Can i eat whale in japan

Whale represents only 0. Schools occasionally serve it for lunch, including some - like those in Chigasaki, a city west of Tokyo that is not a traditional whaling area - as a way of teaching children what people ate in the past.

To make it appealing to students, whale is usually served as fried nuggets, often with a soy-ginger sauce or ketchup, said Emi Yamaguchi, at the Chigasaki Board of Education. Image source, Getty Images. A chef at a whale meat restaurant in Tokyo shows off a chunk off red meat. The minke was captured on Monday in the first commercial hunt since the ban was introduced in Japan resumes commercial whaling after 30 years Could the ban on killing whales end? A woman eating whale meat in front of Tokyo's whale meat restaurants.

Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, object to the moratorium and continue to hunt whales commercially without using science as an excuse. Small-scale whaling is traditional in some parts of Japan, but whale meat was only ever popular in the postwar period. For everyone else, though, whale meat is more of a curiosity. Good numbers are hard to come by but A poll commissioned by Greenpeace and conducted by the independent Nippon Research Centre found that 95 percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat.

And the amount of uneaten frozen whale meat stockpiled in Japan has doubled to 4, tons between and So what's really behind resistance to the moratorium? By , the amount had increased to In contrast, the average Japanese person consumed That amount increased to In , Japanese consumed on average In effect, the Japanese diet has shifted to meat, though perhaps not as much as people think.

The U. Department of Agriculture estimated that in the average American consumed about kg of red meat and poultry, according to Bloomberg News, or more than three times what the average Japanese person consumed in More to the point, Americans in consumed 36 kg of beef per capita, coming in a distant fourth after Uruguay, Argentina and Hong Kong.

This may sound surprising given that beef tends to get a lot of media attention in Japan owing to its importance in international trade. For the most part, Japanese beef producers have to compete with much cheaper beef from the U. Generally speaking, most Japanese eat imported beef if they eat beef regularly.

Domestic beef is treated almost as a delicacy, and it is much more expensive.