
Greenpeace Japan's Junichi Sato displaying the stolen whale meat to the media. ©Greenpeace/Naomi Toyoda
Brian's already blogged the full story on the emerging whale meat scandal, so I thought I'd fill you in on the latest happenings here in Tokyo. Most of us at the Greenpeace Japan office were up late on Wednesday night and very early Thursday morning, working hard on the preparation for today's announcement - that the crew of the Nisshin Maru have been siphoning off tonnes of whale meat and thousands of dollars of public funds for personal gain.
We met for breakfast at 6:30am; the sun was shining for the first time in days, and the scandal had been splashed all over the front page of the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper with 8 million copies circulated daily. A good start to the day. By the time our press conference kicked off at 10am, news had spread, and the room was packed with domestic and international media, including all the top Japanese TV stations, and international agencies like Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse. Cross conferences can be notoriously dull affairs - but this was a little different. Our whale campaigner, Junichi, while presenting the conference with Jun (Greenpeace Japan executive director) pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, and held up a piece of the stolen whale meat for the cameras. Mind, seeing wasn't enough to convince one journalist who was forced to ask "is it real?" To which Junichi replied that it certainly was, and invited the journalist to have a sniff - the whale meat doesn't smell so good, and by the time the conference was over, the entire room smell of dead whale - an Antarctic minke that found an ignominious, pointless end, stuffed into a cardboard box.





