A Japanese whaling company has sparked an angry response from animal rights campaigners after it started selling whale meat from vending machines in an effort to boost consumption.
Kyodo Senpaku Co., a Tokyo-based major whaling company, will open four unmanned vending machine stores selling whale meat and processed whale meat products in Tokyo and other locations by mid-February.
This year marks the fifth year since Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission, and the concerned entities aim to increase the uptake of whale-related foods as the first step in protecting the nation’s whaling culture.
For its part, the Fisheries Agency aims to expand the nation’s whale-catch quotas in around two years’ time.
The three machines in the country’s second-largest city Yokohama offer customers whale steak, whale bacon, and whale sashimi.
Whale meat has long been a source of controversy but sales in the new vending machines have quietly gotten off to a good start, the operator says. Anti-whaling protests have subsided since Japan three years ago terminated its much-criticized research hunts in the Antarctic and resumed commercial whaling of the Japanese coasts.
Kyodo Senpaku hopes to expand the vending machines to 100 locations across the country in five years, company spokesperson Konomu Kubo told The Associated Press. A fourth is set to open in Osaka next month.
The idea is to open vending machines near supermarkets, where whale meat is usually not available, to cultivate demand, a task crucial for the industry’s survival.
Major supermarket chains have largely stayed away from whale meat to avoid protests by anti-whaling groups, and they seem to remain cautious even though harassment from activists has subsided in recent years, Kubo said.
“As a result, many consumers who want to eat it cannot find or buy whale meat. We launched vending machines at unmanned stores for those people,” he said.
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Astrid Fuchs of Whale and Dolphin Conservation said in a statement: “This latest cynical sales ploy comes at a time when the fisheries agency in Japan is aiming to expand the nation’s whale-catch quotas – and possibly increase the list of species that can be killed.”
Whale meat used to be very common and popular in Japan since it was an island country isolated from much of the world. However, other livestock like pork, beef, and chicken have become more widely available, and whale meat consumption has been on the decline since the 1960s.
Back in 1962, Japanese consumers ate more than 233,000 tons of whale meat. In 2021, the people of the Asian island nation ate only just 1,000 tons of whale meat, which accounts for a dramatic decrease in the consumption habits of the people of Japan.
The company spokesman added that “Some of the items have sold out.”
Although the global community does not support Japanese whaling, the government of Japan spent five billion yen to prop up the whaling industry in 2020. The government did not want the whaling industry to fail despite decreasing sales and less interest in whale meat from the Japanese community.
Back in 2014, the international court of justice commanded that Japan quit its annual slaughter of more than nine hundred whales in the Southern Ocean. However, Japan claimed that its annual whale hunt was conducted for the benefit of scientific research. Nevertheless, Japan did pull out of the International Whaling Commission and announced that it would quit whale hunts. But the country did admit that it would continue to hunt for whales along the country’s coast.
The International Whaling Commission called for a halt to commercial whaling in 1986, but Japan was still allowed to hunt whales in the Southern Ocean every winter season. This year, the Japanese government set a quota for 379 whales across three species.
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