I used to marvel at the heroics of Greenpeace growing up in Vancouver, Canada, in the late 1970s and '80s. Greenpeace was going against large factory ships, embodying state terror that was slaughtering sentient, gentle giants.

I don't think that I am being too over the top by using the word heroics as they did things that I used to think where superhuman. Watching young bearded men my dad's age skip across the surface of the water in a Zodiac toward a factory ship or chaser was pretty heroic for a young kid. They were fighting the good fight, and fighting against something visible and destructive: state-sponsored ships, industrial death machines. It wasn't hard to feel sorry for the whales. They proved to be surprisingly photogenic.

It is worth thinking that the power of Greenpeace and the support that it was able to muster was its ability to make you take notice of the ways in which the Cold War wasn't going to destroy the planet in a flash of blinding light, radiation poisoning and years of nuclear winters. We didn't need to wait for the coming of the nuclear holocaust. State-sponsored terrorism of the oceans and atmosphere was killing us sooner that.

Greenpeace's perfect David and Goliath story couldn't have been done without the help of the whaling ships and the modern media technologies that supported their cause. Television was environmentalism's best friend. It helped to project the image of faceless industrialism on TV and bring journalists on board. Non-governmental access to International Whaling Commission meetings in 1978 eventually led to the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982.

Part of what made the story work is that Greenpeace and its allies were successful in making whales something that we needed to consume visually and not as a source of fatty oil or meat.

It was easy to paint the adversary as being monstrous, something that was ideologically or culturally different than us. Whaling became emblematic of difference. It was just one more thing to hate in our adversaries. In the '70s and '80s, the Japanese were not only killing our auto industry or the Soviets threatening us with communism, they were threatening to destroy our most prized environmental totem.

It is so easy for people to hate something that embodies a nation when that something is faceless.

I think that one of the things that we are missing is the opinions of the laborers on the opposing sides of the conflict.

I would like to know more how the people fighting commercial whaling feel. How do people who crew the whaling ships feel? I can't help but think that the people working on those ships might be uncomfortable with someone trying to ram their means of livelihood or shoot them with water cannons.

There are a number of studies by scientists working inside and outside of the IWC about the intensity of feeling that occurs when a whale's insides are ripped to shreds by the explosion of "bomb lances."

However, I have read nothing that reveals the intensity and complexity of the emotions that the Japanese crews feel when they kill, haul up and render a whale.

Why does this matter?

Well, it is more likely that you are going to be able to understand the feelings and motivations of others in conversation than through a yelling match over ships' speakers.

Don't we need to start a conversation at some point or is each side satisfied staying in the background of the "whale war" spectacle with little hope of an armistice in the foreseeable future?

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.