And here they just scrapped the Rainbow Warrior II. COINCIDENCE???? Probably.

Wasn't eating whale taken as a minor marker of national poverty in the UK postwar? (I'm going by stray references to "tinned whale" here and there, as well as "whale steaks" in Noel Coward's mean-spirited, but lyrically clever, "Don't Make Fun of the Fair".)

It first utilized a measure called blue whale units, or BWUs, to measure whale takes.40 Each baleen whale was evaluated based on the amount of oil it yielded so that one BWU was equal to one blue whale, two fin whales, two and half humpback whales, or six sei whales.

2. So my mother would have had me believe. It was mostly available during the war, when the UK had to eat pretty much anything that wasn't immediately toxic, but I believe they kept it on the market for a few years afterwards.

2: It's considered poor-people-food in Norway.

One of those links says it's poor-country-food in Japan, hence collapsed consumption since the 1960s.

6: Which link? The IFAW one said "Polls have consistently shown that, among older generations who ate whale meat in greater quantities in the 1950s and early 1960s, there is a greater fondness for whale meat and support of commercial whaling."

I was surprised to learn in the same paper that in 1945-60, whale was usually 30-40% of meat consumption in Japan - though importantly, those figures exclude fish.

7: I meant the IFAW link. You're right it doesn't say 6 in so many words. I think it does support the inference though.

Heebietake: I learned of the bluefin thing via this article from 2001, which is interesting because Japan started unilateral scientific tuna-fishing in 1998 to support its contention that stocks had recovered sufficiently for quotas to be raised, and based on the subsequent history of the organization, their results persuaded NZ and Australia, which have opposed the Antarctic whaling. The OP assumes optimistically that the Antipodes changed position because the science was good, rather than to appease their own fishing lobbies (which they might be politically free to do because tunas aren't charismatic megafauna and do taste great).

tunas aren't charismatic megafauna

Mr. Limpet was pretty charismatic. Wasn't he a tuna? [Googles.] No. No, he was not.

The Starkist spokesfish, Charlie the Tuna, claimed to be a tuna with good taste - not so sure about charisma.

The sorry Charlie tagline was pretty wide spread, I'm here to tell you.

Belatedly catching up. Whale meat consumption has been declining in Japan for many years, despite concerted attempts to boost it, so there's a huge stockpile from all the Antarctic whaling that will take years to work through. My kids were given it for school lunch a couple of times, with much fanfare, but have never shown any inclination to seek it out again, and it's rare to see it in supermarkets now.

The Antarctic whaling expeditions have been a major hurdle for relations between Japan and Australia/New Zealand for many years, and have been wasting money to satisfy (a) Abe's home constituency of Shimonoseki, where the Antarctic whaling fleet is based, (b) the LDP-dominated coastal whaling constituencies, and (c) the Japanese right and center-right in general, for whom whaling has a political valency similar to that of gun control in the US.

With Trump in the White House, Abe has been going on a diplomatic offensive all around the Pacific, trying to mend fences with Russia and pushing for stronger ties with India as well as reinforcing the current alliances. I see the cessation of Antarctic whaling in that context, as removing sand from the gears in Japan's relationship with Australia. At the same time, Abe is able to throw some red (whale) meat to the base by withdrawing from the IWC and boosting coastal whaling, which was going on in any case. What's interesting to me is that Abe thinks it's a sufficiently good tradeoff that he's willing to throw his own home constituency under the bus.

Call me Aussenpolitik! Thanks Ume. I haven't been tracking, but ISTM that Japan has been the one status quo power pulling its weight since 2016.

In which context, this presumably frees up some foreign aid funds from the vote-buying campaign in the IWC.

In which context, this presumably frees up some foreign aid funds from the vote-buying campaign in the IWC.

Others have also made this point, but it's not clear yet how that will shake out. Japan is the largest single funder of the IWC, so the latter will also have to do some rebudgeting.

I've added a photo of six-year-old Tatsu on holiday in Abe's home constituency to the Flickr pool.

Springfield, Illinois, is an underrated resort area.

Does it also have giant harpoons for kids to play with?

The inland waterways of the USA sometimes drove development in really counterintuitive ways.

It's America. They just give the kiddies guns.

Whaling constituencies! That makes a lot of sense, I knew domestic support for whaling was partly spite at being told not to do it, but that didn't seem like enough to explain the amount of subsidy the government keeps shelling out.