Japan Drops Humpback Whale Hunt

Carl Freire in Tokyo
Associated Press

December 21, 2007

Japan is dropping its plan to kill threatened humpback whales in the seas off Antarctica, a Japanese official said Friday.

"The U.S. asked Japan to freeze planned humpback hunts" for one to two years to support its efforts as chair of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said.

The Hunt

Japan dispatched a whaling fleet last month to the southern Pacific in the first major hunt of humpback whales since the 1960s, triggering widespread international criticism.

Commercial hunts of humpbacks have been banned worldwide since 1966. The World Conservation Union considers the species "vulnerable," meaning it faces a high but not immanent risk of extinction in the wild.

The Japanese whalers had argued that the hunting ban didn't apply to them because their hunt was for the sake of science.

"There will [be] no changes to our stance on our research whaling itself," Machimura said Friday.

Australia

Australia announced earlier this week it was launching a new push to stop Japan's annual whale hunt, including sending surveillance planes and a ship to gather evidence for a possible international legal challenge. (See story.)

Earlier Friday, Japan's Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters he hoped to discuss the whale hunt and related issues with his Australian counterpart soon.

"This seems to be a problem of differences in national sentiment between Japanese and Australian culture," Komura told reporters. "It's not a matter that can be solved by appealing to one another through logic."

'A Good First Step'

The Japanese mission also aims to take as many as 935 minke whales and up to 50 fin whales in what Japan's Fisheries Agency says is its largest-ever scientific whale hunt.

Critics say the program is a shield for Japan to keep its whaling industry alive until it can overturn a 1986 ban on commercial whaling.

Karli Thomas, who is leading a Greenpeace expedition heading to the southern Pacific, lauded Japan's promise to .

"This is good news, indeed, but it must be the first step towards ending all whaling in the Southern Ocean, not just one species for one season," Thomas said in a statement from the group's ship, Esperanza, which set out from New Zealand this week to thwart the Japanese whaling mission.

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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

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