Tourism, Resource Nationalism, and the Making of South Korea’s “Whale City”

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ABSTRACT Repertoires of state-making and regime maintenance include the capture, control, and use of animals for activities ranging from landmine detection by rats to military incursions and border patrols on horseback. However, marine animals have been less amenable to efforts to fix or uphold states due to their disregard for territorial boundaries, thus prompting states to adopt different approaches. Through what means, then, do states incorporate marine animals into their resource and territorial claims? This research takes up this question through an examination of how the tourism industry in Ulsan, South Korea narrates its history of whaling and the geopolitical effects of this historiography. Ulsan is a former whaling hub and is now a centre of domestic whaling tourism. Building on resource nationalism and tourism geopolitics literature, we analyse the politics of Ulsan’s whale tourism through a combination of in-depth interviews, archival document analysis, and site observation. Our analysis reveals three interlinked sets of politics concerning the Bangudae Petroglyphs, Korean autonomy, and whales themselves. Korean state and non-state actors marshal prehistoric and historical whaling records in Ulsan to underscore cultural linkages and historical continuity between past and present-day Korean whaling practices. However, these nationalistic and territorialised descriptions of Korea’s relations with whales omit the highly consequential history of Japanese colonial whaling and its ongoing vestiges in postcolonial Korea. We find that the Korean government selectively mobilises ‘facts’ about the Bangudae Petroglyphs and Korean gray whales to support their whale resource claims within the International Whaling Commission. Moreover, whale tourism plays a crucial role in materially and discursively refining human-whale relations to bolster the state and city’s geopolitical positioning of whale resources and marine territory within the global whale governance landscape.