Do the Japanese really love nature more than all other people ?

[Glenn]

Are you saying that a country that decided to drop half of its culture to adopt Western systems, sciences, and invented new kanji compound for them, a country that has imported so many linguistic terms from European languages, could not have changed the kanji for whale or just supress it and replace it by katakana or hiragana as has been done with other words. No, there was no will to do so because for the Japanese it isn't really a problem to associate whales with fish. After all, don't they all live in water ?

So what's your problem with this, then?:

3) 魚 doesn't always mean "fish," but also has the meaning of a creature that lives in water (according to the 新漢語林: 水中に住む動物の総称。)
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Kanji have a long history, so it's not always possible to say "I know X means Y on its own, so it must have that meaning everywhere."

I would associate this more with the creation of new words from old kanji (e.g. 写真). The Japanese are masters in word combinations that completely depart from the originally meaning (e.g.リモコン) and mixing Japanese with foreign words to form new terms (e.g. カラオケ, from "空" and "orchestra"). But this has nothing to do with biological classification. You are arguing about purely linguistic formations.

I agree that it's closer to that (in fact, identical), but kanji are still created with meaningful elements, so it's not entirely non-analogous.

I would argue that 魚 on the left of 京 to make 鯨 has nothing to do with biological classification. In fact, I think that's what I am arguing. Since 魚 (as a radical) has a broad meaning of an animal that lives in water, I don't see the problem with it.

What I should have done is left that out the first two points, as they merely complicated the issue. But then again, I think the point is clear that even if 魚 only meant "fish" at first, it came to have other meanings later, and by the time the Japanese were importing Western words and science, the meaning of "animal that lives in water" was probably firmly in place, so there was no need to change it.

You are good at confirming what I had just explained above with more detailed examples. Indeed, in Japanese, a "turtle" is a "sea tortoise", and the Muroidea (family of the mice, shews, voles, gerbils, rats, hamsters...) are just ネズミ, with an adjective differentiating them. The same is true for Cetacea, only roughly divided in クジラ (whale) and イルカ (dolphin), a bit like small children do in the West. I am suprised that English doesn't have a unique word for "sperm whale" (cachalot in French), so imagine my disappointment with Japanese language, despite Japan having such a special relationship with whaling. Japanese language also lacked differentiation between weasel, skunk, mink, ermine, polecat, all commonly refered to as いたち, although the English words is sometimes used for スカンク (skunk) or ミンク (mink). You have to admit that even when an English word has been imported, most Japanese (especially if they do not speak English well) do not use these loan words. Likewise, I rarely heard the Japanese making a point in differentiating a mouse from a rat.

So ネズミ should be translated as "rodent," then. It seems to have more of that meaning anyway. I don't know why it's glossed as "rat; mouse," but then again, I don't know why 夜叉 is glossed as "female devil" either.

Along the same lines, the Japanese gloss of ウミガメ is obviously intended to cover the meaning of "turtle" as "sea turtle" as opposed to "land turtle," which would be a tortoise. To be honest, it looks like the English words are vague in their meaning, as "turtle" can mean anything in Family Testudinidae, or it can mean only some of those belonging to Families Cheloniidae (seven species) and Dermochelyidae (the leatherback), whereas "tortoise" is considered a herbivorous turtle that lives on land. However, it seems that this case is much like the one of ネズミ, in that the gloss is wrong. カメ is the general term "turtle" (not the sea turtle) and everything else is a specific kind of カメ. It seems that "tortoise" would be more appropriately glossed as ゾウガメ.

Without going through all of the クジラ it looks again as though it's just a general name, and that more specific creatures that fall under that category are some kind of クジラ.

From what I have read, skunk aren't even native to Japan, so it's no wonder they'd import the word. ミンク doesn't refer to native Japanese mink, by the way, only American and European ones. The Japanese ones are イタチ.