MOSCOW, April 22 (RIA Novosti) – Over 60 percent of the Japanese population supports the country’s whaling program, even though only 14 percent consume whale meat, according to a recent opinion poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
The survey showed that 60 percent of the almost 1,800 respondents support Japan’s whaling program, ostensibly conducted for scientific research, while 23 percent disapprove of it. Nearly half of voters said they have not eaten whale meat recently, while 37 percent admitted they had never tasted it. Only 4 percent of those surveyed said they eat whale meat occasionally.
The opinion poll was conducted a day after Japan announced it would present a new, more scientific whaling program to the International Whaling Commission by this fall.
Yoshimasa Hayashi, the head of Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry, also said the country plans to resume whaling in the Antarctic by next spring and continue whaling in the Pacific Ocean this year.
Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry earlier cancelled the next routine expedition scheduled for late last year, following an International Criminal Court (ICC) ruling that banned Japan from whale hunting in the Antarctic. The judges in The Hague refused to accept that Japan’s whaling program has purely scientific goals.
Australia took Japan to court on May 31, 2010 over whaling it argued was for commercial purposes, and won the legal battle that slapped a whaling ban on Tokyo. It later emerged that Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research, which is responsible for killing whales, was allegedly planning to go ahead with the 2014-2015 hunt with a redesigned project.
Japanese lawmakers said the ICC’s decision was regrettable but it shouldn’t stop the whalers from doing their job. They suggested that the parliament could swiftly come up with a reformulated science program to justify further whaling. According to the latest poll, 40 percent of Japanese supported the ICC verdict.
Although commercial whaling has been illegal since 1986, Japan continues to hunt the creatures for what it claims to be scientific research, with much of the meat sold in shops and restaurants.
