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Story of the week Episode 1
Do you REALLY know about
WHALES!?
The Whale-Love wagon adventure kicks off as Yuki and Ivan, our Whale-Love explorers, hit the streets of Tokyo to find out what people know about whales.<Facts of whales 1>
Whale watching and whale dish, images of whales
What image comes up to your mind when you hear the word “whale”? According to the Asahi Newspaper survey in 2002, the image most Japanese people have for the word was “whale dish”, followed by “whale watching”. However, the survey conducted by the Nihon Research Center (NRC) in 2006, the results were reversed; the first “whale watching” and second “whale dish”. With increasing popularity of whale watching in recent years, people are considering the whales as something to watch, not to eat.
Whale = Big fish???
The Chinese character of the whale “鯨(kujira)” literally means a big fish, implicating that whales have been considered as a big fish since ancient times. Another survey by NRC reported an amazing fact that even now, as many as 42% of Japanese people still believe whales are fish.
In fact, whales are descendants of land-living mammals, entering the water roughly 60 million years ago. There are about 80 species of the whales, including a small type of whales, generally called dolphins. The whale families range from the Blue Whale (Balaenoptera Musculus), with up to 30 meters (98 feet) in length and 150 metric tons (equivalent to 2,000 female humans) or more in weight, to 1.5-meter-long 50-kg dolphins. Females give birth to a single calf and breast-feed the young. Whales are considered to be highly social animals.
<Other Stories>
The Whale-Love wagon adventure kicks off as Yuki and Ivan, our Whale-Love explorers, hit the streets of Tokyo to find out what people know about whales.<Facts of whales 1>
Whale watching and whale dish, images of whales
What image comes up to your mind when you hear the word “whale”? According to the Asahi Newspaper survey in 2002, the image most Japanese people have for the word was “whale dish”, followed by “whale watching”. However, the survey conducted by the Nihon Research Center (NRC) in 2006, the results were reversed; the first “whale watching” and second “whale dish”. With increasing popularity of whale watching in recent years, people are considering the whales as something to watch, not to eat.
(Researched by
Nippon Research Center, Ltd., June 2006
)
Whale = Big fish???
The Chinese character of the whale “鯨(kujira)” literally means a big fish, implicating that whales have been considered as a big fish since ancient times. Another survey by NRC reported an amazing fact that even now, as many as 42% of Japanese people still believe whales are fish.
In fact, whales are descendants of land-living mammals, entering the water roughly 60 million years ago. There are about 80 species of the whales, including a small type of whales, generally called dolphins. The whale families range from the Blue Whale (Balaenoptera Musculus), with up to 30 meters (98 feet) in length and 150 metric tons (equivalent to 2,000 female humans) or more in weight, to 1.5-meter-long 50-kg dolphins. Females give birth to a single calf and breast-feed the young. Whales are considered to be highly social animals.
<Other Stories>
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