JAPAN: Less than a week since Japan and its allies scored a stunning victory at the International Whaling Conference - paving the way for a possible return to commercial whaling - the Japanese government has revealed how it was done: by buying the vote, writes David McNeill in Tokyo.
In a written reply to a query on Japan's "marine-aid" to developing countries, the government admitted to pouring 617 million yen (€4.2 million) last year into St Kitts and Nevis, the tiny Caribbean nation that hosted the IWC conference.
Nicaragua, the top recipient of Tokyo's largesse, was awarded about €8.1 million and the Pacific island cluster of Palau got €3.9 million.
All three countries voted with Japan, Iceland and Norway at last weekend's conference on the now notorious St Kitts and Nevis Declaration, calling for the 20- year ban on commercial whaling to be scrapped.
The pro-whaling camp won the vote - its first majority in over two decades - by just one vote. Environmentalists say the result, although largely symbolic, spells disaster for the world's dwindling stock of whales.
Japan has long been accused of using multi-million-pound aid packages to swing the IWC - which has had an anti-whaling majority for quarter of a century - away from conservation.
Many of the commission's 20 newest members such as the Marshall Islands and St Kitts and Nevis, have no history of whaling and several, including Mongolia and Mali, have no coastlines.
Japan's chief IWC negotiator, Joji Morishita, denied last weekend that his country bought its way to victory.
"Japan gives aid to over 100 countries so why single out those that come to this conference?" he asked, saying the allegations were an "attempt by the anti-whaling bloc" to "smear those of us who want to return to sustainable use of whale resources".
An anonymous foreign ministry official, speaking to the Yomiuri newspaper this week dubbed allegations of vote-buying "Japan-bashing".
Greenpeace Japan's executive director Jun Hoshikawa however said it was "obvious" that Japan's aid influenced the St Kitts vote.
"Otherwise why is money being poured into the country? Tax money is being spent on something Japanese people do not want on a place they don't know."
Japanese environmentalists say the drive to end the 1986 ban is financed by a clique of nationalist politicians, who have spent billions of yen in public money despite most taxpayers' indifference to whaling.
Whale-eating has been declining in Japan since the 1960s and is now a specialist cuisine.
A Greenpeace survey released last week claims that more than 70 per cent of Japanese people oppose a return to commercial whaling on the high seas.
Conservationists also allege that Japan has sometimes paid the expensive International Whaling Conference subscriptions of poorer members such as Togo, which turned up late to the St Kitts conference with $10,000 in cash, although such allegations have never been proved.
The latest information however is the most detailed yet on Japan's direct grants to its supporters and will likely lead to calls for more openness on the murky relationship between aid and votes.
The aid question - which used the term "vote-buying"- was tabled by Shokichi Kina, a member of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan and a well known Okinawa-based environmentalist.
Japan and Iceland currently engage in what is controversially called "scientific whaling" while Norway ignores the 1986 moratorium.
Pro-whalers need 75 per cent of the IWC votes to completely scrap the ban, but many fear they will use the momentum from what Mr Morishita called the "historic' weekend vote, to dominate next year's International Whaling Conference conference in Alaska.