Japan Fleet Sets Off to Hunt Humpbacks

By HIROKO TABUCHI

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan – Japanese whalers set off into the South Pacific on Sunday with orders to kill humpback whales for the first time in decades. The hunt is certain to inflame tensions in the standoff between anti-whaling forces and Japan.

Angry environmental activists have pledged to chase Japan’s whalers to the Antarctic.

"The Japanese government’s scientific whaling program is a sham," said Karli Thomas, expedition leader aboard the Greenpeace boat Esperanza, waiting outside Japanese territorial waters to confront the fleet. "Whaling has no place in Antarctica – it’s a place of peace and science, and this is not science."

International Whaling Commission, or IWC, allows Japan’s annual research whaling mission, but anti-whaling activists call it a cover-up for a commercial hunt. Meat from Japan’s scientific catch is sold commercially.

The large-scale hunt for up to 50 humpbacks is believed to be the first for the species since a 1963 moratorium that put the whales under international protection.

Scientists say the knobby-headed humpback whales – a favorite among whale-watchers – are intelligent creatures that communicate through lengthy "songs."

They grow up to 48 feet long and weigh as much as 40 tons, but they are extremely acrobatic, often throwing themselves out of the water, swimming on their backs with both flippers in the air, or slapping the water with their tails.

The Japanese mission was also hunting for up to 935 Antarctic minke whales and 50 fin whales through April in what Japan’s Fisheries Agency says will be its largest scientific whale hunt in the South Pacific.

Four ships left the southern port of Shimonoseki after a departure ceremony at the wharf. Two observation ships had left northern Japan on Wednesday.

Japan, a major commercial whaling nation before a comprehensive ban in 1986, has killed almost 10,500 mostly minke and Brydes whales under a research permit issued by the IWC – and its catch is growing.

This season’s target of up to 1,035 whales is more than double the number the country hunted a decade ago.

International bans on humpback whaling were agreed upon in the 1950s and 1960s, after they were hunted to near-extinction. But a few are killed under a subsistence program in Greenland the Caribbean.

The former Soviet Union defied the bans and hunted humpbacks until 1973.

The Japanese whaling hunt is planned to last until April, Japan’s Fisheries Agency said in a written statement.

The agency’s whaling chief, Hideki Moronuki, said killing whales lets marine biologists study their internal organs.

"Humpback whales in our research area are rapidly recovering," he said. "Taking 50 humpbacks from a population of tens of thousands will have no significant impact whatsoever."

But the American Cetacean Society estimates the global humpback population at 30,000-40,000, about a third of the number before modern whaling. The species is listed as "vulnerable" by the Swiss-based World Conservation Union.