Greenpeace - Making Waves: Live from Tokyo: Update on the whale meat scandal

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.

It's not the only one. According to the testimonies we collected from informers, as detailed in our dossier, the whalers have been systematically killing more whales than necessary, using methods that fly in the face of their own bizarre "scientific whaling" logic. I say bizarre, because while the whaling industry claims that the whale hunt is for scientific research purposes, it also claims that there's a market for whale meat in Japan. An informer says that while the Nisshin Maru and its catcher boats have targeted hunts to ensure maximum catch (rather the self-permitted scientific random "sampling"), they've been chucking vast quantities of meat - up to seven tonnes a day - over the side of the ship.

Not that this is a new practice in the dark history of whaling. Through the centuries, some of the products derived from whales waxed and waned in popularity - in Victorian times, baleen, or whalebone, the material that rorqual whales teeth are made from, was used to make hoop skirts for ladies; the oil from sperm whales went into everything candles to missile control systems. The meat wasn't wanted at all, but usually "tried out" - boiled until the oil was leached out.

In the current case, the Japanese whaling fleet seems to be only interested in the "prime cuts" of meat - and to hell with research. According to the informer, there wasn't time to process all the whale meat coming aboard the Nisshin Maru, there wasn't room to store it all, and little opportunity to do any "research". The targeting of whales was indiscriminate - harpoon as many possible, dump whatever they can't be bothered with. At this stage, until a full investigation is carried by the Japanese government, it's hard to know if the whalers have actually been under reporting their kills, or even sticking to the species that they claim to target.

This really calls into question the exponential increases in the whaling fleets self-appointed quotas over the last few years. Why push the quota so high if there's no facilities to actually "research", process or store the whale they kill? The informer also reported that the conditions on board the Nisshin Maru had become extremely harsh, due to the increased workload from the increased quotas.

Rather than some kind of legitimate scientific operation, the whalers have this time really proved themselves to be as duplicitous, untrustworthy and ignorant of the concepts of unsustainability - a common trait in the history of whaling, where whale populations like that of the blue and right whales (amongst others) were decimated by intensive whaling. The behaviour of a couple of modern examples spring to mind - like the consistent falsification of catches by the Russian fleet to the IWC - a lie that only came to light thanks to some diligent scientists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 90,000 kills were unreported. Another was the pirate whaling fleet of the famous Aristotle Onassis, responsible for indiscriminate killing of any whale, of any size that its harpoons could hit.

The team deliver the evidence to the Public Prosecutor's office. © Greenpeace/Naomi Toyoda

But back to yesterday's events. Following yesterday's press conference, we hightailed it across Tokyo, where Junichi, Jun and our lawyers met with the Public Prosecutor and delivered the evidence - including the whale meat. The Prosecutor gave assurance that the details of the case will be reviewed, pending a decision to mount a criminal investigation. We've also written to the government's second in command, Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura, in order to set up a meeting with him to discuss the dossier of gathered evidence, and the need for a public investigation.

Throughout the day there was some dark comedy, as the government's Fisheries Agency (FAJ), the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) and Kyodo Senpaku (the company behind the whaling fleet) all gave confused and conflicting responses to media questioning - with Kyodo Senpaku admitting that "souvenirs are given to distribute among neighbours" in one interview, after denying it in an earlier one. The Asahi Shimbun ran a follow up story, pointing this out. Amidst the chaos, the Fisheries Agency demanded that the ICR carry out an investigation of the issue - a pretty pointless exercise, given the fact that the ICR would be effectively be investigating itself.

While it all quiet for a tired Greenpeace Japan team today, the story is rumbling on, and there's sure to be more news in the coming days.

Comments

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Posted by: itsc | May 16, 2008 9:40 AM

it is really time that japan stops wahling
what more needs the world for proof that they are a bunch of lying xxxxxxxx
i sincerly hope that the rest of the world will join greenpeace and puts so much pressure under japan it will be stopped for ever
anyway i wish any one eating whale meats gets so ill they will be sick for weeks to come

Posted by: patricia kouwenberg | May 19, 2008 4:44 PM

Greenpeace Japan filed a criminal complaint with Japanese prosecutors Thursday,
accusing whaling-ship crew members of stealing whale meat from a hunting trip. However,
the alleged "evidence" was stolen from the warehouse.

Jun Hoshikawa, the director of Greenpeace Japan,
admitted that they stole it and apologized. According to the Japanese law,
the object which was collected with illegal measure can't be an evidence. So their accusation will be rejected.

This is a typical hypocrisy of so-called radical ecologists.
Western people want to save the whale, while they are killing millions of cows, pigs, and other animals everyday,
more than any eastern people. As eating cows is the western tradition,
so eating whale is Japanese tradition. Nobody can tell which tradition is correct or incorrect.

Greenpeace is the worst model of western ethnocentrism.
Even more foolish is the Japanese like Hoshikawa, who imports the western arrogance to Japan.
Fortunately no Japanese media is supporting their illegal behavior.
Many Japanese are angry at their violence and hypocrisy.

Posted by: a | May 20, 2008 5:57 PM

Hi "A", thanks for your comment - legally speaking, Greenpeace didn't "steal" the box of whalemeat - under Japanese law, theft is denoted by the intent to profit. In this case, the whale meat was taken by Greenpeace to the Public Prosecutor who today announced that it would be undertaking a full investigation of the dodgy practices of the whaling business.

Jun Hoshikawa did not admit theft, and did not apologise - it was't theft!

Whales are wild animals - many species (such as fin whales, targetted by the whalers) are on the IUCN Red List of endangered species. The whalers shouldn't hunting them. Comparing the hunting of wild animals to the consumption of domestic meat will get you nowhere - this isn't about comparing one animal to another. If anything, we should not be eating so much land-based meat, based on the carbon (and other) footprints caused by livestock production - but try convincing the world of that!

Whaling was once tradition around the world - in America, in Britain, in Netherlands, Spain - the Basques were one of the earliest serious hunters, Russia, Australia and many more. These countries now realise the error of their ways, of how the hunting decimated the whale populations.

And apparently you've not been reading the papers - the front page of Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper with 8 million daily circulation, had the story on the front page last Thursday (May 15th).

Posted by: Dave Walsh | May 20, 2008 8:29 PM