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Whaling season over

Financial Grants and Votes for Whaling

12 February 2007

From Feb 13th to 15th in Tokyo, the Japanese government is hosting a so-called "Normalization" Meeting, inviting members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This document explores the links between the Japanese government’s "Grant Aid for Fisheries (Fisheries Aid)" and the recruitment of countries to the IWC who subsequently vote with Japan.

The document also lists the 33 countries that voted for the St Kitts Declaration in the IWC 2006. We have added the columns titled: "whaling countries"; "the total amount of the Fisheries Aid provided by Japanese government from the 1994 till today", and "the opinion poll data on the resumption of commercial whaling" where the data is available.

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Nippon Research Centre Whaling Poll

01 June 2006

June 2006 independent Japanese Opinion Poll June 2006 poll by the Nippon Research Centre showed that 95% of Japanese never or rarely eat whale meat and 69% of Japanese do NOT support whaling in the Southern Ocean. Page 10 shows how often Japanese eat whale meat.

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Industrial Whaling Factsheet

18 November 2005

Call me Ishmael...! Whaling folklore speaks of tradition, of the noble hunt, of man pitting his wits against the ferocious sea and against mighty intelligent leviathans. But the history of whaling is far from glamorous, far from something to look back at through rose tinted spectacles. It is bloody tale of persecution, greed and stupidity, nowhere more so than in the waters encircling the Antarctic.

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Tradition, culture & science

18 November 2005

In recent years, Japan’s pro-whaling lobbyists have deployed a series of excuses for continuing the hunt, despite the existence since 1986 of a global commercial whaling moratorium. First comes science: to gather much needed data, they claim, in order to restart commercial whaling on a sustainable basis. Second, comes culture: Japan’s long tradition of whaling and the dietary importance of whale meat. Finally, a new and possibly the silliest, argument has been added: whales eat fish and are threatening fish stocks.

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