An injured whale stranded in shallow water was saved around 8:30 AM on January 20th in a western Japanese city by local people.

According to NHK, the whale was about ten meters in length and a curator at the Tokushima Prefectural Museum said appeared to a sperm whale. It was stranded on the beach of Anan City in Tokushima prefecture.

As you can see in the two videos below, local residents and police officers joined efforts to continuously splash the whale with water and even push it back out to sea, but lacked the man power. Within hours a fishing boat was called in to successfully pull the whale back out to deeper waters with a rope. Students can be heard cheering as the whale, which has clear injuries to its head and other body parts, is set out to sea.