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CoolHand [soylentnews.org] writes:

Per the Huff [huffingtonpost.com], Japan's government thumbs its nose at international law at the behest of their commercial fishing industries, and gives permission to "deal with" protesters.

The madness behind the Japan government's continued support of hunting whales and dolphins apparently is catching. Last month, Japan's Parliament passed a series of laws aiming to return to commercial whaling and to allow arrest of people protesting whaling and dolphin hunting.

For many years, the Japan Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry has been the main government advocate to support continued whaling, including the bogus "scientific" whaling that has been conducted by Japan every year since the worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in 1986-87.

Around 45,168 whales have been killed since the moratorium: of these dead whales, 19,167 were killed by Japan's "research whaling," 10,395 were killed by Norwegian whalers, and 1,086 were killed by Iceland. Japan would likely have killed even more whales had not the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society interfered with their whaling in the Antarctic, a campaign celebrated by the Animal Planet series "Whale Wars."

[...] Remarkably, the people of Japan have been decidedly unenthusiastic about buying and eating whale meat. 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.

The new legislation claims the purpose of Japan's scientific whaling is to set the stage for a return to full-scale commercial whaling on the high seas, a move currently blocked by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). But the Japan government has consistently ignored objections and resolutions from the IWC against its scientific whaling and has even ignored a decision by the International Court of Justice that they close down their whaling activities as undermining the IWC.

The new Japanese legislation includes funding to repair the aging whale ships being used for the current bogus "scientific" whaling and guarantees funding for whale "research" in the future.

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. (Memo to Japan government: Sea Shepherd is right.)

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.

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