Newsweek has an online article about whaling, focusing on Japan and the upcoming International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting. It is an interesting topic which pits national sovereignty against international consensus with no easy or obvious solution.

The Japanese delegation at the IWC parley is expected to lobby other countries to relax the moratorium on worldwide commercial whaling that the body imposed in 1986. No other country has been quite as prepared to risk international opprobrium over this issue as Japan, which is allowed to kill up to 1,000 whales a year for “scientific research” under a loophole in the IWC ban. Tokyo wants the body to acknowledge the right of individual countries to engage in whaling along their own coastlines and has threatened to walk out of the IWC and unilaterally resume commercial whaling if a compromise can’t be worked out by the end of next year’s IWC meeting in Portugal.

Most of the world’s whale populations have benefited from the IWC moratorium, which took effect more than 20 years ago (some species have seen 3 percent to 8 percent growth). One of the most endangered species of all, the blue whale, has shown signs of a modest comeback: Relentlessly hunted by Japanese whaling fleets off Chile’s southern shores as recently as the late 1960s, blue whales have returned to those waters in recent years, and at least 250 individual animals have been photographed and identified. That has inspired plans to create a large marine reserve to protect their breeding ground, which is centered off the northern coast of Chile’s Chiloe Island.

Japan’s insistence on its right to pursue whaling operations infuriates environmentalists and leaves others scratching their heads. Though polls show that most Japanese don’t care much for whale meat, a hardcore minority does and defends whaling as a time-honored tradition that is worth preserving. Japan has ceased hunting endangered humpback whales, but Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has justified the yearly slaughter of hundreds of whales on the grounds of scientific investigation. Advocates of the IWC ban dismiss that contention out of hand, arguing that it isn’t necessary to kill the giant mammals to study them. Tokyo’s case is further undermined by evidence of whale blubber turning up on sushi menus and in Japanese school cafeterias. “You wouldn’t know this wasn’t commercial whaling because all the whale meat from scientific whaling is sold on the market,” says David Phillips, executive director of the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, which has lobbied for stronger conservation measures at previous IWC conferences. “And the so-called science is mostly unnecessary.”