Not Taiji, by any chance?
Yes. I used to live in southern Mie and would sometimes drive down the coast into Wakayama.
Not wanting to take sides (I think both are wrong), it seems to me that the whalers have the upper hand on this one. Just dragging the SS to court could break their bank and having the main characters appear on court on key dates of the whaling season would be enough to stop them completely.
So the short answer is that neither side has the law on their side because there is really no binding law that can be enforced a nobody to enforce it.
Why can’t the whalers use SS tactics on the SS? This people can hardly breathe without injuring themselves. That slippery stuff would kill the whole crew in minutes. Ditto for the stinky stuff. I loved the idea of chasing them all the time with an old ship to spy on them. Why didn’t they keep that one up?
I think this discussion has left GQ territory. Moving to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
to specifically address one part of the legal issue. Australia has declared a whaling sanctuary in waters that are part of the Australian Antarctic Territory’s waters. Japan does not recognise the sanctuary or apparently Australia’s Antarctic claims at all.
see here:
so yes the japanese hunt has been declared illegal in Australia but the court doesn’t have jurisdiction in Japan of course.
Australia does however allow the Sea Shepherd fleet to be based out of Melbourne and they have a lot of public support in Australia.
Which is what the Sea Shepherds effectively attack when they poison the whale meat on the ships.
I have to say that Peter Brown is a serious danger to that crew. That guy is such an imbecile.
I’m pretty sure that there are different interpretations of how healthy the populations of those whales are. Are there enough of them in a 1970’s we’ve pretty much swept the seas clean of whales/there are like 500 Northern Right Whales left in the world sense? Sure. Are there enough of them if we look at what their pre-industrial whaling population was? Much different story.
I think too that the closest thing to a country having jurisdiction over this issue is New Zealand or Austrialia, both of whom are very anti-whaling. So even if the Japanese were inclined to try and stop SS through legal means, I don’t think they’d get much traction.
The New Yorker did an excellent article about the whole situation.
Except you don’t see them actually ramming the whaling fleet all that much. If the article says ramming is their signature tactic then I am dubious about the bulk of it.
The article is a couple years old. Maybe they changed their tactics?
Yeah, they might have toned it down for the cameras.
I’ve wondered the same thing. The day after I win the mega-billions lottery I’m going to buy a big-ass boat (that can deal with ice–another example of SS moronity) and go kick some SS ass on the high seas. There has go to be a way to deliver the stinky stuff by cannon or by air that is more effective than the SS hand-throwing method. I also bet that I could foul their prop or otherwise disable their boat fairly easily.
So are these really Australian territorial waters or not? Does the UN see them as such? That would make a huge difference. It seems (from the New Yorker link) that the governments of both NZ and Australia (which claim to be strongly anti-whaling) cannot be arsed to stop them even when the SS have them pinned down.
Another great link. It raises more questions than it answers to my OP, though. It says they ram ships and have sunk at least two. Is that not illegal even on international waters? What is the normal punishment if I charter a boat and ram some other random boat in the ocean?
There is likely a reason they don’t use air cannons to deliver their arsenal. I am certain they are quite well versed on piracy laws and are working it to the bleeding edge of what is acceptable. If you introduce air cannons then your enemy is within their rights to introduce actual cannons.
Though I find the Randian juxtaposition of you doing this after winning the lottery (IE being given money by the state) going against what Paul Watson built over the lifetime of his career. 
Octopuses. Or octopoda.
Octopi is a made-up word from people pretending to sound erudite and trying to form the plural the latin way. But “octopus” is from Greek roots.
Well, they are in a tough situation. Japan is an ally and a big time trading partner for both countries. Combine that with the fact that their claims aren’t recognized by everyone (the extent of national territory waters is a surprisingly complicated topic) and you have a situation where they can make their distaste known, but not really go any farther than that.
Well Australia went to bat for them when they boarded the Japanese whaler. They transferred the prisoners to an Australian coast guard vessel.
I am opposed to Whaling, but the SS simply isn’t helping anything. I guess they’re getting the word out, but by watching the show, they seem like a bunch of helpless idiots. Like when their ship has absolutely no ice qualification and they try to go straight through an ice shelf. Stupid.
Yeah that was idiotic. And it’s getting to be downright comical that they ALWAYS miss their navigation mark because it just so happens that they plot the course just before the shift that Peter Brown takes the helm. That guy really shouldn’t be the First Mate.