JAPAN is to let its whaling fleet catch many more whales after suffering a setback in votes at this weekend’s meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

The defeats came as a surprise to Tokyo after a well-funded campaign to overturn the commission’s ban on commercial whaling.

Japan is now likely to pursue the expansion of its “scientific” whaling programme. It has already announced that it will increase the number of whales it catches within the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary to 935 minke whales plus 10 fin whales in the current year. Tokyo does not recognise the sanctuary.

Over the next two years Japan plans to kill similar numbers of minkes plus 40 more fin whales and 50 humpbacks. Fin and humpbacks are classified as endangered by the commission.

Japanese inshore fishermen also kill thousands of dolphins and porpoises — including an estimated 10,000 Dalls dolphins alone — each year.

This year the country’s Antarctic fleet has been testing a high-tech fragmentation harpoon equipped with an enlarged high-explosive charge.

The weapon hurls shards of metal through a whale’s body to sever major nerves and blood vessels to accelerate death. According to the commission, it can nevertheless take up to 14 minutes for the animal to die.

Whales that do not die immediately are supposed to be shot in the head with large-calibre rifles. However, according to Greenpeace campaigners who have witnessed such incidents, some are dragged backwards until they drown.

The emotive nature of the dispute has made Japan’s diplomatic campaign both contentious and difficult. It is backed by a powerful domestic lobby that portrays hunting and eating the giant creatures as part of Japan’s cultural heritage — a claim sharply disputed at home and abroad.

Japanese negotiators had expected to win votes that would have excluded smaller species from protection and instituted secret voting at the commission, a move that could have favoured the commercial whaling lobby.

Hideki Moronuki, head of the whaling division within Japan’s agriculture, forestry and fisheries ministry, said he was “very unhappy” when the votes were lost. But Tokyo was confident that its position on whaling would eventually be accepted.

“These votes were only the first day of the meeting and there are more issues to come,” he said. “I don’t think it has helped that the meeting is being held in a very inconvenient place.”

The commission is meeting in the Caribbean state of St Kitts and Nevis. Joji Morishita, Japan’s chief negotiator, warned before the talks began that his country might ultimately leave the group if the ban on commercial whaling was not lifted.

The commission was “very polarised”, he said, and “not working as a resource management organisation. If we cannot normalise it then I don’t think this organisation has a reason to exist”.

However, officials in Tokyo were backing away from that position yesterday.

The Japanese hoped for support from small countries in the Pacific and Caribbean, some with no apparent interest in whaling but considerable interest in development aid in yen.

In hard lobbying before the meeting, Japan increased aid to commission newcomers Belize and Mali, as well as offering more than $1m in assistance to the impoverished Pacific nation of Tuvalu. St Lucia, St Vincent, Antigua, Dominica, Grenada and St Kitts have also received an estimated $100m in aid from Japan since 1998. All have backed Tokyo’s position.

The carrot and stick approach has not been entirely effective. Ben Bradshaw, the British fisheries minister, described how two of Japan’s allies, Guatemala and Senegal, had failed to turn up for the first vote. Two others, Gambia and Togo, were not allowed to vote until they had paid their annual subscriptions to the commission.

Belize, a recipient of Japanese largesse, also failed to vote in its favour. “I am surprised at the way Belize voted because they get a lot of aid from Japan,” said Moronuki, the Japanese whaling official. “But I guess this goes to prove that Japan is not buying votes.”

The irony is that the Japanese are losing their taste for whale meat — if they ever really had it. Consumption of whales became widespread only in times of hunger and shortage after the second world war.

Even in a land where culinary taste extends to raw, poisonous blowfish and horse carpaccio, whale meat is a hard sell.

The government has promoted a cookbook by Mutsuko Onishi, who owns a whale restaurant in Osaka. It includes recipes such as hari hari nabe, which uses different parts of the whale including skin, muscle, tongue and blubber.

However, stockpiles of frozen whale meat are so large that local governments have reintroduced whale dishes on school menus and in hospitals. Some has even been offered to dog meat companies.

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