14 DAY TRIAL // A fisheries official in South Korea announced on Thursday that the country was considering resuming its commercial fishing practices, if the International Whaling Commission allowed Japan to continue its cull of minke whales in its territorial waters. The situation, which will be discussed in June at the next IWC meeting, is very complex, as international pressure mounts on Japan to stop whaling in the Antarctic altogether. Environmental groups and the Australian government are pressuring Tokyo to drop their fake scientific studies altogether and to ban this practice once and for all.
But the tradition of catching whales is rooted deep in Japanese tradition, and Tokyo authorities say that they will have none of this. At this point, experts around the globe are pondering possibilities to be discussed at the meeting in June. Japan might get a few concessions, such as to be allowed to fish in its territorial waters, in exchange for leaving the Australian Antarctic waters alone. The whale populations in that area are already endangered, and Japan has an yearly quota of almost 1,000 whales each season.
“If the general assembly meeting approves Japan's bid, then South Korea could also consider revising current regulations regarding commercial whaling. South Korea does not rule out the possibility of commercial whaling, but that doesn't mean we would go and say we would start it right away,” an expert in the South Korean fisheries ministry, who has asked that no names be revealed, told Reuters.
Commercial whaling was phased out under a UN moratorium as far back as 1986, but Japan started its bogus Cetacean Research Institute the following year. Under the pretense that its experts were studying the animals, the fleet killed up to 1,000 minke whales each year, which it then returned to the country, where they were sold in supermarkets. When two Greenpeace activists exposed a whale-meat scandal and the whole scam, authorities arrested them under theft charges, and the two are now facing years in jail for doing the right thing.
The Greenpeace environmental group has also drawn attention to the fact that South Korean fishing boats have been catching increased numbers of whales over the past few years, and that they call the catches accidental. Under the country's law, any whale that is caught “by accident” can be sold in supermarkets, while purposefully hunting the animals is illegal. One cannot refrain from asking: how exactly does one catch a whale weighing several tons by mistake?