This is following the announcement by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries that it has recalled its Antarctic whaling fleet from the Southern Ocean, marking the fleet\u2019s shortest ever season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis historic announcement confirms what we all know: that Japan\u2019s whaling serves no purpose whatsoever and the fleet has no business in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary,\u201d said Junichi Sato, Executive Director of Greenpeace Japan. \u201cAll the whaling programme has produced is a stockpile of thousands of tonnes of frozen whale meat, the waste of billions of Japanese taxpayer\u2019s yen, and a culture of corruption and scandal. An early return of the whaling fleet is not enough \u2013 Japan\u2019s whaling ships should never leave port again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Polls show that over 70% of Japanese people do not support distant water hunting of whales far from Japan Greenpeace has been working to expose the corruption that has helped sustain its commercial whaling program, conducted under the guise of scientific research for years. Two Greenpeace activists – Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki – were recently found guilty after having exposed a whale-meat embezzlement scandal and work continues in Japan to shine a light on this senseless hunt to the Japanese public, whose tax dollars subsidise the hunt for whales in an internationally-recognised whale sanctuary. Sato and Suzuki are appealing the guilty verdict entered against them in the whale meat embezzlement case.<\/p>\n
The Fisheries Agency of Japan recently admitted that five of its officials, who sailed with the whaling fleet to oversee its activities, had accepted expensive gifts of whale meat from the fleet\u2019s operators.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Japanese public doesn\u2019t want to be force-fed whale meat or be forced to bankroll a corrupt and dying industry,\u201d added Sato. \u201cGreenpeace is urging the Japanese government to not only investigate the whale meat scandal we exposed three years ago, but also start taking real action towards protection of the world\u2019s oceans\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greenpeace is demanding that Japan\u2019s government finally end its commercial whaling programme and re-open an investigation into corruption scandals inside the industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-3812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3812"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=3812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}