put into words the feeling of being around dolphins,” she says, pensively. “They’re deep thinkers; they want to communicate with humans and make that effort. Plus they’re so playful, and I have that energy too when I’m surfing. Sometimes they’ll just show up and it’s so magical. They ride the waves with you and interact with you, trying to make that connection through play. It’s one of the best feelings.”
