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Natsumi Mizumoto
Friday, June 7, 2002 at 09:30 JST TOKYO ? A senior U.S. Embassy official in Japan on Thursday called on the Japanese government not to repeat its opposition to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) renewing whaling quotas for U.S. and Russian indigenous peoples as it did in the IWC's just-ended annual meeting.
Kevin Maher, minister-counselor in charge of environment, science and technology at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, told a press conference Washington will try to reverse the IWC decision not to renew a five-year quota of 280 Arctic bowhead whales by the time the existing quota expires at the end of this year.
Maher spoke about what he considers a misunderstanding by Japanese media over what happened in the May 20-24 meeting in the western Japan city of Shimonoseki.
In the meeting, Japan waged a successful but controversial bid to let the IWC vote down a renewal of whaling quotas for indigenous peoples in Alaska and Russia's Far East as part of a failed attempt to gain permission for four Japanese communities to hunt minke whales off the Japanese coast.
'Alaskan Inuit are people who are dependent on whales as food from a long time ago, particularly in winter when they are isolated without road access and with frozen waters,' Maher said.
'But people in Japan's four communities can go to convenience stores if they have no food in the winter,' he added.
Maher, meanwhile, said the United States is not a staunch antiwhaling country that opposes hunting the mammals under any circumstances.
The country currently opposes lifting the 16-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling because the IWC lacks scientific proof of recoveries in whale stocks as well as a whaling monitoring and observing scheme. (Kyodo News)
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