While European whalers took the baleen and the blubber and discarded the whale meat, the Japanese utilized almost every part of the whale, wasting as little as possible.

As were many of the depictions of "products" in this series, this scene was likely copied from an earlier Tokugawa period work. (See the article Dai Nippon Bussan Zue (Products of Greater Japan) for more information.)  When this print was issued in 1877 near-shore whaling had given way to off-shore, or open sea, whaling.  By 1877 Japanese whaling was undergoing a transformation from traditional to modern practices forced upon them by declining near-shore whale populations. In traditional active whaling, whalers belonged to a specific whaling group (ōnaya) based out of a coastal village that had space on the beach for processing whales taken near shore (shore-based whaling). As inshore whale populations declined, larger open sea whaling ships were used to haul whales back to processing plants on shore and ownership of whaling operations passed to larger business groups, such as the massive Masutomi group, able to provide the bigger ships and on-shore facilities. By the 1920s factory ship whaling had begun in which harpooned whales taken on the open seas were towed to a centralized factory ship for processing.