Japan’s Northwest Pacific Whale Killing Program Could Start Later This Month

April 18 2014 On March 31^st, a rul­ing by the Inter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice (ICJ) served a dev­as­tat­ing blow to Japan’s whal­ing indus­try. The court’s land­mark rul­ing stat­ed that the Japan whale Research Pro­gram in the Antarc­tic (JARPA II) was not con­duct­ed for the pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic research. It ordered that Japan revoke the sci­en­tif­ic per­mits giv­en under JARPA II and refrain from grant­i­ng any fur­ther per­mits under that pro­gram.

In a bla­tant show of defi­ance of this rul­ing, Japan’s Insti­tute of Cetacean Research (ICR) last week filed court briefs stat­ing that they intend to return to slaugh­ter whales in the South­ern Ocean for the 2015–2016 sea­son with a new­ly designed “research” pro­gram and will seek a per­ma­nent injunc­tion against Sea Shep­herd.

Anoth­er exam­ple of Japan’s com­plete dis­re­gard for the wish­es of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty could soon unfold as the Japan whale Research Pro­gram in the North­west Pacif­ic (JARPN II) is sched­uled to start this month. Accord­ing to a Japan Times arti­cle of April 17: “The Japan­ese whal­ing fleet’s depar­ture for the Pacif­ic North­west has been delayed to April 26 instead of Tues­day 22nd” because of dis­agree­ments between the For­eign Min­istry and the Fish­eries Agency after the Inter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice last month ordered Japan to halt its annu­al “research” hunts in the Antarc­tic Ocean after rul­ing they are not sci­en­tif­ic in nature. The For­eign Min­istry is con­cerned that if Japan whales in the North­west Pacif­ic imme­di­ate­ly after the ICJ rul­ing, anti-whal­ing coun­tries may sue to halt hunts there as well. The Fish­eries Agency insists that whal­ing in the North­west Pacif­ic should con­tin­ue, but at a reduced tar­get catch of 60 whales. The delay “might be a side effect of U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s planned three-day vis­it to Japan start­ing Wednes­day.”

 

Although the ICJ rul­ing does not include JARPN II, as Aus­tralia and New Zealand’s case cen­tered on “their” whales in their “back­yard”, even the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment real­izes, accord­ing to a NHK World arti­cle of April 10, that “the court’s rul­ing could be applied to those waters depend­ing on meth­ods used, includ­ing the num­ber caught.”

The arti­cle con­tin­ues: “The con­cern is prompt­ing the gov­ern­ment to assess its research pro­ce­dures. It plans to decide as ear­ly as next week whether to go ahead with research whal­ing in the North­west­ern Pacif­ic. Some in the gov­ern­ment claim that it should con­duct the Pacif­ic research whal­ing as planned. But oth­ers argue that Japan could be sued again if it con­tin­ues the pro­gram with­out due con­sid­er­a­tion to the court’s rul­ing.”

Imme­di­ate­ly after the ICJ rul­ing, the spokesman for the Japan­ese del­e­ga­tion to the court, Nori Shika­ta said: “Our pro­gram in the North­ern Pacif­ic is out­side the scope of the pro­ceed­ings before the court, and so they are two sep­a­rate pro­grams and this rul­ing is about the pro­gram in the Antarc­tic,”

On April 15th, before a meet­ing with the pres­i­dent of the ICR, Japan’s Agri­cul­ture, Forestry and Fish­eries Min­is­ter, Yoshi­masa Hayashi expressed will­ing­ness to con­tin­ue whal­ing in the Pacif­ic despite the ICJ rul­ing. He said he is deter­mined to “main­tain the sol­id pol­i­cy of pre­serv­ing whale-eat­ing cul­ture and secur­ing sup­ply of whale meat.”

On that same date, Kyo­do Sen­paku, which owns Japan’s whal­ing fleet, said it had urged Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Yoshi­masa Hayashi to allow the North­ern Pacif­ic whal­ing to take place as usu­al. “The min­is­ter gave us strong encour­age­ment by say­ing that he would firm­ly con­sid­er it, giv­en that the research itself was not gain­said.”

Aside from the geo­graph­ic region and the whales tar­get­ed, the JARPN and JARPA pro­grams are iden­ti­cal twins when you look at their goal, con­struc­tion and his­to­ry. Thus a large part of the ICJ’s moti­va­tion for the rul­ing on Antarc­tic whal­ing can be direct­ly applied to the North­west Pacif­ic slaugh­ter:

• A court would find no evi­dence of any stud­ies of the fea­si­bil­i­ty or prac­ti­ca­bil­i­ty of non-lethal meth­ods, nor find evi­dence that Japan exam­ined whether it would be fea­si­ble to com­bine a small­er lethal take and an increase in non-lethal sam­pling to achieve its research objec­tives.
• As with the eval­u­a­tion of JARPA (1988–2005) and JARPA II (2005–2014) by the ICJ, a court inves­ti­ga­tion of JARPN (1994–1999) and JARPN II (2000-present) will reveal a con­sid­er­able over­lap between the two pro­grams’ sub­jects, their objec­tives, and their meth­ods.
• Both state iden­ti­cal goals such as improv­ing knowl­edge on stock identity/structure and feed­ing ecol­o­gy.
• As with JARPA II, which called for a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the minke whale “sam­ple” size and the lethal “sam­pling” of addi­tion­al species (hump­back and fin whales) com­pared to JARPA, the North­west Pacif­ic kill quo­ta esca­lat­ed from the killing of 100 com­mon minke whales annu­al­ly under JARPN to 100 com­mon minke whales, 50 bryde’s whales, and 10 sperm whales under JARPN II. In 2002 they increased the minke whale quo­ta to 150 and added 50 sei whales. The next year, the minke quo­ta became 160 and the sei whale quo­ta was dou­bled to 100. In 2008 the pro­gram pro­pos­al was an annu­al take of 340 minke whales, 50 bryde’s whales, 100 sei whales and 10 sperm whales.
• The ICJ deter­mined that weak­ness­es in Japan’s expla­na­tion for the deci­sion to pro­ceed with the JARPA II sam­ple sizes pri­or to the final review of JARPA lend sup­port to the view that those sam­ple sizes and the launch date for JARPA II were not dri­ven by strict­ly sci­en­tif­ic con­sid­er­a­tions. The same applies to the tran­si­tion from JARPN to JARPN II.
• The ICJ not­ed that there were three addi­tion­al aspects of JARPA II which cast fur­ther doubt on its char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as a pro­gram for pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic research: the open-end­ed time frame of the pro­gram, its lim­it­ed sci­en­tif­ic out­put to date, and the lack of coop­er­a­tion between JARPA II and oth­er domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al research pro­grams. All of these aspects apply to JARPN II.

 

Giv­en these exam­ples, it becomes clear that if JARPN II were under the scruti­ny of the ICJ or any oth­er court out­side of a whal­ing nation, the con­clu­sion of that court would sound much the same as in the case of JARPA II: “The Court con­cludes that the spe­cial per­mits grant­ed by Japan for the killing, tak­ing and treat­ing of whales in con­nec­tion with JARPA/N II are not ‘for pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic research’ pur­suant to Arti­cle VIII, para­graph 1, of the Con­ven­tion.”

As a result, Japan would have vio­lat­ed the mora­to­ri­um not only in the Antarc­tic, but also in the North­west Pacif­ic.

Beyond all the legal talk, it is of course clear to every ratio­nal per­son that just as Japan’s Antarc­tic whale pro­gram is a dis­guise for com­mer­cial whal­ing, the same goes for the pro­gram in the North Pacif­ic.

Still in the court’s rul­ing there is this sen­tence: “The Court finds that JARPA II can broad­ly be char­ac­ter­ized as ‘sci­en­tif­ic research’.” How “broad­ly” exact­ly do you want to go?

Sci­ence thrives on our thirst for knowl­edge. All valu­able research starts with a ques­tion. With that ques­tion as a foun­da­tion, sci­en­tists build a research pro­gram that might pro­vide them with answers.

Japan has no ques­tions; they had to dis­guise their con­tin­u­a­tion of com­mer­cial whal­ing as sci­ence. Decid­ing on an out­come was easy: the resump­tion of com­mer­cial whal­ing. Then they defined the desired con­clu­sions: “there are plen­ty of whales” and “these whales eat our fish.” As whales in Antarc­ti­ca migrate South to feast on krill and not fish, they had to come up with some­thing else there: “minke whales have become too abun­dant and threat­en the recov­ery of the blue whale and there­fore have to be culled.”

Call­ing this sci­ence, even broad­ly, is an obscen­i­ty.

An impor­tant point that some might for­get in this day and age, where for many sci­ence has replaced the gods of old, is that just because some­thing is called sci­ence, be it as a guise, tru­ly so or just broad­ly, that in itself jus­ti­fies absolute­ly noth­ing! We only have to look at what is done to ani­mals in lab­o­ra­to­ries all around the world to real­ize that sci­ence often lacks ethics and morals. In the def­i­n­i­tion of the ICJ, prob­a­bly even the exper­i­ments of Nazi doc­tors in WW II con­cen­tra­tion camps could “broad­ly be char­ac­ter­ized as ‘sci­en­tif­ic research’.” That doesn’t make it all right…

Regard­ing JARPN II there is anoth­er dis­guise with­in the dis­guise of com­mer­cial whal­ing as sci­ence. When Japan in 1988, under US pres­sure, lift­ed its objec­tion to the mora­to­ri­um on com­mer­cial whal­ing, this also end­ed Japan­ese Small-Type Coastal Whal­ing (JSTCW) for minke whales, as minkes are one of the 13 species of larg­er whales that fall under the juris­dic­tion of the Inter­na­tion­al Whal­ing Com­mis­sion (IWC). In response to the mora­to­ri­um, four of the last nine JSTCW ves­sels from Abashiri (Hokkai­do Pre­fec­ture), Ayukawa (Miya­gi Pre­fec­ture), Wada (Chi­ba Pre­fec­ture) and Tai­ji (Wakaya­ma Pre­fec­ture) stopped oper­at­ing. The remain­ing ships con­tin­ued killing short-finned pilot whales, Risso’s dol­phins and Baird’s beaked whales in Japan’s coastal waters, as these “small cetaceans” are not cov­ered by the IWC’s reg­u­la­tions.

Since 1987, Japan has tried to get a quo­ta from the IWC to resume the killing of minke whales under a sort of abo­rig­i­nal sub­sis­tence whal­ing scheme as exists for Alaskan Inu­its, North­east Siber­ian Chukchi, Green­lan­ders and for the natives of Bequia. The IWC has for all these years refused to grant a minke whale quo­ta for JSTCW because they judge it to be a com­mer­cial pro­pos­al.

To get around this, the ICR added a coastal com­po­nent to JARPN II in 2002. The ICR con­tracts Japan’s Small Type Whal­ing Asso­ci­a­tion to pro­vide ves­sels and crew to par­tic­i­pate in whal­ing oper­a­tions off Ayukawa, now part of Ishi­no­ma­ki, (Miya­gi pre­fec­ture) from April through May and off Kushi­ro (Hokkai­do) in Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber to shoot 60 minke whales in each area. The ICR buys the whales from the whal­ing com­pa­nies at a set price and then sells part of the meat at a sub­si­dized price back to the JSTCW towns.

In this light, the ICR’s activ­i­ties in the North­west Pacif­ic are an even big­ger scam than those in Antarc­ti­ca.

This is the hunt that is about to start on April 22^nd, fol­lowed a month lat­er by the off­shore com­po­nent that includes the last-of-its-kind float­ing abat­toir, the Nis­shin Maru and the famil­iar Yushins.

All this could just be under­way before the annu­al meet­ing of the IWC sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee start­ing May 12 in Slove­nia. The com­mit­tee mem­bers are almost cer­tain to ques­tion the legal­i­ty of JARPN II in light of the ICJ rul­ing on JARPA II.

The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty can­not stand by and allow Japan to make a mock­ery out of its agree­ments and insti­tu­tions. It’s time for the world’s lead­ers to pick up the phone and explain to Tokyo in no uncer­tain terms why they should keep their whal­ing ships in port