COLUMN ONE : Friends for Whales in Japan : Japanese have been vilified for hunting the sea mammals. But attitudes are changing, and whales are now trendy. Marketers use their images to harpoon consumers.

Izumi Sato was an ordinary bank employee in a Tokyo suburb until whales, she says, changed her life.

She took a Hawaiian whale-watching tour while on vacation, and her heart was stolen by humpbacks diving majestically in the waves off Maui. Not satisfied, a year ago she visited Chichi Jima, the main island in Japan’s subtropical Ogasawara chain, in search of more whales. On her first sighting there, she was so moved that she wept.

Sato, 25, quit her job at the bank and moved to this remote island, 600 miles and a 28-hour boat ride south of Tokyo.

“My only regret is that I didn’t get into whale-watching sooner,” said Sato, who found work here as a car rental clerk. “I wasted so many years.”

The Japanese, long vilified abroad as heartless hunters of endangered sea mammals, are now tagging along with the global environmental boom. Partly out of sensitivity to their nation’s image overseas, partly out of a conditioned response to commercially motivated trend-setters, people appear to be changing their attitudes about whales.

They’ve discovered that whales can be cute. Advertisers are suddenly using whale and dolphin images to harpoon consumers. Television documentaries and photo exhibitions are “raising consciousness” about conservation. A whale-watching industry has been born, not only here in the Ogasawaras but also in other former whaling ports.

But at the same time, the old values die hard. Many people still regard whales as large, air-breathing fish. Some vehemently defend Japan’s right to defy an international moratorium and continue killing Antarctic minke whales in its disputed “scientific research whaling” program.

Even Sato’s passion for whales has a qualification. She still likes to eat them.

“Whale meat is delicious,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to see them hunted to extinction. I think there’s an appropriate level where whaling can continue and not threaten the stocks.”

A bizarre incident in early November underscored Japan’s new ambivalence about conserving whales and dolphins.

Nearly 600 Risso’s dolphins were beached, many reportedly driven ashore by fishermen with speedboats and clubs, at the town of Miiraku on Fukue Jima, an island off Nagasaki in southern Japan.

The dolphins were butchered and at least some of their meat was distributed to the local population, which has a long tradition of eating the animals. Fishermen in the area consider dolphins a nuisance because they eat commercially valuable yellowtail and squid.

Sensationalized reports of the Miiraku dolphin slaughter in the British tabloid press prompted the Foreign Ministry to issue knee-jerk, official denials that the dolphins had been intentionally forced ashore.

Government spokesman Taizo Watanabe told a group of incredulous foreign correspondents that the dolphins had beached themselves in a “mass suicide.” He later elaborated by saying that autopsies on four carcasses revealed parasites in the ears, which Watanabe suggested caused the dolphins to become disoriented and swim fatefully into the bay. Indeed, he added, environmentally correct fishermen tried to save them by driving them away, but to no avail. The dolphins were determined to die.

Numerous eyewitness reports carried in the Japanese press have since discredited the government’s version of events.

The real news in Miiraku, however, was not that subsistence fishing communities still kill and eat dolphins. Inexpensive, protein-rich dolphin meat was once a staple in some rural areas of the Japanese islands. Even now it can be found occasionally on the shelves of supermarkets, sometimes marked as bogus “white whale” meat. Nagasaki prefecture (state) offered a bounty for dead dolphins--at least until November.

What made the dolphin killing notable was that it highlighted the acute embarrassment many Japanese now feel about their global environmental image.

Instead of the strident and defensive approach favored by Tokyo’s delegates to the International Whaling Commission--which banned all commercial whaling in 1986 over the objections of the Japanese--the government now seems inclined toward environmentally sensitive damage control.

Japan’s track record on the environment is at best a spotty one. It has been a major perpetrator, along with South Korea and Taiwan, in “wall of death” drift net fishing; it is unrivaled in its avaricious consumption of tropical rain forest timber; the Miiraku dolphin deaths seem minor compared to the systematic killing of the endangered Dall’s porpoise by Japanese coastal fishermen.

But now part of the fear is that an adverse reaction to Japan’s alleged environmental sins could feed an increasingly critical and intolerant mood toward Japanese economic behavior, a mood already gathering force in the United States and Europe.

Many Japanese officials and opinion leaders view even the most benign foreign criticism as emotional, irrational and perhaps racially motivated--”Japan-bashing.” Fleet Street’s screaming headlines about dead dolphins may not have helped much to dispel such fears.

The truth is, Japan is not quite the same place it was in the late 1970s, when foreign environmentalists were first shocked by reports of fishermen on Iki Jima, also in Nagasaki prefecture, defiantly slaughtering thousands of dolphins.

These days, dolphins are in fashion, along with whales, ozone-friendly hair sprays and other icons of good environmentalism. Why? Because the profit motive may be succeeding where righteous indignation has failed in the past.

“Every company has to have some sort of link with something ecological, or it’s just not trendy,” said Mary Corbett, a Tokyo marketing consultant who is organizing a major exhibition of “dolphin art” for the Seibu Saison department store chain.

Retailing image-makers smelled something hot when Japanese tourists began conspicuously snatching up whale and dolphin art in Hawaii. Last autumn, one of Seibu’s rivals, the Tokyu Department Store, launched a promotional campaign at its big “Parco” outlet in Tokyo’s glittering Shibuya shopping district, featuring dramatic photographs of humpback whales and assorted whale paraphernalia--whale ashtrays, whale clothing and recordings of whale songs.

“Japanese love fads, and this could be just another fad,” said Manami Yamaguchi of the Ogasawara Marine Center, which conducts research on the migrating humpback whales that are steadily increasing in the waters off Chichi Jima. “But I believe some people are really getting serious.”

Ogasawara launched its whale-watching industry two years ago to help fill empty rooms at the island’s lodges during the off-season--which is almost the entire year outside the summer months. The whales show up mostly between February and April, and last year the number of tourists in that period--3,658--was already 75% higher than the level in 1987.

Many apparently were “office ladies,” young working women from the major cities who religiously follow trends in clothing and travel.

“The girls who visit Ogasawara as tourists have a lot of curiosity, and we’d like to use their sense of awe to get our message across,” said the Marine Center’s Yamaguchi. “We’d like them to see what wonderful creatures whales are, and then maybe stop eating them. The men are more stubborn, and harder to change.”

Whales have been a big deal on the Ogasawara Islands for as long as humans have lived here. Chichi Jima was first settled in the early 19th Century by American and European whalers. Whaling was a significant local industry before World War II, and ships belonging to whaling companies from the main islands used a base on nearby Haha Jima until the IWC’s ban took effect in 1987.

The remnants of Japan’s once mighty whaling fleet have been consolidated into a four-ship contingent that is now at sail in the Antarctic Ocean, conducting its fourth season of controversial research whaling. The fleet plans to capture 330 minke whales in a program that critics charge is no more than a callous cover for surreptitious commercial whaling.

Japan caught 1,941 minke whales in the 1986-87 season, and proponents of whaling contend that abundant stocks of minke continue to thrive, unlike the endangered species of humpback whales treasured in Ogasawara and Hawaii. Anti-whaling scientists and environmentalists dispute that claim.

Japanese whaling officials, meanwhile, say they must kill whales during research to substantiate their arguments with accurate data on age, sex, diet and mating patterns.

To help defray the cost of research, the “scientific” whale meat goes to market. Also available for consumption are frozen, pre-moratorium stockpiles of minke and contraband supplies from murky sources--presumably from illicit coastal whaling both inside and outside Japan.

Whale is a pricey delicacy at the Ganso Kujira-ya, or Pioneer Whale House, which serves whale sukiyaki and raw whale sashimi. The prosperous restaurant is just down the street from the Parco department store that drew crowds with an environmentalist whale promotion in September.

“Maybe someday the Japanese will change from whale eaters to whale watchers,” said Mitsuaki Iwago, the wildlife photographer whose portraits of breaching humpback whales were exhibited in stunning, back-lit blowups by Parco and whose recent book on whales is a best seller. “But Japanese also fail to appreciate that wild animals aren’t supposed to be cute. They’re trying to make whales into cute animals, and I think that’s very dangerous.”

Already, reports suggest commercial whale-watching operators in Ogasawara are coming ominously close to, and occasionally colliding with, their prey. A local rule requiring boats to keep a distance of 55 yards is only laxly observed. In contrast, a federal regulation in Hawaii requires boats to keep a 100-yard setback from humpbacks to avoid driving them from their breeding grounds off Maui, and authorities impose stiff fines on violators.

But Japan, too, may acquire environmental sophistication as time passes.

“I think whale-watching is here to stay,” said Akihito Koga, a former riot policeman who first arrived on Chichi Jima 21 years ago and returned to open the island’s first dive shop. “I don’t think this is a fad.”

It was Koga who came up with the idea of using the whales to draw tourists. He brought in a Canadian marine biologist, Jim Darling, to study Ogasawara’s humpbacks in 1987. The rest was easy.

“It’s a shock for Japanese to see the whales,” said Koga, who takes whale watchers out on his dive boat at $30 a head. “Times have changed. Hardly anybody eats whale meat anymore--most of us can’t even remember what it tastes like. But nobody’s going to forget the experience of seeing a whale dive right in front of them.”