Japan threatened to resume commercial whaling yesterday after suffering defeat once again in a crucial vote in the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The threat came after antiwhaling nations won a vote supporting the continuation of the 21-year-old ban on commercial whaling.

The Japanese were also outraged at the rejection of a proposal to allow small-scale coastal whaling, despite similar concessions being granted to indigenous people in Russia and the United States.

“There is a real possibility that we will review at a fundamental level our role in the IWC and this would include withdrawing, setting up a new organisation,” said Akira Nakamae, head of the Japanese delegation, at the end of the annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. “The IWC lost the last chance to reclaim the role of a resource-management organisation. We are not able to give them any more concessions.”

Japan has threatened to abandon the commission after similar setbacks at previous meetings, but they seem more than usually embittered this year. At last year’s meeting, in the Caribbean nation of St Kitts, the pro-whaling faction gained a small minority and won a symbolic vote declaring that the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling no longer necessary. But a three-quarters majority is required to overturn the ban, and this year the antiwhaling nations seized back the initiative with the same kind of questionable tactics for which they formerly criticised Japan.

For years, environmentalists have accused the Japanese of recruiting to the IWC countries with no historical or economic interests in whaling and, in some cases, buying their votes with generous aid to their fishing industries. This year Laos, the small SouthEast Asian nation, joined and voted with Japan – despite having no coastline, let alone a whaling industry.

After last year’s defeat, the antiwhaling lobby also mounted a recruitment drive. After a personal appeal by Tony Blair and a glossy brochure issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, five new antiwhaling members were enrolled – Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Greece and Slovenia.

If Japan carried out its threat and set up a rival organisation to the IWC, it could probably take with it about 30 of the commission’s 77 members, effectively destroying its claim to include all currents of opinion on the whaling controversy. It remains to be seen whether Japan is prepared to take such a dramatic and irrevocable step, which would harm its relations with otherwise friendly governments.

One of the mysteries of the whaling controversy is why Japan expends such energy, and risks jeopardising international goodwill, over an issue about which its own people care very little. Whale meat has not been eaten widely in Japan for a generation and the country has accumulated a “blubber mountain” in cold storage.

Particularly galling for Japan was its failure to push through a proposal to allow four coastal communities to hunt minke whales from small boats within ten nautical miles of northern Japan’s Pacific coast. Native Americans and Russian aboriginals are allowed to carry out such small-scale hunts because it is part of their traditional culture.

Japan claims that the once endangered minke whale is flourishing, with 25,000 of the mammals in the North Pacific. A Japanese fisheries official once famously referred to minkes as “the cockroaches of the sea” because of the speed with which they breed and travel through the water.

This week Japan also announced that it may unilaterally hunt up to 50 humpback whales during its annual “scientific research” cull, after this proposal was also rejected by a majority in the IWC.

Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Environment Minister, cautioned that this would jeopardise his country’s good relations with Japan. “The inclusion of the humpbacks in the scientific whaling programme will have a very adverse impact on perceptions of Japan and Japan’s standing in Australia,” he said.

“If Japan is sincere about seeking to engage constructively and openly with other countries about a revised or a renewed or a reconstructed whaling convention, then the single most effective gesture of goodwill that it could give would be to drop those humpbacks from their scientific programme.”

— 1,243 permitted catch last year for Japanese whalers

Source: International Whaling Commission

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