So you admit that our emotions are choking off your ability to reason. That's helpful.
Every farmer has affection for their animals. Go to a 4H show sometime and look at the love between the kids and the animals they groom and show. This affection, however, does not choke off their brains. (How does it feel to be less emotionally and intellectually mature than a sixth grader?) The animals will become food, and more often than not, the folks who love the animal will do the slaughtering, as has been done for thousands of years.
Yes, of course, you got to see a whale up close, so you're now a magical being, and far more enlightened that the hundreds of millions of other humans who have loved, and then eaten, their animals. We're proud of you, and can only hope that you get elected Global Emperor soon, to save us all from ourselves and our foolish opinions and cultural norms. But since you're clearly a lying, hypocritical moron, who feels instead of thinks, thankfully your opinions won't sway many. I'm fully for the Japanese whaling, and I hope they take the ones that you've encountered up close as soon as possible... and send you photographs to prove it.
(And yes, it is ridiculous that they have to lie about the "research" thing, but that is entirely due to nincompoops like yourself who have made a myriad of idiotic rules that forces them to make such statements so that they can continue to pursue their livelihoods and help feed their people in the ways that they have done for hundreds of years. This does not give you an actual valid debate point. It is simply a reality that further shows what a pain-in-the-tail obstruction to real life that people like you have become.)
Whales are extremely intelligent and at one point the "hundreds of years of tradition" nearly killed them off. After a long and difficult period, we have international conventions to protect them - except for the well-heeled Japanese who just ignore the laws and kill them anyway with, as you noted, using specious signs saying that it's "Research", as if anyone needs to kill 1,000 Minke whales per year for research. But you don't mind the lying.
I am not a bleeding heart. When my country needed me, I did my share and more to fight and kill those I had to. At some point you gain a greater appreciation for what life and death really mean and particularly as you get older, life becomes something you take more seriously.
It's a shame I can't take you sailing and show you what whales and porpoises are like. They are clearly several steps above any other animal form and deserve protection.
The Japanese are energetically killing whales and porpoises and hunting Bluefin Tuna almost to extinction. Should this type of worldwide campaign at the expense of the rest of the world be allowed to go on, just because they have the money and the influence? You don't really believe that, do you?