Using the Corpus "COCA" For Insights about Whaling

I searched on COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English—https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) for the occurrences, —within 4 spots of each other—of when the word “Japanese" collocates with “whaling.” In total 41 such collocations were found. Thirty in academic contexts, five in news, and three in spoken English, while only one was found in fiction. This was a fairly low occurrence rate in a corpus comprised of more than half a billion words.

It was discovered that all of the ones from academic contexts were found in either of two articles that were published in the years 2000 and 2002. Some further research revealed that the articles came from two issues of the same academic journal, one that is based in America but focuses on Asian affairs. These are the citations of the articles:

BAILEY, J; MCKAY, B. Are Japanese Attitudes Toward Whaling America-Bashing? A Response to Tanno and Hamazaki. Asian Affairs: An American Review. 29, 3, 148, Sept. 2002. ISSN: 00927678.

TANNO, D; HAMAZAKI, T. Is American Opposition to Whaling Anti-Japanese?. Asian Affairs: An American Review. 27, 2, 81, June 2000. ISSN: 00927678.

The article by the Japanese co-authors contends that American ethnocentrism and an anti-Japanese bias led to negative  feelings by Americans toward Japanese whaling operations. They also claim that Japan was singled out for its whaling activities even though Iceland and Norway also conducted their own annual whaling expeditions. Tanno and Hamazaki charge that environmental groups such as Greenpeace tend to focus their protests on Japan instead of the Western countries that also engage in whaling, which they believe amounts to Japan bashing.

In response to the Tanno and Hamazaki article, Bailey and McKay convincingly counter that Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and other environmental NGOs have extensively protested against the whaling of Western countries such as Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. They assert that Japan was not exclusively targeted. In fact, Sea Shepherd sunk the Norwegian whaling vessel Willassen Senior in 2007, something it never did to a Japanese whaling vessel. Not to justify their actions, but this is evidence that the pressure put on Japan’s whaling was not evidence of any sort of racism or “Japan bashing.”

The news stories that were found in COCA ranging from 2010 to 2014, concerned the threatened legal measures taken by Australia against Japan to halt Japan’s Antarctic whaling program, which Japan was claiming to be necessary for scientific purposes. When Japan did not respond to the pressure put on it by Australia, the Australian government sued Japan in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. In 2014, a decision was made against Japan in the court. It was found that “Japan’s program failed to justify the large number of minke whales it takes under its [then] current Antarctic program.”

Because the academic articles that the COCA samples came from fell on both sides of the whaling issue, they were balanced in their stances. Only a few of them showed some bias:

* Sympathetic toward the Japanese (in the face of aggression tactics by the conservation group Sea Shepherd (3)

* Expresses opinion that environmental NPOs are more likely to target Japanese whaling operations than Norwegian ones. (2)

* Siding with environmentalists or with countries opposing whaling (pointing out that the Japanese whaling industry is heavily subsidized and “scientific whaling” a guise for commercial whaling) (3)