Tensions came to the fore on January 8 after a collision involving Japan’s whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru, and Arctic Sunrise, one of two Greenpeace protest vessels. Each side blamed the other for the incident. The Greenpeace boats have harried the whalers at close quarters, interfering with their hunt for minke and fin whales.

The NZPA news agency reported January 11 that the Japanese Fisheries Agency “was considering asking its Maritime Police Agency to send armed aircraft to defend the whaling ships.”

Christopher Carter, minister of conservation in New Zealand’s Labour Party-led government, told reporters on January 10 that the air force’s Orion aircraft are “already watching the situation.” He congratulated Greenpeace for having “blown the lid on what the Japanese are doing…. The Japanese are getting acutely embarrassed by these images of bleeding and dying whales.”

Carter rejected an appeal by Green Party leader and Member of Parliament Jeanette Fitzsimons for the New Zealand navy to sail a warship to the scene of confrontation.

In debates before the International Whaling Commission (IWC), officials from New Zealand and Australia, donning their conservation hats, have taken a lead among representatives of imperialist powers in condemning the minke whale hunts carried out in the name of research by ships from Japan and Norway. Although it bans commercial whaling, the IWC has voted to allow a limited catch for scientific purposes.

The media has cranked up the volume of nationalist rhetoric here during the recent escalation. On January 12 the Herald’s editorial cartoon employed a racist caricature harking back to World War II. It depicted a Japanese Zero fighter with a buck-toothed pilot at the controls. The caption read, “Early Japanese scientific whale research vessel…circa 1940s.”
 
 
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