The country's whaling fleet has sought to catch around 900 minke whales, and a much smaller number of fin and humpback whales, every winter after the International Whaling Commission IWCC) banned commercial whaling in 1986.
Having reduced the Japanese nation to submission, the occupying Allied powers turned decommissioned Japanese vessels into whaling ships, and – with western observers aboard – were sent out to kill whales and use their meat to feed a starving nation.
Australia took Japan to the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague in 2010, accusing Tokyo of exploiting a loophole by hunting whales as scientific research to get around a 1986 ban on commercial whaling.
Many more whales and dolphins die each year through pollution, bycatch, ship-strike: who is going to legislate for them?
In the Faroes, in "European" waters, thousands of pilot whales die each year, driven from the open Atlantic on to the islands' beaches and butchered.
Visas can be arranged through Footloose Sea kayaking was invented in Greenland by Inuit hunters as a means of pursuing seals and whales, but today it is growing in popularity among holidaymakers keen to get up close to the majestic icebergs around the coast.
As well as whalers' harpoons, whales must navigate the dangers of ship strikes, entanglements in shipping nets and other ocean apparatus, disorientating man-made ocean noises, habitat destruction, resource exploitation, climate change and pollution.
The leading court at the UN will rule on Monday on whether Japan has the right to hunt whales in the Antarctic, an emotive case that activists say is make-or-break for the mammals' future.
We see that all whales are selfish idiots.
In this adventure, you sail to the Silver Bank in a liveaboard dive ship then, twice a day, move out on small boats to locate the whales.
The use of the term "scientific" to justify the lethal killing of whales by Japan is not supported by any marine mammal scientists that I know in the present age.
