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Japan to defy world opinion, set to begin whaling in Antarctic (Includes interview)

The decision comes a mere few days after the negotiator, Joji Morishita attended a scientific committee meeting held earlier in June by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that didn’t reach a consensus regarding Japan’s whaling practices and requested further analyses, Vice News reports.

Joji Morishita  director-general of National Research Institute of Far Seas Fisheries  Fisheries Res...

Joji Morishita, director-general of National Research Institute of Far Seas Fisheries, Fisheries Research Agency and Japanese commissioner to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) speaks to the media in Tokyo on June 22, 2015
Toshifumi Kitamura, AFP

The Guardian reports that it was expected that the IWC would judge whether Japan’s “Newrep-A proposal,” which would kill 3,996 minke whales over a 12-year period, had adequately addressed the issues that led to earlier proposals being ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

However, the commission’s 2015 Scientific Committee report found the new proposal lacking, saying that it “contained insufficient information” for its panel of experts to complete a full review and specified what work the country would need to undertake.

“This report found that the NEWREP-A proposal did not include enough information for them to determine whether lethal sampling (killing whales for research purposes) was necessary to meet the objectives of the programme,” said Kate Wilson, with the International Whaling Commission. “In response to this report, Japan had submitted additional information and both the report and the additional information were discussed at the Scientific Committee.”

“The Committee agreed that continuing analyses was still required, but could not agree on whether the additional information already supplied was sufficient for the programme to go ahead,” Wilson told Digital Journal.

Even in the face of international disapproval, Japan has remained stubborn, hunting whales in the Southern Ocean by exploiting an exemption in the global whaling moratorium which allows for lethal research. And Japan’s government makes it widely known that meat from the whales killed for “scientific research,” is processed for food, and maintains that the whale population is large enough to allow sustainable whaling.

So why does Japan keep up this game?

“They do this in a two decade effort to keep up the charade of conducting their whaling for legitimate scientific purposes which is in fact allowed under Article 8 of The International Convention For The Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the convention that undergirds the International Whaling Commission,” Patrick Ramage, Whale Program Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) told Digital Journal.

“In truth however, this whaling has now been unmasked by the International Court of Justice decision,” he continued.

“It is not being conducted for scientific purposes. It is commercial whaling by another name.”

Japan's whaling bases

Japan's whaling bases
, AFP/File

Morishita, however, dismissed the recommendations of the IWC’s scientific committee, calling the IWC “a divided organization,” Vice News reports.

“Because of this division, even the scientific committee is always having difficulty in coming up with some kind of a conclusion,” Morishita told AFP, per Vice News.

He maintains that the international debate on whaling has moved from science to politics, and said he finds the logic that decries killing one animal over another “strange.”

“If you keep on like this, I worry that a country which has international political power could impose its standards and ethics on others,” he said, saying this was “environmental imperialism.”

Ramage dismisses Morishita’s allegations, however, saying that Japan is grasping at whatever it can so that it can keep killing whales.

“The Japanese have insisted on the scientific legitimacy of the whaling practice for decades, and now that it is unmasked, it is a desperate search for any argument to justify the killing of these highly migratory marine mammals, he said, per Vice News.

Killing whales for “scientific research” is bad science, he notes.

“The best whale science in the world today comes from studying live whales in their ocean habitat, not from harpooning them, chopping them up and looking at their bits,” he says, noting that the scathing critique of last year’s ICJ was echoed among scientific circles in April when the independent panel of scientific experts convened by the IWC issued its verdict on Japan’s latest whaling proposal.

The current proposal, he noted, doesn’t demonstrate the need for lethal sampling.

On an international level, commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but countries are allowed to issue special permits if the whaling is done for scientific purposes, and this is the aforementioned exemption that Japan has been exploiting to undertake whaling activities, per Vice News. Fortunately, in 2010 and 2012, the Australian and New Zealand governments filed cases against Japan in the ICJ, alleging that Japan’s whaling program was in violation of the ban.

It remains to be seen as to whether the ICJ will step in once again, but a member country would have to bring a case against Japan’s NEWREP-A for the court to do so.

“The ICJ ruling was not about the principle of special permit (scientific) whaling,” Wilson said. “It was a specific case brought against the JARPA whaling program in the Southern Ocean. “This program was stopped by Japan in response to the ICJ ruling.

“A new case would have to be brought against NEWREP-A,” she said.

The IWC can wield considerable clout, but doesn’t have the authority to stop countries from hunting whales, Vice News reports.

Wilson puts it like this:

“Special permit (the formal name for scientific whaling) is regulated nationally, not internationally. The IWC has a clear role (defined in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling) to providing scientific scrutiny of both new proposals and ongoing special permit research programmes, but it does not have a regulatory role,” she said. “It is the responsibility of the Government of Japan to decide whether or not to issue special permits.”

The IWC began in 1946 as a “whaler’s club,” and it lacks enforcement powers and the capacity that comes along with that, Ramage told Digital Journal.

“There is not a strong disincentive against defying IWC resolutions,” he said. “Still, despite repeated statements that they intend to go ahead, it remains to be seen what senior decision makers in Tokyo will do this coming whaling season.”

IFAW works in tandem with conservation-minded governments that participate in the IWC and its scientific and conservation committees,” he said. The organization also works to highlight developments to key audiences — including government officials, media, key opinion leaders, and the global whale conservation community in an effort to encourage shifting attitudes from killing whales to whale watching. The emphasis is also towards “21st century marine science studying living whales in their ocean environment rather than outmoded and needless lethal research whaling,” he added.

Ramage notes that since there has been a series of international rejections of Japan’s “scientific whaling” practices, it may be in the country’s best interest to conduct a second season of non-lethal research whaling “and submit its proposal to the full IWC in 2016 as requested in the IWC resolution passed last year in Portoroz, Slovenia.”

Should Japan resume hunting minke whales in the Antarctic without gaining the approval of the global body charged with the conservation of these huge mammals, it will most likely earn the scorn of the international community, France24 reports.

Japan maintains that the world’s whale population is sizable enough to accommodate a return to sustainable whaling, especially in regard to minke stocks. Needless to say, this puts the country at odds with activists and anti-whaling nations.

The ICJ said Tokyo’s proposal needed to “improve both biological and ecological data on Antarctic minke whales” and “investigate the structure and dynamics of the Antarctic marine ecosystems.”

Japan counters this by saying the knowledge gained by killing the whales would help the IWC estimate what levels are sustainable for hunting and would also lead to better understanding of the Antarctic marine ecosystem, France24 reports.

Perhaps the most perplexing issue is why Japan wants to even keep supporting its whaling industry, an industry that hasn’t paid it’s own way for decades, Ramage notes.

Information compiled by Ramage and Naoko Funahashi, IFAW representative for Japan showed that Japan’s whaling industry is heavily subsidized through taxpayer money that’s funneled through the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR).

Taxpayer subsidies averaged around ¥ 782 million yen (U.S. $9.78 million) each year. Even with these subsidies, the ICR continues to operate at a loss.

This chart shows the cost
and Income from
By-Products of
Scientific Whaling
by Institute of
Cetacean...

This chart shows the cost
and Income from
By-Products of
Scientific Whaling
by Institute of
Cetacean Research
IFAW

The conclusion? Whaling isn’t commercially viable, the report said.

Japan’s yen for whale meat has been dropping precipitously over the last two decades, as these articles in Digital Journal and Global Post point out.

This chart shows that Japan s appetite for whale meat is definitely on the decline.

This chart shows that Japan’s appetite for whale meat is definitely on the decline.
IFAW

This means that thousands of tons of whale meat have been left unsold, and the government can never hope to recoup its investment, Ramage told Global Post.

“Whaling is an economic loser in the 21st century,” he said. “We have been saying for years that whaling has no economic future, but here it is in black and white in this report.”

There are other gaping economic wounds caused by this as well. In the past 25 years, whaling subsidies from the Ministry of Agriculture have cost Japanese taxpayers more than ¥30 billion (in U.S. dollars that’s nearly $400 million). Not only that, but funds to the tune of ¥ 2.28 billion (U.S. $28.55 million) were diverted from tsunami relief to support “research whaling, stabilization promotion, and countermeasure expenses” for the ICR, the report mentions.

Japan’s government has also backed a huge loan with guarantees to refit the whaling fleet’s main factory ship and intends to maintain the fleet for at least another decade.

This comes at a time when demand for whale meat is really bottoming out, Ramage wrote.

When polling was conducted by a Japanese public research company on behalf of IFAW, it showed that consumption of whale meat had slowed to a mere trickle of what it once was — falling to an insubstantial one percent of what its peak was in the 1960s. At the time when the Digital Journal article was written, stockpiles of unsold meat had increased to a staggering 5,000 metric tons, about four times greater than they were 15 years ago.

Whale watching has become a profitable two billion dollar industry worldwide, and Ramage would like to see Japan turn to this and away from its killing ways. Scores of coastal communities from Hokkaido to Okinawa are doing this and reaping the economic benefits by doing so.

“It has the potential to increase tourism to Japan and assist Prime Minister Abe to achieve his goal 20 million foreign visitors annually by the time Tokyo hosts the 2020 Summer Olympic Games,” Ramage wrote. “Animals, people, and the economy all do better when whales are seen and not hurt.”

Indeed, if Japan decides to trade its harpoons for binoculars, the whales will proliferate, and there will be less consternation in the international community.

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