A whale of a battle: Japan vs. the conservationists

Whale sashimi is the most popular. But patrons of Kujiraya, Tokyo’s only speciality whale meat restaurant, have the choice of every sort of whale dish imaginable: whale bacon, whale heart, whale sukiyaki – you name it. And for them there’s the added spice of eating food that in most countries is banned, said Todd Crowell in Asia Times (Hong Kong). The 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling allows kills for scientific purposes only. But Japan exploits that loophole to keep up a limited supply of whale meat – some for the posh restaurants, but the bulk for school lunch programmes.

Why do the Japanese persist in this odd obsession? They seem not to care that it creates a “whale-sized blot” on their international reputation. It’s not as if whale meat is particularly traditional in Japan – it became popular after the Second World War when US general Douglas Macarthur, the occupation ruler, encouraged it as a source of protein. In fact, today the Japanese prefer beef. Yet the idea of eating whale still seems to exert an emotive hold. It’s a pernicious fad, said Pierre Breteau in Le Monde (Paris). Many of the great whale species were hunted practically to extinction before replacements were found for the oil used in lamps, soap and margarine. True, populations have started to recover, but it may take until the year 2100 for the numbers of blue whales and fin whales to get back to half those of 1900. Yet Japan carries on slaughtering these mammals – it killed nearly 400 protected minke whales in 2016 alone – despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice that its claim to be doing so for “scientific” reasons is bogus. And eager to return to full-blown commercial whaling, it tried to get the ban overturned at this month’s meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Brazil. Its effort was repulsed in a 41-27 vote.

Rightly so, said Phil Dwyer in The Globe and Mail (Toronto). Whales are vital to the health of marine systems: the nutrients they excrete help to feed the plankton other fish depend on. Besides, they’re of more value to us alive than dead: whale-watching in countries such as Canada, Argentina and Brazil contributes an estimated $2bn to the tourist industry. And the moratorium does its job. Between 1900 and 1965, some two million whales were slaughtered by industrial-scale whaling. Since 1986, the toll has been only 38,000, almost half by Japan, most of the rest by Norway and Iceland. But the conservationists’ victory may be short-lived, said The Japan Times (Tokyo). Japan – along with several African, Caribbean and Pacific nations – just wants to establish reasonable quotas for fishing certain species like the minke whale, whose population is stable. Japan is the biggest donor to the IWC: it may now decide to pull out of the 72-yearold organisation and set up a rival one dedicated to managing sustainable whaling.