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Jake de Grazia

Posted on Monday 17th May 2010

New York Times blogger Andy Revkin says there is reason to believe that the Japanese whaling industry is dying.

In a Monday morning blog post, he brought up both a Martin Fackler article in Saturday's New York Times and a series of conversations he had with Japanese diplomats a few months ago.

The diplomats got in touch after reading Revkin's writing on the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, and, after speaking with them, Revkin felt that "there was a clear sense that the Japanese government was trying to gauge American views on its whaling efforts, perhaps recognizing that its ongoing investment in, and aggressive defense of, whale hunts was creating a significant branding problem, at the very least."

The Times article mentions the foreign environmental activism that is leading to the branding problem, but it also highlights opposition to whaling from within Japan:

Even its proponents concede that the only real purpose of research whaling is to sustain the shrinking whaling industry, even though much of the meat piles up uneaten in freezers and the last private company dropped out of the Antarctic hunt four years ago. That, in turn, has led to a new round of criticism over the program’s failure to fulfill its own goals of preserving Japan’s whaling industry and traditional whaling culture.

Looks like whaling is both ethically and economically questionable.