Japan whaling fleet sets off on Antarctic hunt
Date: 11-Nov-02
Country: JAPAN
Japan abandoned commercial whaling in 1986 in line with an international moratorium, but has provoked world outrage for what it calls its research whaling programme, begun a year later.
Whale is a pricey gourmet delicacy in Japan, and meat from the research whaling ends up on store shelves and restaurant tables.
The five ships of the fleet left the port of Shimonoseki, some 825 km (490 miles) southwest of Tokyo, in the afternoon.
The hunt, scheduled to last until next April, aims to take some 400 minke whales, plus or minus 10 percent. The same hunt last year caught 440 whales.
"Of course, catching whales is not the only goal of our surveys," a Fisheries Agency official said. "We need to see how many minke whales there are, along with how large the populations of other species are."
Japan, along with fellow whaler Norway, believes that while endangered species should be protected, others - such as the minkes - are in no danger of dying out and that hunting within strict limits should be permitted.
In line with its argument that whales are partly responsible for Japan's slumping fish landings, now half of what they were 20 years ago, Tokyo says it needs to carry out the research whaling in order to find out what whales eat.
"There are some surveys in which catching the whales is unavoidable, but there are also many others we do just by observation, taking photographs, or taking tissue samples," the fisheries official said.
Shimonoseki was the site of May's acrimonious meeting of the International Whaling Commission, when Japan and its allies tried unsuccessfully to overturn the commercial whaling moratorium.
