Greenpeace yesterday met the returning Japanese whaling fleet factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, with placards reading “Southern Ocean Whaling: Cover-ups, lies, 1.2 billion yen in taxes”.
The environmental organisation also sought to document the offloading of the ships cargo of whale meat, which it calls "the by-product of the so-called scientific hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary".
The organisation says that last year, boxes of embezzled whale meat, some falsely labelled 'cardboard', were offloaded and couriered to the homes of the ship’s crew. Whistleblowers told Greenpeace that this was standard practice, but the Fisheries Agency of Japan (FAJ), the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) and Kyodo Senpaku (KS) publically denied it. It was only later that the three claimed that the boxes of prime whale meat were approved as 'souvenirs'.
It is now one year since Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki first exposed the embezzlement of whale meat from the fleet. They are still on trial and facing up to ten years in prison.
The FAJ promised greater transparency, but Greenpeace says that in January it again covered up the truth by heavily censoring documents containing whale meat sales data, released to Greenpeace following a Freedom of Information request. The FAJ, ICR and KS also denied another request to allow a Greenpeace documentation crew to monitor the whale meat being offloaded from the fleet this year.
“With the whaling fleet’s history of embezzlement, Greenpeace has requested that all whale meat offloaded be documented,” said Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan. “If the “souvenir” practice has been legitimised, the public should at least be told how much of the 1.2 billion yen it has spent subsidising the so-called scientific whaling expedition has been spent on buying gifts for the crew.”
