Wearing a toy whale hat, whale tie and a whale motif shirt, Hideki Tokoro spends much of his days thinking about the world’s largest mammals. But he doesn’t want to protect them. He wants to hunt them.
To do that his company Kyodo Senpaku has built and launched a brand-new whaling $48 million “mothership” – the Kangei Maru, reports CNN.
“We are proud of catching whales and are very proud of this ship which will allow us to begin offshore mothership-style whaling this year,” Tokoro told reporters as he escorted them around the 370-foot, 9,300-ton vessel that set sail last Saturday for an eight-month tour of the country’s northern waters.
The new ship replaces the Nisshin Maru, the infamous whaling factory vessel dubbed by activists as a “floating slaughterhouse” that was decommissioned in 2020 after more than 30 years of service, during which it frequently clashed with anti-whaling activists.
The Kangei Maru is bigger and faster than its predecessor, the company says, and is equipped with state-of-the-art drones able to travel a reported 100 kilometres (62 miles) to allow crews of smaller boats to quickly locate and kill whales.
But activists say the ship’s high-powered features, including a cruising range of 13,000 kilometres (more than 8,000 miles) and its ability to sail for up to 60 days, suggests that Japan is setting its sights on whales far beyond its northern waters.
“Japan has never given up on its whaling ambitions,” veteran anti-whaling activist Paul Watson told CNN. “The only purpose of a vessel like that is so it can travel long distances to the Southern Ocean to hunt whales, (and) what the whalers are doing right now is just a test run. They are testing out the new ship in their waters.”
We need to cull whales
The Kangei Maru boasts a slipway large enough to haul 85-foot whales from the sea that leads to an indoor flensing deck the size of two basketball courts.
There, workers will strip away the blubber before cutting up the whale flesh on enormous cutting boards, before vacuum-packing and storing the meat in 40 industrial freezers, ready for sale.
“Whales are at the top of the food chain. They compete with humans by eating marine creatures that should be feeding other fish,” Tokoro said on the tour.
“We need to cull whales to keep the balance of the ecosystem – it’s our job and mission to protect oceans for the future.” He also told CNN that most of the ship’s catch would be killed “almost instantly” by cannons at sea. “We aim for perfection, but some of them may suffer. In such cases, we will use a rifle to finish the job.”
Besides objecting to the slaughter of one of the ocean’s most majestic creatures, marine conservation groups and scientists have highlighted the important role which whales play in helping to tackle the climate crisis through sequestering and storing planet-heating carbon emissions.
“Whales are not just consumers in ocean eco-systems – they recycle a ton of nutrients into the environment which helps stimulate plant-life growth,” said marine ecologist Ari Friedlaender, also rejecting pro-whaling arguments that commercial hunts could be “sustainable.”
“Humans have a very long history of killing whales and have not done a good job of being able to sustainably harvest animals,” he said. “There is no way to sustainably harvest a wild animal like that.”
