According to Greenpeace, Japan's whale hunting is pointless and serves only to “maintain a body within the Ministry of Fisheries”.
We have never put much stock in the euphemism of "scientific research" — the only justification that, since 1986, the year of the moratorium issued by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), has allowed Japan to kill whales. It is also well known that only a very small proportion of the Japanese population still eats whale meat. Why, then, does Japan continue to hunt these enormous marine mammals, in defiance of international law and global public opinion?
According to Alessandro Giannì, campaigns director of Greenpeace Italy, the motivation behind the annual killing of hundreds of cetaceans is, as is so often the case, prosaic and banal. The slaughter takes place solely to "maintain former officials and politicians from the Ministry of Fisheries, parked at the cetacean research institute," Giannì stated. "A small minority of people, protected by the enormously powerful lobby that revolves around the Ministry of Fisheries." Every year the research institute, which is supposed to be based on the carcasses of 333 minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) killed in the Antarctic Ocean to study the Antarctic ecosystem (even though experts argue that most of the information obtained in this way is also available simply by examining the animals' faeces), receives around ten million dollars in public funds.
Whale hunting expeditions were once funded by the sale of cetacean meat. Today, however, it seems that the Japanese no longer have any intention of continuing to eat whales, and even the pretext of tradition is falling away. Young people do not want to eat it, and whale meat consumption is confined to small communities or a few nostalgic elderly people for whom the food is a reminder of the protein shortages of the post-war years.
It is estimated that around three-quarters of the whale meat caught remains unsold. "So tonnes of whale meat sit in cold storage and Japanese citizens continue to pay out of their own pockets for this great swindle," Giannì declared. "Only around 5 per cent of the Japanese population regularly eats whale meat." For a period, whale meat was used by a company to produce a line of luxury dog food, until, following protests from environmentalists, it decided to withdraw the product from the market.
Despite all of this, whale hunting continues, making the killing of these threatened giants even more (if that were possible) appalling and senseless. Japanese whaling vessels docked at the end of March in the port of Shimonoseki, carrying on board the lifeless bodies of 333 minke whales, the result of an 83-day hunt. Japan's hunting plan is far from over: in 2015, after just one year's pause, the country put forward a plan to kill around four thousand minke whales over twelve years. The end of the war between Japan and the whales — and virtually the rest of the world — is still a long way off.