Whale burgers go on sale in Japan

A fast food chain in northern Japan began offering a whale burger today as anti-whaling nations urged the country to cut back on its catch at an international conference on whaling.

Restaurant chain Lucky Pierrot serves a burger with deep fried minke whale meat and lettuce topped with mayonnaise at 380 yen (€2.90) at its 10 outlets in Hakodate on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, once a whaling hub.

Japan is facing increasing international criticism for its research whaling programme in which the whales are killed in order to study them and their meat is then sold. Critics say it is commercial hunting in disguise.

Miku Oh, an official for Lucky Pierrot, said that the chain was only utilising stock meat obtained from the scientific research and that it wanted to preserve the culture of eating whale meat.

“People in other countries may think eating whale is strange, but it is our culture,” she said.

Oh said the whale for the burger was cooked in such a way that “it tastes like beef and tuna, and since it is deep-fried it has no odour”.

At an annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, being held in Ulsan, South Korea, anti-whaling countries passed a resolution yesterday urging Japan to drop plans to more than double the number of whales it hunts each year for research.

The commission also rejected a proposal to end its almost two-decade-old ban on commercial whaling, dealing a blow to Japan and other pro-whaling nations that say stocks of some species have recovered enough to allow limited hunts.

Japan says it must kill whales to properly study them, including their stomach contents to glean details of their diets.

Environmental groups and anti-whaling countries, including the US and Britain, say Japan’s research whaling program is a thinly-disguised commercial whaling venture, stressing that meat from the whales is sold to Japanese supermarkets and restaurants to help fund the programme.

Annually, Japan kills about 400 minke whales in the Antarctic and another 210 whales – 100 minke whales, 50 Bryde’s whales, 50 sei whales and 10 sperm whales - in the north-western Pacific.