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Several days after that, Greenpeace whaling opponents maneuvered a small inflatable boat between a Japanese whaling ship and a tanker in a bid to block a refueling.
Meanwhile, the Japanese government is expressing increasing impatience with international rules that ban commercial whaling. "As far as the whale issue is concerned, our position is rigid," said Hideki Moronuki, chief of the whaling section of Japan's Fisheries Agency. "We have made so many compromises already."
The Japanese originally announced that they would take up to 50 humpback whales in the current hunt in addition to 800 minke and 50 fin whales. The humpback kill would have been the first in more than 40 years for a recovering species whose numbers had been reduced by about 90 percent by industrial whaling.
Under pressure from the United States and the European Union, where the humpback holds a special place in environmentalists' hearts, Japan backed away from that hunt. But the fleet is proceeding against the rest of the prey.
Japan: Time for 'normalization'
The 78-member International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed the global ban in 1986 and has since declined to lift it, despite repeated demands to do so from Japan and other countries that support whaling.
Citing the language of the IWC charter, Japan notes that the organization was created in 1946 not only to conserve whales but also to "make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry."
The world's whale population has substantially recovered since the ban on commercial hunting, Japan argues, so it is now time for "normalization" -- sustainable hunting of species whose numbers have bounced back. "The anti-whaling camp has been insisting only on conservation," said Moronuki, the Fisheries Agency official. "This contradicts the spirit of the commission."
He said that unless the IWC moves this year to allow commercial whaling, the organization "will collapse," as far as Japan is concerned. "We consider whales as one of our fishing resources," Moronuki said. "If we compromise about whales, we may have to compromise about all our fishing."
Japan's much-criticized whale hunt is underway at a time when the country's leader, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, is trying to market Japan as an environmental role model.
"By using such 'environmental power' to the fullest," Fukuda said this month, "I will promote a shift to a low-carbon society, which will serve as a precedent for the world." Aboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, which has been dogging the Japanese whaling fleet since Jan. 12, environmental activists scoff.
"If you say you want to be a world leader in environmental issues, then you send ships out to hunt whales, you lose credibility," Sara Holden, coordinator of the Greenpeace whales campaign, said in a telephone interview. "Of course this is hurting their image."
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