TOKYO  For years, dolphin hunts off the seaside town of Taiji, which turn coastal waters red with blood each winter, have drawn the ire of Western activists. But few among the Japanese public seemed to care, or even know, about the slaughter.

That could change with the first public screenings here of “The Cove,” an American documentary that used hidden cameras to film Taiji’s annual dolphin hunts. On Wednesday, Japanese moviegoers got their first glimpse of it at the Tokyo International Film Festival, held here this week.

Taiji is not the only community that hunts dolphins, thousands of which are killed across the world either by intent or by becoming ensnared in fishermen’s nets. But Taiji’s fishermen are notorious drive hunters, banging on metal poles to herd panicked dolphins into a cove, then spearing them to death in what protesters describe as a gory bloodbath.

Image Fishermen in Taiji, in western Japan, bang on metal poles to herd panicked dolphins into a cove to then spear them to death. Credit... Oceanic Preservation Society

Japan killed about 13,000 dolphins in coastal waters in 2007, according to the fisheries agency, of which about 1,750 were captured in Taiji. Japan also hunts whales by using a loophole in the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling that allows whales to be killed for research, though the catch from its research fleet ends up in Japanese supermarkets.