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A recent law promoting whaling allows Japan to take a key step towards resuming commercial hunting of the giant mammals that are "a great source of food," officials said on Thursday.
Japan defies international protests to carry out what it calls scientific research whaling, having repeatedly said its ultimate goal is to whale commercially again. In the 2016-2017 season, its fleet took 333 minke whales in the Antarctic.
The new law, passed in June, will help enshrine as a "national responsibility" an activity that was previously just a tacit policy, said Shigeki Takaya, director of the Whaling Affairs Office at Japan's Fisheries Agency.
"While the government has given its support to the implementation of scientific research into whales, it is heartening to see that the law clarifies its position even further," Takaya told a news conference.
In 2014, the International Court of Justice ruled that Japan should halt Antarctic whaling.
Per the Huff, Japan's government thumbs its nose at international law at the behest of their commercial fishing industries, and gives permission to "deal with" protesters.
In a 2012 poll conducted for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), 88.8% of the Japanese public said they had not bought any whale meat in the past 12 months. While 26.6% said they supported Japan's scientific whaling, 18.5% opposed the hunts and the rest of the population were undecided, hardly a ringing endorsement of Japan's bloody whaling policy.
Much of the whale meat brought in from the scientific whaling scheme is being held in warehouses, frozen because it does not sell well on the Japan market. Sales of dolphin meat have also plummeted. Because sales of whale meat are so poor, the Japan government has subsidized the scientific whaling scheme at 5 billion yen ($44.7 million US) annually.
Furthermore, the new legislation allows Japan to send vessels to Antarctica with the fleet specifically to deal with harassment from such organizations as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which seeks to interfere with whaling activities they contend violate international law. [...] The legislation also gives new authority to Japan immigration enforcement to deal with people who may be "likely" to sabotage or harass whaling vessels in Japan. This is an obvious effort to legalize the blocking of people, such as members of Sea Shepherd, who come to Japan to legally and peacefully protest the dolphin hunts in Taiji.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @06:22PM (1 child)
Power, status and blood are transitory states. Power is acquired and lost over time. Similarly blood and status mix and change as society changes and the generations pass and mutations form. Justice, however, is absolute. So, claiming something that's always changing can fulfill the criteria for something that always stays the same just because you advantageously happen to posses it presently is hypocritical.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 23 2017, @03:00AM
But that doesn't necessarily matter to the person with the opinion. If those transitions don't happen, then the holder of the belief remains irritatingly consistent.
Not even remotely true. Justice is notoriously subjective. There are plenty of examples where people think that some activity is wrong and should be punished, while others do not. And it changes as we develop technologies that create new ways to be just and unjust.
There can be no justice without an intelligence to implement it. You can take power or status away and still conceive of patterns of justice. If you take intelligence away, there is nothing to conceive.