“Don’t play with your food!”
I wonder if any Japanese mom ever said that to their child before they went swimming at the Dolphin Lair, a now abandoned dolphinarium that apparently allowed its guests to take a dip with the world’s most popular aquatic mammals.
Japan is constantly under fire for how some members of its society treat dolphins and whales – whether it’s hunting the cetaceans or keeping them captive. I actually doubt that the majority of Japanese support the practices of those few, most people are just indifferent and don’t care enough to demand change. Hardly anybody eats whale or dolphin on a regular basis, but when the international community demands changes, a lot of people feel threatened by possible foreign influence, leaving them stranded in some area that can be summed up like this: “I don’t care, but I’ll be damned if somebody else tells me to give up what some of my fellow countrymen consider tradition!” You know, like having an assault rifle at home to protect your 32 inch TV…
As for the “keeping dolphins captive” part, Japan doesn’t differ much from the rest of the world – except that theirs are probably smaller. Not the dolphins, the dolphinariums; which in general have a bad reputation everywhere, even the big ones, the ones everyone knows… and they survive financially, because people still go there – which means that enough people think that keeping dolphins (or other animals) captive is a good idea. If people would stop going to zoos and dolphinariums, the problem would solve itself, except for maybe some few private or state zoos.
The Dolphin Lair was a small dolphinarium along the coast of the Seto Inland Sea in central Japan. The regular entrance fee was 500 Yen for age 3 till elementary school (usually around age 12), 800 Yen for everyone older than that (currently 100 Yen are about 0.80 EUR or 0.85 USD). A 20 minute long “Petting Course” was 2.500 / 3.000 Yen, the 40 minute long “Swimming Course” cost 6.000 Yen for kids who were at least in third grade of elementary school and 8.000 Yen for everyone past elementary school. Dolphin Lair also offered a “Diving Course” for 11.000 Yen, though I am not sure if that involved the dolphins, too.
7 years after being closed in 2008, Dolphin Lair was a surreal sight. Located next to a small marina, the area was more roped-off than fenced-off, the pools mostly below ground, reaching a height of maybe 1.5 meters, to the right a café towering over everything. While the metal parts looked like abandoned decades ago, the wall paintjob was still in amazing condition – most buildings locked, the café probably in use during the summers. At first I had a really hard time connecting with the place, it just looked so… random. Thanks to the setting sun the light was gorgeous, but hardly anything caught my eyes. Exploring a tiny storage at least provided me with some items to take pictures of – swim fins, rubber boots, a stuffed dolphin; not to be confused with a taxidermy dolphin! Outside again I switched to my ultra-wide angle lens and all of a sudden the Dolphin Lair looked much more interesting to me – still not a place I would want to spend a whole afternoon, but enough to take a whole set of decent photos.
Sadly there is not much known about the history of the Dolphin Lair. According to a headstone on the premises a dolphin called Sakura died there on January 25th 2003 – and according to the Phinventory there were four more living there: Hikaru, Kuru, Mahina, and Sola. What happened to them after the dolphinarium closed? Nobody seems to know. But if you know Japan, then you know that the next restaurant is always just a short walk away…
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Abandoned Kansai 
Bad rep aside, some Japanese aquariums have actually done amazing things with captive maintenance of cetaceans. They’ve set lifespan records for several species, kept a few alive that no one else has managed to yet, and bred some species that even the U.S. hasn’t been able to breed. It’s far from universal and a majority of facilities still rely on dolphin drives, but the exceptions would probably surprise anyone from outside of the country, since the rest of the world mostly treats them as “that barbaric place where people still eat dolphins”.
Also, trainers at many facilities run blogs where they are very open about training techniques and the life histories of the animals, a transparency most of the world could probably stand to learn from. Outside of the slaughters – which, you’re right, most Japanese people don’t support – they view cetaceans as any other animal in a zoological collection, and approach their maintenance with a very practical mindset that strongly contrasts with the sentiment-driven “empty the tanks” sensationalist movement that’s currently sweeping the United States. It would be lovely to find some middle ground, a happy medium between greater awareness of animal welfare and a sensible, matter-of-fact approach to measuring that welfare.
Sorry for the rant. I find this subject interesting, having actually looked into Japanese dolphinaria and found a lot of unexpected points. (Oh, and any animal that dies in a dolphinarium is unlikely to end up in a restaurant. Japanese aren’t some heartless monster race – their trainers get just as attached to the animals as trainers in any other part of the world, mourn them when they die, and often erect memorials, like the one you mentioned above. Again, in many ways they are more open about such matters than the West.)