Five small ships have sailed out of Kushiro harbour in Japan's first commercial whale hunt in more than three decades, a move that has aroused global condemnation and fears for the fate of whales.
A minke whale is loaded from a Japanese fishing ship. Photo: Photo / AFP
Japan has long said few whale species are endangered, and news in December that it was leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to resume hunting was the culmination of years of campaigns by industry supporters and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose constituency includes a city that has long whaled.
"If we had more whale available, we'd eat it more," said Sachiko Sakai, a 66-year-old taxi driver in Kushiro.
"It's part of Japan's food culture," he said. "The world opposes killing whales, but you can say the same thing about many of the animals bred on land and killed for food."
The ships, which are set to be joined by vessels from the southern port of Shimonoseki, will spend much of the summer hunting for minke and Baird's beaked whales.
Crew in orange life vests took positions on the decks as the blue-hulled ships sailed out of Kushiro, some with red banners fluttering from their masts.
Japan began whaling for scientific research a year after a 1986 ban on commercial whaling, aiming to gather what it called crucial population data, but it abandoned commercial whaling in 1988.
Critics said the program was simply commercial whaling in disguise, after the meat of animals taken in scientific whaling ended up on store shelves and in restaurants.
This year's quota for commercial whaling, including minkes, sei whales and Bryde's whales, is 227, the Fisheries Agency said. The quota, to be set annually, is less than the 330 whales Japan harvested in the Antarctic until recently.
Environmentalists said the launch was delayed until after a summit of leaders of G20 major economies that Japan hosted, but whaling proponents have denied this.
"This is a sad day for whale protection globally," said Nicola Beynon of Humane Society International.
"The word 'research' may have been removed from the side of the factory ship, finally ending Japan's charade of harpooning whales under the guise of science, but these magnificent creatures will still be slaughtered for no legitimate reason," Ms Beynon, based in Australia, said in a statement.
-Reuters