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Japanese whalers, and for that matter, the entire Japanese fishing industry are probably the most blandly arrogant eco-rapers on the planet. All the whales they take are for "scientific reseach." and they like to use the meat to feed school children. They are the ones who invented the 25 mile long drift nets (gill nets, from the surface to 500 feet deep) that leave a desert in their wake. They all but wiped out North Pacific salmon. They net every thing and kill what they don't want. They are the ones who bait and gaff sharks, of any size, and type, slice off the fins and deep 6 the rest of the still alive fish.

I suspect the only way they are going to stop is when the oceans are completely barren of all life. Maybe the NorKs could sink Japanese whalers, but I think Kim is too chickens%$#.

The most amusing thing of all is that the Japanese like to use "Cultural Diversity" arguments on the tree huggers, which leaves the less commited eco-loons stuttering.

I'm up in the Pacific Northwest, so I'm familiar the lengths that are taken in an effort to justify these "cultural traditions". Washington State has pretty much given away the farm on seafood quotas to the local tribes.

There's a good short book by Jun Morikawa called, Whaling in Japan: Power, Politics, and Diplomacy. Excerpt at Amazon.

Whaling whoppers debunked - The Japan Times
"The author draws our attention to the ICR-orchestrated media campaign aimed at convincing Japanese that whaling is part of their national identity. The ICR also tries to spur whale consumption, but to little avail. A major problem for whaling advocates is that Japanese consumers are not buying even heavily subsidized whale meat; one third of the meat harvested through "scientific research" remains unsold."
-snip-
"Japan's whale-eating culture was also very limited in scope and, according to Morikawa, is "an invented tradition, only lasting 20 years from the end of WWII to the early 1960s." During the U.S. occupation, whale meat became part of the national school lunch program, explaining why Japan's aging baby boomers evince a nostalgic nationalism over the issue."