Whale meat is not only being consumed, but also being traded in cars.
Activists' protests have started in Japan. This food has long been in decline and has now disappeared from the shelves of many supermarkets. The idea to resell it came from Kyodo Senpaku, Japan's leading whaling company, which recently opened its stores in Yokohama and the capital Tokyo.
Next month, the company will also open one in the city of Osaka, and expects to reach a hundred distributors in the next five years of kujira (whale meat) across the country.
Although the government claims that whale consumption is an important part of Japanese culture, the peak was in the early 1960s (233,000 tons per year), but consumption has since decreased steadily: in 2021 it was only a thousand tons, compared to 2.6 million for chicken and 1.27 million for beef.
Environmentalists argue that such initiatives are desperate attempts to revive interest in a cruel activity.
In 2014, the International Court of Justice ordered Japan to stop its annual slaughter of whales in the Southern Ocean.
