JAPAN: Twenty years after the environmental movement scored one of its biggest victories with the worldwide moratorium on commercial whale hunting, campaigners are again pulling on their save-the-whale T-shirts.
Conservationists say the pro-whaling nations of Japan, Iceland and Norway are likely to win control of regulatory body the International Whaling Commission (IWC), when it meets in the West Indies next month.
Led by Tokyo, which has tirelessly lobbied for the return of commercial hunting, the pro-whalers hope to secure 51 per cent of the IWC votes, paving the way for the reversal of the 1986 ban.
Although scrapping the moratorium requires a 75 per cent majority, control of the commission would be a huge propaganda boost to Tokyo's campaign and allow secret voting and other measures likely to help its cause, say environmentalists.
The prospect of an end to the two-decade moratorium will make the June annual IWC conference in St Kitts and Nevis the most vitriolic yet, after years of tension between the two bitterly opposed camps.
The IWC has failed to stop the three pro-whaling nations from killing about 2,000 whales a year. Japan's whaling fleet returned last month from a "scientific expedition" to an Antarctic whale sanctuary with a haul of almost 1,000 whales, in defiance of the whaling body.
Australia was one of several governments around the world that said the expedition was a "sham", but Japan has worked quietly for years to win the support of over a dozen smaller nations, by buying their votes with foreign aid, claim critics.
Tokyo says the IWC has been hijacked by environmentalists and is "totally dysfunctional". Armed with its own disputed surveys on whaling stocks, the pro-whaling lobby is relishing another skirmish with what it calls the West's "culinary imperialists". "We think it is possible to use whale resources in a sustainable way," says Hideki Moronuki of Japan's fisheries agency. "We don't have much land, we have the sea. Japan has lost so much of its own culture already. Countries like the UK and America have their own resources."
The agency claims there are close to a million Antarctic minke whales and that it can hunt at a "scientifically sustainable" level. Conservationists dispute those figures and say the same arguments about "sustainability" were heard when other species were being hunted to extinction.
Japan's relentless push to scrap the ban puzzles many international observers, given the cost of the campaign to Tokyo's international standing and the relatively puny size of its domestic whaling industry.
Consumption of whale had been falling for years, even before 1986. Today, Japanese eat 40 times more beef-burger than whale, according to Greenpeace; surveys suggest that 1 per cent of the Japanese population eats whale-meat regularly.
Among the bulk of the population, the debate provokes more yawns than table-thumping, although some middle-aged Japanese wax nostalgic about eating whale after the war, when protein was scarce.
Many Japanese, however, are bewildered by what they consider western sentimentality, and hypocrisy, about eating whale-meat.
In a typical comment, Kiyoshi Okawa, the boss of a company that makes pet snacks from whale-meat, recently said: "I can't understand how people can consider whales cute. Lambs are much cuter to me than whales, and I don't eat them."
The real engine behind the whale campaign is not culture, however, but politics. After decades living in the diplomatic and military shadow of the US, Japanese nationalists feel this is one area where they can make a splash.
And there is a practical consideration: if the nationalists back down on whales, they fear restrictions on other marine resources will follow, including that beloved staple of the Japanese diet: tuna.
Japan's whaling "research fleet" is backed by a lobby of nationalist politicians, mainly within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The lobby champions the "tradition" of whale hunting in a handful of fishing communities, and has spent billions of yen in a tireless diplomatic offensive to reverse the 1986 ban.
Many of the same LDP politicians can be found behind other right-wing causes, such as revisionist history textbooks.
Without their support, there is little prospect that whale hunting would be economically viable: the sale of whale-meat barely covers the cost of sending Japan's eight whaling ships out of harbour.