“Awesome” is a superlative that is quite merited when you want to describe a whale watching experience … if you’ve ever been on a trip to watch the whales, you’d know it’s simply an awesome memory to keep.
Humpback whale watching tours from Okinawa Tourist Service (OTS) which offers trips for ¥8,500 for adults and children over 12 years of age, and ¥6,500 for children ages 6 to 11 years old. Children five years old and younger are free. Whale watching tours are held daily. If you would like to make reservations, call OTS at 098-.... Parking at the Tomari Port costs ¥200 for the first hour and ¥100 every extra hour, so bring about ¥1,100 for parking. Also, the itinerary and schedule is subject to the weather, so call in advance and make sure your tour is still on-schedule. To get to Tomari Port, drive south on Highway 58 towards Naha City. Tomari Port will be on your left hand side beside the Tomarin building and Kariyushi Urban Resort. Several other local travel agencies also offer whale watching tours.
Dolphin-watching:
Dolphin-watching at Miyake Island. The island can be reached by overnight ferry from Hamamatsucho, Tokyo, departing nightly at 10:40 p.m. and arriving at around 5 a.m. One flight a day — subject to weather conditions — also services the island, leaving Tokyo's Haneda Airport at 11:45 a.m. and arriving at 12:30 p.m. Return flights leave Miyake Island at 1 p.m. An overnight dolphin-tour package through Dolphin Company TAG costs ¥35,000 per person, including meals, accommodation, a guide, a hot-spring visit, a snorkeling lesson and the dolphin swim itself. A dolphin dive and hot-spring visit alone cost around ¥16,500. For more details, call 04994-6-0996 or visit Dolphin Club Miyake Island. See also Diving with the dolphins in the Izu islands.
Whale-watching in Shikoku / Ogasawara Islands (Bonin Islands) - the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association helps to promote whale watching activities. You can watch for whales at land lookout points from February to April see this page for more. Accommodation info here and contact them at info@whaleroute.com.
Umitonchu-maru dolphin-watching company or at this page. Address: 1001301, mikurashima-mura, Tokyo Japan Email
Naia dolphin tours by http://www.dolphin.naia.jp/ or contact iruka@naia.jp
Amakusa dolpin watching center, Tsujijima, Kumamoto prefecture
Related information:
Japanese museum has ‘world’s oldest’ right whale fossil – USATODAY.com
Oldest right whale fossil in Japan? Discovery Channel news –
July 5, 2007 — Researchers at the Shinshushinmachi Fossil Museum in Nagano central Japan have fossilized skull bones and jaw of a right whale that are estimated to be between 5 million to 6 million years old, making them the oldest fossilized remains of the animal in the world, officials said. Right whale skeletons have often been found in Europe the Nagano fossils and their dating “raises the possibility that right whales might have originated in the North Pacific,” said Toshiyuki Kimura, curator of the Gunma Museum of Natural History.
EDUCATION IN JAPAN COMMUNITY Blog 
Australian scientists decode whale sounds By Tessa Dunlop
1 hour, 40 minutes ago
Australian scientists studying humpback whales sounds say they have begun to decode the whale’s mysterious communication system, identifying male pick-up lines and motherly warnings.
Wops, thwops, grumbles and squeaks are part of the extensive whale repertoire recorded by scientists from the University of Queensland working on the Humpback Whale Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC) project.
Recording whale sounds over a three-year period, scientists discovered at least 34 different types of whale calls, with data published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
“I was expecting to find maybe 10 different social vocalizations, but in actual fact found 34. It’s just such a wide, varied repertoire,” University of Queensland researcher Rebecca Dunlop told Reuters.
The researchers studied migrating east humpback whales, as they traveled up and down Australia’s east coast, and recorded 660 sounds from 61 different groups.
Researchers attached audio transmitters to buoys near the whales and monitored the whale interaction from the shore.
Many of the whale sounds could overlap in meaning, said Dunlop, but some had clear meanings.
A purr by males appeared to signify the male was trying his luck to mate a desirable female. High frequency cries and screams were associated with disagreements, when males jostled to escort females during migration, she said.
A wop sound was common when mothers were together with their young. “The wop was probably one of the most common sounds I heard, probably signifying a mum calf contact call,” said Dunlop.
Dunlop stopped short of defining the whale communication as a language, but said there were clear similarities with human interaction.
“Its quite fascinating that they’re obviously marine mammals, they’ve been separated from terrestrial mammals for a long, long, long time, but yet still seem to be following the same basic communication system,” she said.
Dunlop hopes further research on the subject will help reveal the effect of boats and man-induced sonar on migrating whales.
(Editing by Alex Richardson) http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071108/sc_nm/australia_whales_dc
Thursday November 8, 2007 – 11:54am (CST)
[…] established a reputation as the world’s greatest lookout for humpback spawning grounds(see my earlier post for details), off Kuroshiocho port on Shikoku Island are lesser known whale-watching grounds that can actually […]
Why is there no organized opposition within the Japanese dolphin and whale watching community to Taiji? A striped dolphin pod was exterminated there today.
because they taste good. Get over it we are all here to eat other animals. In your native NZ they slaughter sheep and cows whats the difference.. all animals.