On the other hand, Japan, spearheading the pro-whaling group, is making a feverish pitch to allow its traditional coastal communities to catch an unspecified number of Minke whales under the same IWC rules that permit the Inupia and Yup'ik peoples of Alaska to hunt the giant creatures.

Even though the IWC, which regulates whaling and is in charge of conservation of the mammals, imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, it has a policy of allowing people in countries such as the United States, Russia and Greenland to hunt otherwise protected whales to satisfy longstanding cultural and subsistence needs.

Japan has been campaigning for 20 years for so-called emergency relief quotas for four of its small whaling towns but its request has been rejected by the IWC, which argues that such an allocation would be a "commercial" quota disallowed under the moratorium.

Japan is going to try again this year and the move, experts say, could be a key focus of the meeting. Japan is already under fire from conservationists for exploiting a loophole in the moratorium, which allows killing of whales for "scientific research."

The richest Asian nation may even use its bargaining power over the United States' regarding aboriginal subsistence whaling quotas to gain votes to back its own demands.

For its request for whale hunting quotas for native communities to be maintained, Washington needs the support of three quarters of the IWC members. Japan and its allies hold enough votes to block such approval.

"We expect the same treatment to be given to any proposal from Japan for a quota for our traditional coastal whaling communities, where the whales would be caught locally, processed locally, distributed locally and consumed locally," Joji Morishita, alternate IWC commissioner for Japan, told AFP.

"People need to ask themselves the question: does it matter whether a whale is hunted under the US's so-called Aboriginal Subsistence, or Iceland or Norway's commercial whaling or Japan's traditional coastal whaling?"

"Of course not. What is of the utmost importance is that the practice is sustainable. And it is," Morishita said.

Japan has denied that it would block the US request to maintain its quota but experts say they are not sure whether its allies will toe the line. In 2002, a Japanese-led coalition nixed the US quota but later backed down.

Last year, Japan and other pro-whaling nations, notably Iceland and Norway, won a razor-thin 33-32 victory, passing a symbolic resolution saying the whaling moratorium was no longer necessary.

Japan, in recent years, supported continuation of subsistence hunting in exchange for the United States showing support in principle for Japan's commercial coastal whaling program. William Hogarth, the US commissioner to the IWC, is reportedly wooing support particularly from Caribbean countries that are allied to Japan on the issue.

"Under the current international balance of interests, whaling would surely continue, at least in the short term," Hogarth said in a report circulated here.

"So any newly negotiated instrument would have to accommodate that fact," he said. This was apparently a response to calls to shut down the IWC following its failure to develop an effective whaling management scheme.

earlier related report
Japanese boatman drops harpoon to turn whale-watcher
Muroto (AFP) Japan, May 24, 2007 Tomohisa Nagaoka owes a lot to whales, having killed thousands during a long career as a whaler, but he has traded his harpoon for binoculars, convinced many Japanese would rather watch than eat them.

"I feel as if whales are part of my body," said Nagaoka, 75, who was born and raised in this former whaling port on Japan's southwestern island of Shikoku. "Whales are a gift from nature."

Nagaoka, who is permanently suntanned with deep wrinkles etched into his forehead, sails out with tourists on his "No. 2 Suehiro-Maru" fishing boat with a whale painted on its bow.

Japan hunts some 1,000 whales a year, to the fury of Western environmentalists, and is set to push again later this month at a meeting in Alaska for a full-scale resumption of commercial whaling banned in 1986.

Nagaoka, once renowned among his colleagues for his skill with a harpoon, decided in his mid-50s to become one of Japan's first whale watching navigators.

At that time, 20 years ago, global restrictions were tightening, leading to the merger of Japan's major whaling companies running controversial missions to the Antarctic.

"Whaling isn't easy, even with fellow whalers. Whaling with people I didn't know was one of my options," he said.

"But I know more about whales than most people," Nagaoka said. "I know what kind of whales they are, where they swim and how they swim. I'd heard that whale watching was about to begin in Japan, so I thought, 'Let's give it a try'."

No national figures are kept on whale-watching. But on the Pacific islands of Ogasawara, Japan's most popular spot for observing the massive mammals at play, some 14,700 people came to watch whales last year, a 20 percent growth from eight years ago, according to the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association.

One trend which few dispute is that Japanese people are eating less whale meat. This flies in the face of the government's insistence that whale meat is part of Japanese culture.

Annual per capita consumption has fallen to a mere 30 grams (one ounce) per person -- equivalent to one slice of sashimi -- compared with 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) per person in the early 1980s before the global moratorium.

While the environmental group Greenpeace and the Japanese government are in perennial discord, the enemies can at least both agree on whale watching.

"Although it's not our official stance, we can support whale watching as a means to use resources in a sustainable manner," said Hideki Moronuki, head of the Japanese fishery ministry's whaling division.

Junichi Sato, the campaign leader for Greenpeace Japan, said: "We suggest that the Japanese government shift funds from whaling to promotion of whale watching, which is still not well organised in Japan."

Nagaoka conceded that whalers were decimating the world's population of the mammals, particularly blue whales which are the biggest animals on Earth and are now an endangered species.

But he said Japan still had the right to catch whales.

"Overhunting is no good," he said. "We used to catch as many as 60 blue whales a day, which was even beyond the mother ship's processing capacity, and some of them were spoiled due to rotting.

"But whaling within reasonable bounds should be allowed for people like the Japanese who have traditionally eaten whale like fish," the old man said. "I believe there is a way that people and whales can live together."

Whale meat does have sentimental value for many older Japanese as it helped feed the country during the severe food shortages that followed World War II.

But falling consumption has left a glut of uneaten whale meat and so the government last year set up a trading company to sell it to hospitals, bars and restaurants.

The government is also reintroducing whale meat to school lunches in the hope of imparting a taste for it to a new generation.

In the whaling heartland of western Wakayama prefecture, nearly 85 percent of public elementary and junior high schools started serving whale in 2005, sometimes in the form of burgers to entice children.

Nagaoka began his career in 1956 at Kyokuyo, one of the nation's biggest whaling firms, joining as an apprentice before becoming a skilled harpoonist.

"Whaling was very dangerous, but a very attractive job," Nagaoka said. "Whales are very smart. They have sharp ears to notice danger. I'd pit my wits against theirs."

As chief harpoonist of his fleet, Nagaoka shot more than 4,000 whales, mainly in the Antarctic Ocean.

"When you hunt whales, you should have no mercy. I tried to harpoon whales for the sake of my company and my family," said Nagaoka, who has two sons.

Japan continues to hunt whales using a loophole in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium that allows the killing of the animals for scientific research. Only Norway and Iceland defy the ban.

IWC regulations allow the meat of whales killed for "research" to be sold on the market, so Japan argues that it is not defying the ban.

But Japan is expected to use the Alaska meeting from May 28 to 31 to push for towns to be designated "subsistence" whaling communities using the same IWC rule that permits indigenous people in Alaska, Siberia and Greenland to hunt whales.

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