Why Japan hunts back whales

Tokyo had smuggled the message is simple, "to the end of the year", complained to Greenpeace because of the international media were less attentive. Indeed, Japan's government is likely to have little interest in ensuring that out to be big, what they announced on the Second day of Christmas: that Japan withdrawal from the International whaling Commission (IWC) commercial whaling again allow. Tokyo rejected the Greenpeace allegation: The decision was already longer, and the outlet should 1. January will be reported to the whaling could begin in July.

At a meeting of the IWC in September, wanted to assert Japan, the approval of the since 1987, banned commercial whaling, but failed. Now Tokyo, the Commission returns to the back, even though it insists otherwise, always to the observance of international law.

Japanese lived a long mostly vegetarian

The IWC was created in 1948 to regulate the whaling. The major whaling Nations – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and Norway – had plundered already, the oceans, the whales were almost extinct. To do this, Japan has not contributed.

The Japanese were vegetarians until, in 1872, a year and a half millennia, there was no livestock and hardly any hunting, the consumption of meat was allowed only in exceptions. The Jesuits, in the 16th century. Century Japan mission, kept it for barbarians, because they lived with goats and pigs under one roof, and then slaughtered. Long hunted by Japanese fishermen only those whales that were lost in their Bay. With the fleet of whaling, Nippon began only after the Second world war – at the Insistence of the U.S. occupation forces, because the population suffered from acute protein deficiency.

Since then, Japan has not ceased to hunt whales, not even after the ban in 1987. It is named the whale just in "scientific whaling". After a ruling by the International court of justice in The Hague in 2014, that supposed science is a guise only. "Commercial" was not of Japan's whaling. The government subsidized him a year with a converted 45 million Swiss francs. The catch captured by the fleet in the Antarctic and in the North Pacific every year up to 5000 tons of whale meat, which was after the alleged Design in the sale.

majority of the Japanese not eat whale meat

Premier Shinzo Abe's government, the case with the withdrawal from the IWC "the clock of time," says Sam Annesley, of Greenpeace Japan. However, as paradoxical as it may sound: the withdrawal of The Japanese is also a success for animal protection. Because Tokyo wants to continue to waive the remote whaling in the Antarctic and in the North Pacific and only coastal whaling. Such as Norway, Iceland and Greenland Japan wants to catch only in its own economic zone for whales.

in fact, the demand is not large, the majority of the Japanese not eat whale meat. Nevertheless, some, why the West has eradicated the whales fast, now want to dictate what you may eat. Some commentators suggest, therefore, that it is Japan at the outlet from the IWC less whale meat than you can from abroad, nothing to dictate.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 29.12.2018, 16:50 PM