Whale meat firm hunts customers by vending machine

A Japanese whaling operator is bolstering sales with whale meat vending machines.

The Kujira (Whale) Store, an unmanned outlet just opened in the port of Yokohama, houses three machines for whale sashimi, whale bacon, whale skin and whale steak as well as canned whale meat at prices from 1,000 yen (HK$60).

The outlet features vending machines decorated with cartoon whales and is the third location to launch in the Japanese capital region as part of Kyodo Senpaku's sales drive.

Whale meat has long been a source of controversy, but the machine sales have got off to a good start.

Anti-whaling protests have subsided since Japan three years ago ended hunts in the Antarctic and resumed whaling off Japan. But conservationists now fear the move could be a step to expanded whaling.

"The issue is not the vending machines themselves but what they may lead to," says Nanami Kurasawa, head of the Dolphin & Whale Action Network.

Kyodo Senpaku hopes to increase the number of vending machines to 100 locations in five years, company executive Konomu Kubo says.

The idea is to have machines near supermarkets to cultivate demand.

Major supermarkets have stayed away from whale meat to avoid protests, Kubo explains, so "many consumers who want to eat it cannot find or buy whale meat."

The meat comes mostly from whales being caught off Japan's northeast coast.

Japan resumed commercial whaling in July 2019 after withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission, ending 30 years of what it called "research whaling" - criticized by conservationists as a cover for commercial hunts banned by the IWC in 1988.

Under its commercial whaling off Japan last year caught 270 whales - less than 80 percent of the quota and fewer than the number it once hunted in the Antarctic and the northwestern Pacific.

The decline also occurred as fewer minke whales were caught by small-scale coastal whalers.

But in a show of determination to keep the whaling industry alive Kyodo Senpaku is starting construction of a new mother ship.

Yet whaling is losing support in other nations such as Iceland, and whales may be moving away from Japan due to a scarcity of saury, a staple of their diet, and other fish.

Whaling in Japan involves only a few hundred people and one operator and accounted for less than 0.1 percent of total meat consumption in recent years.

Still, conservative legislators staunchly support whaling and consumption of the meat as part of a cultural tradition.