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Japan looks to South Korea for help
in restarting commercial whaling
ULSAN, South Korea––Japanese whalers expect a home town edge
when the 57th meeting of the International Whaling Commission convenes
June 20-24 in Ulsan, South Korea.
The IWC meeting will start 10 days after the end of a 12-day series of
preliminary meetings on scientific issues.
“Ulsan is opening a $6-million whale museum this month on an otherwise
dilapidated wharf across from a shabby strip of whale restaurants,”
Los Angeles Times staff writer Barbara Demick reported on May 2. On an
adjacent lot, groundbreaking is expected soon on a site for a whale research
center, which is to include a processing facility for whale meat.”
“Dozens of speciality restaurants along the waterfront of South Korea’s
self-proclaimed whale capital” sell whale meat, Demick explained.
Retired whaler Son Nam Su, 69, told Demick that hunting and eating whales
is a cultural legacy of the Japanese occupation of Korea, 1910-1945, and
that at peak the South Korean whaling fleet killed about 1,000 whales
per year.
Annual South Korean consumption is now about 150 tons of whale meat, taken
from about 80 whales, Demick wrote.
But because South Korea joined the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling
in 1986, Demick added, “the only whales who can be legally consumed
are those accidentally killed in fishing nets. Before the whales are butchered,
maritime police inspect the carcasses to enure there is no sign of foul
play.”
At prices reportedly reaching $120,000 per whale, fishers have considerable
incentive to encourage “accidents.”
“In a petition drive led largely by old-timers in Ulsan, many of
them nostalgic for the city’s past,” Demick continued, “the
South Korean government is being asked to ease the IWC moratorium on commercial
whaling to allow the capture of 100 whales per year. Those in favor of
whaling argue that a whaling revival would boost the local economy and
burnish the image of an industrial city where the noxious fumes of petrochemical
plants drown out any whiff of sea air.”
Japan is expected to unilaterally announce in Ulsan that it will increase
from 440 to 800 or more the number of minke whales that it kills each
year for “scientific” purposes inside the unenforced boundaries
of the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary, surrounding Antarctica.
Japan is also expected to announce that it will kill humpback and fin
whales inside the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary. The World Conservation
Union includes both humpbacks and fin whales on its Red List of Threatened
Species. In addition, Japan may expand “scientific” whaling
in the northwestern Pacific, where in 2004 it killed 220 minkes, 50 Bryde’s
whales, 50 sei whales, and 10 sperm whales.
Agence France-Press reported on May 6 that Yoshimasa Hayashi, chair of
the Japan House of Councillors special committee on foreign affairs and
defense, delivered a personal warning to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs John
Turner that Japan will withdraw from the IWC if there is “no progress”
this year toward reopening commercial whaling.
The IWC put the commercial whaling moratorium in place in 1986. At the
time, all whales larger than minkes were officially considered endangered.
Since then, only the western grey whale is generally believed to have
recovered to pre-whaling abundance.
Hayashi told Agence France-Presse that he expects at least half of the
61 IWC members to back the Japanese position, including China, Russia,
and South Korea.
Hayashi did not mention Kiribati and Mali, the latest of many small nations
that Japan has encouraged to join the IWC by dangling foreign aid. Mali
is a landlocked nation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Opponents of whaling have countered this year by recruiting the Czech
Republic and Slovakia. The anti-whaling faction otherwise consists chiefly
of nations with big shares of the $273-million-a-year whalewatching industry,
including Australia, New Zealand, and Britain.
The U.S. has generally opposed the resumption of commercial whaling, but
not when military considerations have been involved. The U.S. delegation,
headed by then-Vice President Albert Gore, favored the Revised Management
Scheme in 1994 while Gore was also brokering the sale of $261 million
worth of surface-to-air missiles to Norway. A similar compromise is expected
this year, because the U.S. is relying on Japan, South Korea, and China
to help contain the threat from North Korean nuclear weapons.
“I think that the US position is continuing to change,” Hayashi
said.
“Pro-whaling countries may have a voting majority for the first time
since whaling was banned in 1986,” conceded Whalewatch, a coalition
of 140 animal welfare organizations from 55 nations coordinated by the
World Society for the Protection of Animals.
Lifting the whaling moratorium would require winning a 75% majority, but
with a simple majority Japan could try to abolish the supermajority requirement.
The Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary, which Japan has pushed to abolish,
was declared by the IWC in 1994. The declaration enabled conservationists
to claim a paper victory, after the U.S. pushed through the Revised Management
Scheme, which set up a framework for resuming commercial whaling.
Together with the older Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary and the Australian
Whale Sanctuary, declared by the government of Australia in 1999, the
Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary nominally puts most of the southern hemisphere
off limits to whaling, but no effective mechanism exists for bringing
violators to justice.
The Revised Management Scheme meanwhile could put Japan just one winning
ballot round away from breaking the commercial whaling moratorium––not
that Japan has ever strictly observed the moratorium, having signed on
late, and having begun “scientific” whaling in 1987. Selling
the carcasses of whales killed for “science” is now a $52 million-a-year
industry
The intensity of the Japanese effort to resume whaling is sustained less
by demand for whale meat than by concern that regulating whaling creates
a precedent for regulating fishing. The Japanese whaling fleet is owned
by subsidiaries of the biggest Japanese commercial fishing companies.
They are racing against time to reopen commercial whaling before the potential
market disappears.
The post-World War II generation grew up eating whale meat in school lunches,
but whale meat became too expensive to be a staple food as whale populations
dwindled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most Japanese who have grown up since
the whaling moratorium started in 1986 are not whale-eaters.
Trying to rebuild Japanese support for whaling, the whaling industry is
now subsidizing the reintroduction of whale meat to school lunches in
the Wakayama region, where the whaling industry is based. About 57,900
Wakayama children have been served whale meat, Wakayama education official
Tetsuji Sawada told Agence France-Presse.
Whaling
notes
The
Norwegian coastal whaling season opened on April 18 with a self-set quota
of 796 minke whales, the biggest yet. Norway resumed coastal commercial
whaling in 1993, in defiance of the IWC. Said Aftenposten, of Oslo, “Whaling
was for years a key part of the national heritage, especially in northern
Norway, but it is questionable whether there is a market for the whales.
Whale meat earlier was a staple in the Norwegian diet, but has lost much
popularity.”
A 16-foot walrus-skin whaling canoe capsized near St. Lawrence Island,
Alaska, on April 27, after the occupants participated in harpooning a
44-foot bowhead whale. Killed were Gambell mayor Jason Nowpakahok, 38,
his daughter Yolanda, 11, his nephew Leonard Nowpakahok, 11, and whaling
crew member James Uglowook, 20. Gambell is among 10 Alaskan villages that
hold aboriginal subsistence whaling quotas.
