Japan threatened to quit the International Whaling Commission yesterday following a tumultuous week of meetings in Anchorage, Alaska.
The Asian country failed to gain support for a proposal to allow four of its coastal communities to hunt whales.
Antiwhaling nations said the proposal would have lifted the 21-year ban on commercial whaling.
Japan argued the coastal communities have whaled for thousands of years and the hunt should be allowed under the same rules that allow aboriginal groups such as Eskimos to whale.
Opponents contend that the Japanese communities are not traditional settlements and note that they already take part in Japan's so-called research whaling, which is condoned by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
"The commission wasn't interested," said Sue Fisher, U.S. policy director and whaling campaigner for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
"It saw through the attempt as being an effort to overturn the moratorium."
Japan scrapped the proposal once it became clear it would not pass.
Then, at the end of the meeting, the Japanese commissioner took the floor and threatened to leave the whaling body.
"There is a real possibility we will review at a fundamental level our role in the IWC and this would include withdrawing, setting up a new organization," Akira Nakamae said.
Japan has made similar gestures in the past and the threat is not being taken seriously, according to Fisher.
"This is just posturing," she said, "but obviously intended to rattle the like-minded antiwhaling countries enough so that over the course of the next year, they'll start asking Japan how they might make friends [with Japan] again."
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