Through a combination of low cunning and bribery, the Japanese seem to have convinced a sufficient number of member countries of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that they should be allowed out with their harpoon guns once more. There are quite a few minke whale left in the Pacific Ocean — some 760,000 at the latest estimate — but, given a bit of time, the Japs should soon put that right.

There is no great commercial incentive for them to do it, whale meat being regarded as de trop by your modern Japanese gourmand. They have great, blubbery stockpiles of dead whale that they can’t shift. So far as I can gather, the only reason why the Japanese want to set sail with their harpoons is that they hate whales.

Tsutomu Takebe, the country’s agriculture minister, gave an insight into Japan’s peculiar cetaphobia. “You may not know,” he advised ignorant westerners, “but whales eat more than three to five times the amount of maritime resources that humans do. That comes to 300m to 450m tons of fish. On earth there are 800m people who are undernourished.”

There is more stuff like this on the Japanese whaling industry’s website. Whales are a bit thick, it suggests: “They betray little evidence of behavioural complexity beyond that of a herd of cows or deer.” But also devious. And there are loads of them, more than we could ever possibly want, and they breed like aquatic rabbits. Always at it, whales. Quite disgusting. Reading through the whalist diatribe one half expects warnings about a sinister world conspiracy of whales and Freemasons, a sort of The Protocols of Moby Dick.

However, nor is much of the opposition to the Japanese bloodlust ennobling. There is a worldwide petition doing the rounds which suggests that a mere boycott of Japanese goods might not be sufficiently punitive. “You f****** Japs better stop killin’ whales or we’ll nuke yur dumb asses again,” one signatory warns, giving the general flavour.

Indeed, an aversion to all slitty-eyed people, with their unconscionable diets of oven-roast puppy dogs, kitten satay and whale burgers, and their penchant for shame, pornography and violent acts of suicide, informs the debate at even some of the higher levels.

Meanwhile the western NGOs insist that whales are clever companionable creatures, able to do stuff like communicate with one another on an individual basis and complete the quick crossword in 10 minutes flat. The Japanese counter that it is only the Anglo-Saxon countries that get themselves worked up about whales, as if this were a racially acquired trait (which somehow was not passed on to the Norwegians and Icelanders).

There is no objective middle ground. The Japanese and the environmentalists have cooked the books on how many whales are left and what proportion of them it would be fair to put in a bap. The Japanese have quite brazenly subverted the member states of the IWC; by the same score, the IWC was itself subverted by the pro-whale nations during the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in a moratorium being imposed in 1986.

While whales enjoy the occasional fish supper, it is overfishing — mostly by western countries — that has seen a 90% reduction in the populations of large predator fish, such as cod, that you can still buy at the counter of your local supermarket. Save the Cod, as a campaign slogan, does not quite get the juices flowing.

Global warming is also responsible for a massive reduction in the whale populations, something one cannot blame entirely upon the Japanese. The arguments, practical, ethical and environmental, are complex and overwhelmingly influenced by culturally determined notions of what is acceptable and what is disgusting. Everyone differentiates their nation from awful foreigners by mocking what they eat: the frogs, the krauts, les rosbifs, the limeys, etc.

I wish the Japanese would stop whale hunting but I am not sure of my moral ground. I would not wish to get into an argument about the relative intellectual aspirations of chickens and whales; but at its crudest level one might at least suggest that up until the time of its death at the hands of some grinning man with a harpoon gun the whale had a decent life.

You could not say the same of the millions of half-blind, semi-bald, beakless chickens that we consume cheaply every year. Nor could you say it of the pigs shackled in their pens, the calves in their crates. I would not care to live the life of a farmed salmon, either. The post-1945 industrialisation of agriculture in western Europe — and, the Japanese might note, especially Anglo-Saxon western Europe — has caused enormous environmental damage, too.

Whales are indeed endangered: so, too, are the bittern, the corncrake, the marsh fritillary, the camberwell beauty and so on. I am not sure that comparing the relative IQs of these creatures, or their inherent magnificence, or the amount of blood shed live on the TV news when they die, quite allows us to bask in moral superiority. We will have more luck persuading the Japanese to stop behaving in a bestial manner when we stop doing so ourselves.

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