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Japan Announces Withdrawal From International Whaling Commission, To Resume Commercial Whaling (straitstimes.com)
Japan is withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and will resume commercial whaling next year, a government spokesman said on Wednesday, in a move expected to spark international criticism. From a report: "We have decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission in order to resume commercial whaling in July next year," top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters. "Commercial whaling to be resumed from July next year will be limited to Japan's territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. We will not hunt in the Antarctic waters or in the southern hemisphere," Mr Suga added.
The announcement had been widely expected and comes after Japan failed in a bid earlier this year to convince the IWC to allow it to resume commercial whaling. Tokyo has repeatedly threatened to pull out of the body and has been regularly criticised for catching hundreds of whales a year for "scientific research" despite being a signatory to a moratorium on hunting the animals. Mr Suga said Japan would officially inform the IWC of its decision by the end of the year, which will mean the withdrawal comes into effect by June 30. Leaving the IWC means Japanese whalers will be able to resume the hunting in Japanese coastal waters of minke and other whales currently protected by the commission. But Japan will not be able to continue the so-called scientific research hunts in the Antarctic that has been exceptionally allowed as an IWC member under the Antarctic Treaty.
The announcement had been widely expected and comes after Japan failed in a bid earlier this year to convince the IWC to allow it to resume commercial whaling. Tokyo has repeatedly threatened to pull out of the body and has been regularly criticised for catching hundreds of whales a year for "scientific research" despite being a signatory to a moratorium on hunting the animals. Mr Suga said Japan would officially inform the IWC of its decision by the end of the year, which will mean the withdrawal comes into effect by June 30. Leaving the IWC means Japanese whalers will be able to resume the hunting in Japanese coastal waters of minke and other whales currently protected by the commission. But Japan will not be able to continue the so-called scientific research hunts in the Antarctic that has been exceptionally allowed as an IWC member under the Antarctic Treaty.
The UK does not hunt whales. Why can't you copy that, too?
As long as it is only in Japanese territory their choice but how long they take to put the whale down should be taken into account, a cruel extended death should be banned and any method should require pretty much instant death for the whale. Not that I would eat whale or promote it's killing but prevention of cruelty to animals laws should apply.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Whalehunters do give money to Japanese politicians. Lots of money.
Japanese politics is all about money.
If this has a negative impact on the 2020 Olympics, then whaling will be banned just as quickly.
Ah yes "research" whales that just happen to end up in the fish markets.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Whales shouldnÃ(TM)t be hunted for food at all. They are nearly extinct.
"Whales" comprise around 90 different species, some of which are endangered and some which are quite numerous.
Among the species which are classified by IUCN as Least Concern (i.e. not qualifying for a near threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered status) are Bowhead Whales, Southern Right Whales, Common Minke Whales, Humpback Whales, Grey Whales, and various dolphins.
The Minke whale, which is currently the most common catch for whalers, is quite abundant, with over 180,000 in the North Atlantic alone.
Animals hunted and used everywhere around the world. Species are going extinct all around the world. I don’t know why people act outraged when the cute or glamorous ones are the victims. So if we’re gonna be outraged about this, we should just probably stop destroying the planet in the 1000 other ways. “They” always claim we’ll slow down economic progress, disrupt economies, etc, but somehow they’re perfectly fine with automation, globalization and Walmart ruining your hometown, by saying new jobs and economies will develop. So, by the same logic, if we eliminated environmental destruction and animal exploitation, we’d have new earth friendlier economies emerge.
Even in Japan there isn't much of a market for it, it is not something people enjoy eating and was traditionally only eaten as a source of food when there was not much else. There have been stories about how even much of their "scientific" whaling meat gets wasted as it isn't popular.
doesn't work that way in Japan sadly. The government will support the industry to keep it going so they don't lose face.
Because there really isn't a way to quickly kill such a large animal.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
It is not strange at all. After WWII, occupied West Germany was plundered by the former Allies for a while, but with the start of the Cold War, the focus shifted from revenge to opposing the Soviet Union and the emerging Communist bloc. By the end of the 40s, the anti-Nazi policies were scrapped, the criminal past of the NSDAP members and the Nazi government officials was forgotten and forgiven, they were given prominent roles in the German "recovery", and a lot of money was poured into the German economy in the form of foreign aid.
Nothing like that happened in Japan until after the Korean war. The Japanese were basically left to starve for a whole decade by the US. When the occupation power was petitioned for help (which is their responsibility according to international law), the administration of McArthur suggested that Japan should hunt whale meat for satisfying protein deficiency. This is how the modern whaling came about.
Japan has kept them open losing money for 30 years now in the guise of scientific whaling. Various Industries all over the world are funded by governments while making a loss with no real prospect of ever turning a profit.
They really don't. For a while Whale meat was essential for them to survive. But it is not particularly pleasant and not liked much even in Japan. The Japanese public in general are against whaling and don't like Whale meat. Their is a small aging (but influential population) that does want to keep it and more importantly don't like being told they can't have it.
The only source that insinuates that there is no demand is from antiwhaling propaganda. Japan for its part says its not profitable simply because they by definition don't allow a profit since its supposed to be scientific. Why not let them whale? They only hunt common species. If theres no demand like you say they'll eventually get bored of it as the old people die off and problem solved. On the other hand high demand means the Japanese will have an incentive to pour billions more into research and funding than whiny envirowackos are willing to do to save and increase whale populations of those they hunt and those they want to hunt bringing more delicious tastes and delectable food options into the world cuisine.
What is the difference between hunting whales and all the other animals we eat (besides tastiness level but that's opinion based)?
Whales are the only animal they eat that can't be farmed. Hunting and gathering is sustainable only for small human populations, which is why a large percentage of the fish we eat are being farmed today, over the dead bodies of environmental romantics.
The whale population has revived since the nineteenth century age of whaling, but resuming hunts would make whales as threatened as bison were until we started farming them.
Not true. Whale oil was highly prized in the 19th century, and well into 20th, and had many applications. (as a side note, whale oil based additives used to be very important in vehicle transmissions)
Fosdil fuels lose so much, they need a 23 trillion dollar subsidy every year. Don't see them closing.
No, government egos are quite capable of keeping the undead animated. The whaling industry is such a zombie.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One day we might get some independent data on the amount of radionuclides in Japanese fisheries considering the amount of radioactive effluents the ongoing Fukushima disaster is putting into their food chain. I wouldn't be surprised if they know all this and opening up options for themselves.
The volcanic region made seafood a rich harvest for Japan and now they have poisoned it. Bio-accumulation of radionuclides in the food chain is real no matter how much Japan suppresses information. It will continue to poison the Pacific until we take the clean-up effort away from TEPCO and make it an international issue that we address with maximum priority to stop it spreading any further.
That would be the honorable thing to do.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Japan hates it. Schools won't touch it, neither will the poor. Oligarchs and politicians do, which is why their behaviour is strange. Mercury poisoning.
Whale meat is massively subsidized but ends up dumped or sold to Norway at a loss.
The subsidies are all that keep the industry profitable. Nobody sane wants the stuff.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Blue Whale numbers haven't risen significantly since whaling stopped and many species are on the Red List.
Most species that aren't are turning out to be multiple species, due to isolation. Right Whales are an example of that. By recategorizing according to genetics, sevwral whale species went from ok to critically endangered.
We still know nothing about the Lone Voice, the lonliest whale on the planet, other than he's the last of his kind.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Southerm Right Whales turned out to be two distinct species, a few years back. The list has not been updated to reflect that, yet, but the two species have about half the numbers in each.
It makes a huge difference.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My guess is that whaling in Japan is similar to coal in the US. Both are dying industries that still have enough political clout to get money from the government to prop up their businesses and keep them going long past when they should have died.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Tuna is a fish. All of the animals we routinely eat are now farmed, and a large percentage of the fish. Farming of tuna is a hard problem because it’s a wide-ranging top predator species, but the Japanese are working on a tuna farming project, because this fish is highly valued in Japanese cuisine.
Their actual plan is to get us down to only 2 humpback whales, in the hopes of attracting starships from the future. They can then capture one and harvest the technology.
The part that was cut out of the script was that after finding out what what had happened, Space Whales invaded earth to harvest Japanese people for research purposes.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not that the problems imposed by unfettered globalism are complex, it's that there are no solutions to those problems that are satisfactory to the majority of people living in developed nations. For example, a true globalist moves his factories from the US to China (Foxconn) to save 10 dollars in production costs per piece, and then considers moving again to Vietnam because there are factory workers there willing to work for even less. This creates a problem for people who work in manufacturing jobs in the US and see those jobs moving to Asia. And no, not everybody is an MIT graduate that can work in the design department of Apple, some people want to work in manufacturing. Then there is the other problem of "open borders" bringing in too many people who are capable of only for menial jobs and can't even speak the local language, and there is already an overabundance of labour for these kinds of jobs in developed nations, and automation will reduce demand for such jobs anyway. Again, no solutions that are satisfactory to the citizen of a developed nations exist for that problem, and the only "solution" is to throw money at the problem that could be spent towards the native citizens. So, the solution that is chosen by most voters is to back out of unfettered globalism and impose tarrifs and closed borders. Unfettered globalism proponents should propose proper solutions instead of engaging in nonsensical smear campaigns against nationalism.
But how long would whales last if every major country returned to commercial whaling?
How long would deer last if we all returned to deer hunting?
The solution is the same - monitoring the populations and setting quotas accordingly.
Outright bans cause problems too - the migratory bird hunting ban here in the US, for example, where enormous flocks of Canadian geese wreak havoc, the populations having exploded (in part due to corn fields and golf courses, and in part due to killing off their other predators).
For whales, some of the whale species are in direct competition with otherwise sustainable fishing, and some are even threatening other vulnerable marine life that's at risk of extinction. Sure, if we stopped overharvesting and polluting the oceans, it would be less of a problem, but fat chance of that. As it is, our mass hunting fish and shrimp without also culling their predators like whales is becoming a real problem.
There are a whole bunch of species of whale that are neither particularly smart nor anywhere near endangered, like the common minke whale. Anyone who isn't a vegetarian has no business pretending there's a moral issue here.
And the general IWC moratorium, now over three decades old, is in blatant defiance of the purpose stated in the convention that established the IWC -- to make the whaling industry orderly, in order to increase whale stocks, so that more whales can be hunted. A general ban on commercial whaling isn't what the Japanese signed up for, and it's ludicrous to claim they should be bound to keep going along with the abuse of a treaty that's been perverted against its explicit text.
Behaving like a bull in a china shop has this effect as a result, yes.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
When wages fall or are stagnant while the cost of living rises people get upset and Nationalism flourishes. The lesson of History shows: Either the Rich spread the money around or the poor spread the pitchforks and torches around.