These inefficiencies result from a policy that hides its true motives: If the Japanese government adamantly defends its marginal whaling rights, it is because it fears encroachment on its critical fishing activities. This concern is not only a point of cultural pride and a commercial necessity; it is also perceived as a strategic imperative. Japan catches several million tons of seafood a year and is the third-largest importer of seafood, behind the European Union and the United States. Japanese eat more fish per capita than the people of any other industrialized nation.

The problematic use of whaling to safeguard fisheries dates back to the early 1980s and discussions about an international moratorium on commercial whaling. With the negotiations stalled because Japan opposed the idea of a ban, the American government threatened to limit Japanese ships’ access to fishing stocks in United States waters unless Japan withdrew its objection. Japan complied in 1986, privileging fisheries over whaling. But the United States then curtailed Japan’s access to American fish stocks anyway. And in 1987 Japan announced it would resume whaling under the controversial pseudo-scientific program still in place today.

Since then, more hidebound Japanese bureaucrats, particularly in the Fisheries Agency, have feared that giving ground on whaling would undermine Japan’s ability to harvest other seafood. Joji Morishita, now Japan’s commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, let slip this rationale in an interview in 2000. He said he worried that conceding too much would “set a precedent” and that “once the principle of treating wildlife as a sustainable resource is compromised, our right to exploit other fish and animal products would be infringed upon.”

The Japanese government has been hostile to the creation of sanctuaries for threatened species as well as to any restrictions on indiscriminate catching methods, like the drift nets used in the 1990s or the huge, sinuous long lines in use today. Even with the endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna, a clear case of overexploitation, Japanese negotiators have pushed hard to ensure that oversight is conducted by smaller regional bodies, like the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, rather than high-profile international bodies created by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species. In January 2008, the business magazine Shukan Toyo Keizai quoted a government source as stating, “If we give an inch on the whaling issue, we will also have to back down on tuna.”

Perhaps sensing that this domino theory might not convince non-Japanese, the whaling lobby also makes another, spurious, case: that whales, rather than humans, are responsible for declining global fisheries. The Institute of Cetacean Research claims that whales are “top predators” and “consume a colossal amount of fish.” Never mind overfishing or pollution. And never mind that many whales don’t eat the seafood prized by fishing fleets, or that many areas with recovering whale populations also boast abundant fish stocks. According to the I.C.R.’s twisted logic, to protect fish you must cull whales.