The United States U.S. State Department officials met with a representative from the Japanese Embassy on the day the whaling fleet departed for Antarctica to express concerns over illegal whaling. Argentina The Foreign Ministry on 7 January issued a statement urging the Japanese government to halt the fleet's whaling in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary. The German Foreign Minister has informed Greenpeace that he will raise Japan's illegal whaling program when he visits Japan in the spring. The Irish Minister of the Environment has informed Greenpeace campaigner John Bowler that he will urge the Irish Foreign Minister to raise concerns about whaling in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary with his Japanese counterpart. Your country supported the creation of this sanctuary and voted for it at the 1994 meeting of the IWC where it was agreed by a vote of 23 to 1.
Japan is the only country which refuses to recognise the sanctuary.
Japan describes its whaling within the sanctuary as 'scientific' or 'research' whaling but this is just a disguise for what is clearly a commercial operation. The meat produced is sold on the commercial market with a final value, at the retail consumer level, of over 100 million US dollars a year. The information it produces is not needed by the IWC which has repeatedly passed resolutions calling on the government of Japan to end this whaling. Japan cannot claim to be cooperating with the IWC when it ignores calls by the IWC to stop whaling, ignores scientific judgement and continues to carry out thinly disguised commercial whaling in a designated whale sanctuary. We ask that you write to the foreign minister of Japan, urging the Japanese government to suspend this program and to call the vessels back to port.