Stirring Up a Whale of a Storm

By Peter Stoler

A U.S. deal with Japan would keep hunters in business until 1988

In Luxembourg, protesters swamped the U.S. and Japanese embassies with so many telephone calls that they blocked the lines. In cities as far apart as Bonn, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Christchurch, New Zealand, demonstrators paraded outside the two nations' embassies. In Copenhagen, the harbor statue of the Little Mermaid had a Japanese flag draped at her feet and was blindfolded with an American flag; she was also impaled by a symbolic harpoon. These protests were held around the world last week in the name of peace--peace for the threatened leviathan of the deep, the sperm whale.

The killing of this whale was supposed to have ended after this year's spring hunt by order of the 40-member International Whaling Commission (IWC). But Japan's commercial fleet is still slaughtering sperm whales. And the U.S. Government, to the anguish of environmental groups, is allowing Japan to continue.

The problem goes back to 1981, when Japan joined Norway and the Soviet Union, the only other nations that hunt significant numbers of whales, in filing an objection to the killing ban. For three years the Japanese whaling industry, which employs more than 50,000 people, has been pleading with Tokyo not to put it out of business. At the same time, the government was being pressed by Washington to abide by the ban. Despite this pressure, the Japanese announced that they would catch 400 sperm whales in the 1984-85 season, and in early November a four-ship whaling fleet put out to sea. Two weeks ago, one of the ships returned to port with two sperm whales.

The killing of the whales might have been expected to provoke a quick response from the U.S. The Packwood-Magnuson amendment to the 1976 Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires Washington to punish those countries that "diminish the effectiveness" of the international convention for the regulation of whaling. It can do this by curtailing their fishing rights and slashing by 50% the amount of fish they are allowed to take from American territorial waters. Such sanctions would have little impact on countries that do their fishing close to home. But they would have an enormous effect on the fish-eating Japanese, who last year alone accounted for 971,000 metric tons, or nearly 75% of the 1.3 million metric tons of fish taken from U.S. waters by foreign fishermen.

The U.S. Government, however, has declined to impose penalties. Reluctant to antagonize a major trading partner, the Administration has instead tried to make a deal. After two weeks of talks with the Japanese, the U.S. announced two weeks ago that it was dropping the threats of punitive action, and in return the Japanese had agreed to end all commercial whaling by the end of 1988. But whether the Japanese will stand by the agreement appears to be in doubt. Late last week, Shigeru Hasui, managing director of the Japan Whaling Association, declared that "we do not intend to stop whaling after 1988 because there is no reason to do so."

Environmentalists are outraged by the Administration's compromise. "It's an absolute sellout," says Craig Van Note, executive vice president of a Washington-based consortium of animal-welfare groups. Thomas Garrett, the head of the U.S. delegation to the IWC's 1981 meeting, agrees. "What the Administration is actually doing is caving in to Japanese pressure," he says. "The U.S. has not won a promise from Japan to end commercial whaling and may not even have a deal to limit sperm whaling." Conservation groups have sent U.S. Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige a letter documenting Japanese whale kills this year and urging him to "certify" the Japanese as violators of the IWC agreement. If he does not, they say they will take the Government to court. William Rogers, who represents the environmentalists, notes that a lawsuit would be "based on the premise that any commitment by the Secretary of Commerce not to certify Japa nesesperm whaling would be an unlawful agreement not to enforce U.S. law."

In the future, Japan can expect to meet more protests from save-the-whalers. The activist conservation group Greenpeace, for one, is organizing a boycott of Japan Air Lines by attempting to pressure travel agents in twelve countries served by JAL to ticket passengers on other carriers. But there is some fear that the protests will be too late and that the U.S. reluctance to censure the Japanese might encourage other nations to resume whaling. That could bring to an end the decade-long effort to save sperm whales from depletion. In Hasui's view, that is not a problem because, he says, the annual Japanese catch is a tiny fraction of the estimated 200,000 sperm whales in the oceans. Nor is there a substitute for the whale: in Japan, whalemeat is a prized delicacy.

--By Peter Stoler Reported by Neil Gross/Tokyo and Christophei Redman/Washington

With reporting by Neil Gross/Tokyo and Christophei Redman/Washington