New Book by Whaler Exposes Cheating

In a bombshell dropped on the eve of the IWC meeting in Shimonoseki, Japan, a longtime coastal whaler wrote a book called the “Rise and Fall of Japan’s Coastal Whaling.” The book exposes systematic and rampant cheating by whaling companies, the tendency of Fisheries Agency’s inspectors to turn a blind eye to the underreporting of numbers of whales caught, and the exaggeration of the size of immature whales killed.

The seventy-five year old author, Isao Kondo, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, “I didn’t mean to expose any secrets from the whaling days of old. I just thought I ought to record what actually happened.”