Children watch as whale butchered in Japan

One of Japan's coastal whaling towns butchered its first catch of the season in front of watching children today.

The team in the village two hours from Tokyo pulled two Baird's beaked whales caught yesterday onto a landing station with pulleys and ropes, and chopped them into bricks of meat and blubber for sale.

It was Wada's first catch since the International Whaling Commission rejected a Japanese proposal in May to grant its coastal whalers rights to expand their limited catches, and whalers there were angry.

Yoshinori Shoji, head of Wada's Gaibo Hogei whaling company, argued that whales should be managed like any other "natural resource", and he rejected anti-whaling arguments that the animals should be protected at all costs.

There is a long-running whaling tradition in the region. Japanese hunters have caught Baird's beaked whales on the Boso Peninsula, where Wada is located, since the early 1600s. Shoji himself is a third-generation whaler.

But IWC restrictions on the types and numbers of whales that can be caught have dealt a blow to Wada and three other Japanese towns that host coastal whalers.

Japan has fought for years against a 1986 IWC moratorium on commercial whaling, but anti-whaling nations - such as the United States, Australia and Britain - have so far blocked Tokyo's efforts to win more hunting rights for its whalers.

These days, Japan's government limits coastal whalers to a total of 66 whales a year, and Shoji's company has rights to 14 of them, he said. The coastal programme is separate from the 1,000 whales that Japan catches under a scientific program sanctioned by the IWC.

In an effort to keep the old tradition - and business - alive, Wada invites local schoolchildren to watch the first butchering of the season. Today, about 50 youngsters gathered around the whaling station to watch.